Anti-Piracy Group Hits Indie Groups for the Using the Word "Pixels"

[CtW]

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-hits-indie-creators-for-using-the-word-pixels-150808/

 

Yup, this is actually happening

 

An anti-piracy firm working for Columbia Pictures has hit Vimeo with a wave of bogus copyright takedowns just because people used the word 'Pixels' in their video titles. Several indie productions are affected, including an art-focused NGO, an award-winning short movie and a royalty free stock footage company

 

This week anti-piracy group Entura International sent a notice to Vimeo in what first appeared to be an effort to stop piracy of the Columbia movie ‘Pixels’. Not only did it fail to do that in every way possible, it hit a number of indie creators and filmmakers instead.

 

Founded in November 2004, NeMe describes itself as a non-profit NGO and an ‘Independent Museum of Contemporary Art’.

 

“Our NGO has just received a DMCA notice for a video we produced in 2006 entitled ‘Pixels’,” the group told Vimeo this week.

 

“The video was directed by a Cypriot film-maker using his own photos and sounds/music on a shoestring budget and infringes no copyright.”

Link to the notice: https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/11039982#

 

But upsetting the NGO was just the tip of the iceberg. The notice goes on to hit an embarrassing array of entirely non-infringing works.

 

“Life Buoy is my project for my degree at the National University of Arts from Bucharest,” creator Dragos Bardac explains.

 

“The film was made in mid 2010 and it is a music video for the song Life buoy by the band The Pixels. I used a mix of stop motion animation techniques in order to tell the story.”

 

But it doesn’t stop there.

 

Published on Vimeo in 2011, “Pantone Pixels” is described by creator Rob Penny as a “personal project that took me a very long time”.

 

Thanks to Entura, however, the image below now greets users of his website.

 

 

 

And it gets worse.

 

‘Pixels’ is a 2010 award-winning short film created by Patrick Jean. Its tagline “8Bit creatures are invading New York City” only tells half the story of this extremely cool short movie. It’s now wiped out on Vimeo but luckily YouTube still retains copies which together have been viewed millions of times.

 

Also falling victim is VJLoops.com, a royalty free stock footage & media site. They put up a video on Vimeo titled ‘Love Pixels’ which turned out to be a big mistake. Same goes for a 42 second video concerning this year’s Pixels Festival in Mons, Belgium.

 

Last, but certainly not least, Entura rounded off this disaster by taking down the official Pixels movie trailer, even though their very own notice lists their errors clearly.

 

Wow. Honestly I have no idea how you'd confuse an indie film project with a terrible Adam Sandler film. This is similar to when King.com tried to sue companies that used the words candy or saga in their games. It would be nice if these groups would take things down based on whether or not the content itself is infringing rather than if it has the same name, but hollywood is greedy and doesn't care if it is removing things for no reason. I think it's pretty hilarious that they even got the official trailer for the film they were "protecting" taken off of vimeo. It shows how indiscriminately they were issuing take down requests.

[Arty]

Stupid People.

Im prob gonna torrent the movie anyway to see how shitty it was.

[AlwaysFSX]

Honestly if you patent troll your works should be sold to the lowest bidder and your ass thrown on an island for the rest of your life.

[minibois]

Oh.. Because of that movie..

So stupid.. If I had millions of dollars I would just copyright the word 'The' and sue everyone.

Y'know, 'cause I can.

[Guest]

Brb changing my personal website to nothing but the word pixels

 

pixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixelspixels

[Mattrixx]

Been pretty pissed at all the copyright trolling and stupid "blanket copyright takedowns" and DMCA notices against articles/videos that the producer doesn't like. There needs to be a human behind it at least fucking looking at the infringing links first. There also needs to be a penalty for putting out thousands of bogus takedown notices that hurt innocent artists or indie guys. 

 

There seriously needs to be consequences for this sort of shit. It's too hard to take it to court or petition the site to have strikes removed, and that hard-ness is being taken advantage of.

[Ohlyver]

It should be the NeMe people that sue Columbia for stealing the name.

[Trik'Stari]

This kind of abuse needs to come with a lifetime loss of all patents for the owner, and a ban on them owning any patents in the future.

[jaggysnake57]

stop the internet i want to get off

[Nineshadow]

Stupid DMCAs again.

 

At least it's not as stupid as the guys who did DMCA complaints on every page with the word "Download" on it.

[burnttoastnice]

This is absolutely stupid. So they make a shitty movie, then copyright the name "pixels" and have their programmed-by-a-12-year-old bots scavange the internet and rip down anything that has the word pixels in it? What a group of selfish inconsiderate assholes. They didn't even think about the people that it would affect. Just because they are a big ass company doesn't give them the right to troll the web tearing down people's own work, which violate no copyright whatsoever.

 

Im prob gonna torrent the movie anyway to see how shitty it was.

Time to whip out a linux box, you don't want Windows 10 'anti piracy' DRM deleting your movies! On a serious note though I have absolutely no intention of supporting this movie whatsoever. If they are not going to show consideration for people who put their time and effort into making their own things that have no link to the movie whatoever, then screw them!

 

This kind of abuse needs to come with a lifetime loss of all patents for the owner, and a ban on them owning any patents in the future.

THIS.

[Guest]

I wasn't aware you could copyright a unit of measurement. Attention LTT: All your yards are belong to me

[Ekpyrosis]

I'm going to copyright the word "the" and then sue everyone who uses an article.

[mr moose]

It would be nice if those indies who created works before the adam sandler movie could sue columbia pictures for use of the word pixels, or at the very least have them remove all content containing the word.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

[mr moose]

I'm going to copyright the word "the" and then sue everyone who uses an article.

 

I think theThe have already done that.

 

http://www.thethe.com/

[Notional]

Unacceptable. I hope content creators will go class action lawsuit on these idiots. Pixels is a way too generic thing to register. Although they aren't suing for the word, but thinking it's a shitty Sandler movie.

 

I would love to see them go against Röyksopp:

 

[burnttoastnice]

I would love to see them go against Röyksopp

 

[Notional]

 

Lol probably because everything is illegal in the UK now.

[Dabombinable]

I've seen this happen before. Virgin came to Australia and a shitload of smaller business who weren't even connected got forcibly shut down because the name of their business had 'virgin' in the name.

[Dabombinable]

The only benefit I can see from this is that we might see less UnitZ clones on Steam greenlight.

[CtW]

This is absolutely stupid. So they make a shitty movie, then copyright the name "pixels" and have their programmed-by-a-12-year-old bots scavange the internet and rip down anything that has the word pixels in it? What a group of selfish inconsiderate assholes. They didn't even think about the people that it would affect. Just because they are a big ass company doesn't give them the right to troll the web tearing down people's own work, which violate no copyright whatsoever.

 

Time to whip out a linux box, you don't want Windows 10 'anti piracy' DRM deleting your movies! On a serious note though I have absolutely no intention of supporting this movie whatsoever. If they are not going to show consideration for people who put their time and effort into making their own things that have no link to the movie whatoever, then screw them!

 

THIS.

About the piracy thing, I've been able to use popcorn time (which draws all of it's movies and shows from KAT and even allows you to search for torrents on the site) with out issue on Windows 10, so that's a thing that you can do. 

 

Also, you don't need to put a disclaimer as much worse language has been used in regards to this topic on this forum by me and many other people

[Kamil]

Didn't you know? Shit movies with huge budgets are without question the MOST important thing in the entire world.

[CtW]

Didn't you know? Shit movies with huge budgets are without question the MOST important thing in the entire world.

I know right!

[Spork1111]

You wanna know the real kicker?

The 2010 short film is what the movie is BASED ON. The creator of that movie consented to them making an adaptation of it, and they turn around and file a copyright claim against him. For the movie that THEY COPIED. That's a new low.

I don't know that much about copyright law, but I really hope that guy is able to sue them and get some compensation out of it.

[Notional]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Columbia Pictures DMCAs official Pixels trailer​

 

http://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/matthew-wilson/columbia-pictures-dmcas-official-pixels-trailer/

​

HAHAHAHAHAHAAH