Copyright can be complicated.
In a response to copyright infringement claims Facebook accidentally deleted the pages of several well-known websites, including Ars Technica.
A major screwup as it turns out, since the DMCA notices were bogus.
The pages in question were gone for a few hours but eventually returned. Some pages lost a few followers in the process, but other than that everything appears to be normal again.
The above suggests that Facebook is doing very little fact checking on the DMCA notices they receive, which is worrying to say the least.
The social network eventually came clean and released the following message.
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We have investigated a number of recent intellectual property cases and have restored four pages as a result. We apologize for any inconvenience. Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously. We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices.
This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident. Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures.
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