The irony being that if they bothered to understand what it was all about they’d realize how stupid it is to fight it.

BTW, they’re called COMPANIONS… not sidekicks…

Well it was a happy day with both GoT and DW available even if I usually watch D.W in HD through the BBC’s iPlayer. So happiness is to be shared as they say.

I have explained the deal with numbers before so screw them for trying to censor something that no one can lawfully own or to control what others do with them.

And yes I already know to be more care of those damned bots in the future.

Yep, there is fair use.

Targeting a site with ‘sensitive’ hashes probably would work. You could hit any number of companies and government agencies that way – if enough hashes are sprayed over a site’s comment sections on every topic, it’s web-presence could be drastically reduced before the moderators have time to react – and due to the way Google’s ranking algorithms work, if the bulk of third-party links go to topic-pages, rather than the landing page, a targeted site could be delisted from Google almost completely.

Also, I think that since the takedowns are automated and the billing for those takedowns is automated and apparently priced on a per-link basis, a botnet geared to spam hashes all over the net could be used to drive up huge costs for any company using third parties to generate DMCAs, before they have time to react and shut it off. A smaller company using third parties such as Dtecnet could potentially be driven out of business altogether by such fees, unless there are specific caps on either the number of DMCAs or on the bill.

IIRC, the big MAFIAA companies, such as UMG, have their own in-house departments producing DMCAs, so they probably wouldn’t be affected too much, although it would likely make a nasty mess of their internal financing (if they work the same way most big companies tend to work, the legal department charges the rest of the company for services rendered, despite everyone working for the same employer).