Why Lumen database is doing more harm than good while handling movie piracy?
In this post, I would like to discuss about Lumen database and put up my observations about its working.
Quoting the description from the lumendatabase.org site :
“The Lumen database collects and analyses legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals.”
Have you ever searched for latest new movies, clips etc on Google? No doubt many of us have in some point or the other. Doing so, in some case you will find at the last result, It shows that due to copyright policy the particular search result has been removed and we can view the DMCA complaint.
So you feel everything is going cool here?
Until you notice,
- The DMCA complaint exactly pins up the infringing url.
- There is a high probability that the exact clip you are looking for, is present there.
- Since you know that the content is available at the infringing url, there is no need for us to search or click on other search results online since they don’t have any real content, or else they would have been mentioned in the DMCA complaint. :P
Going to the DMCA complaint, we can see the TLD where the movie/clip is hosted.
We see:
- KIND OF WORK
- DESCRIPTION
- ORIGINAL URLS
- ALLEGEDLY INFRINGING URLS
To receive the full infringing url, simply provide an email address and we will receive the link showing full url which hosts the movie.
If you go and search each individual link there, easily ; there is a very high probability that you will get the movie you are looking for . In some cases, the site admin, will voluntarily remove the content from there to avoid any legal trouble.
Alternatively, you can go to lumendatabase.org and directly search for any content you are looking for.
In most cases, you will find the content in the first result itself.
Looking though all of those, I feel that the real use of Lumen database which is to stop and takedown pirated content does something quite opposite to it.
Simply stating, it has become an easy to look place to find infringing links.
Maybe it is time to create some kind of policy which doesn’t allow this type of easy searching.
That’s all I want to say :)
