Saturday came the news that apparently Comcast is sending out “Notice of Action” letters under the DMCA to people downloading fansubs (and it appears to only be Comcast in the US). Now, I’ve never said that downloading unlicensed fansubs were absolutely legal (in fact, they’re not really), I’ve just argued that it is, largely, in people’s best interests to kind of keep a blind eye to the practice since I think it’s more helpful than hurtful.
However, there are several curious things about this situation:
1. I’ve already reported how Comcast has been throttling bittorrent traffic, whether legitimate or not. Obviously Comcast is paying attention to the fact that people are using bittorrent. This may very well suggest that they’re also looking at WHAT you download over bittorrent.
2. People have noted that Comcast isn’t actually identifying who the person reporting the copyright claim is. Whether they’re legally required to seemed to be unclear, but they’re just reporting that they received notification by “a copyright owner, or its authorized agent,” but not whom.
3. As I reported earlier, it appears to only be Comcast sending this out. Not Charter. Not Time Warner. Not Verizon. Etc.
4. The shows where letters are being sent out for are for all different Japanese companies, so either they’re doing something collectively, or it’s not them.
5. If it’s not them, who is it? Are the shows licensed, but just not announced (and in that case, American producers can clamp down on a lot of the downloading just by announcing the series). If it’s not the Japanese or the Americans, then who is it? There is a report that Odex - yes that Odex, sent a letter to someone in France for a French fansub for a show apparently not licensed in France yet. There is also apparently other evidence that this might be ODEX’s doing.
6. Why a letter under the DMCA? Wouldn’t a normal cease and desist letter work just fine? The DMCA is written more for technological circumvention of technologies, not distribution of copyrighted works per se. Regular copyright law should be good enough for that.
Also, no one has apparently been able to get Comcast to answer who is ending out the letters, even when they call, and in fact one person has reported that Comcast has flat out refused to identify who the party requesting the letter was, only noting that it was a “third party.”
Many people are panicking that this is the end of bittorrenting anime, but I’m less sure. We first have to find out whether this is even legitimate, either on Comcast’s end or, if they are actually being sent DMCA notices, that whoever is sending them is sending them legitimately.
There is also a rather big leap between blanketing out DMCA notices to everyone on a bittorrent tracker and actually hauling your ass to court to sue you, especially a Singapore company suing someone in the US.
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It’s definitely from Odex, since the content, formatting and timing matched up nicely. I have no idea what Odex is trying to do or prove, perhaps 6 feet under just isn’t deep enough for them.
Even the Japanese and French are getting “Odexed” at this moment. I won’t be surprised of Odex is hanging some sort of threat above the ISP’s heads.
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[...] I made a post about Comcast sending out DMCA copyright infringement notices to some of their customers (luckily, I am not one of them yet, though this makes me wish Verizon [...]