CoreCodec Apologizes For CoreAVC Takedown

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In a follow-up to the previous story, CoreCodec has apologized for the incorrect DMCA Takedown notice that took the CoreAVC project offline. There's also a public statement by co-founder Dan Marlin saying in part, 'I'd like to publicly apologize to Alan [CoreAVC project lead] for the disconnect between him and us as well as the disruption to the project as there was no ill will intended and we were already working on a resolution with him before this went public.' They've also created a new policy for sending out DMCA Takedown notices, so that they won't misuse them in the future."

Will the Google project resume now?

That is the more important question. I doubt Google will take it up again, though.

Re:

If I were the ones working on the project, I'd make sure I would not host it on Google.

Re:Will the Google project resume now?

What, because Google complied with a legally worded (albeit faulty) DMCA takedown notice, as they are legally obliged to do?

IIRC, it's down to the project owner to then turn around and say "There's nothing the matter with it, you shouldn't have been served the takedown notice". Google is only a middleman here.

Re:Will the Google project resume now?

But the real question is, is there any such thing as bad publicity?

This whole drama seems manufactured to get attention for another *yawn* codec.

Re:Will the Google project resume now?

Why does a takedown notice get more respect than the site owner?

Because that's what the law says. When a host is served a DMCA takedown notice, they respond. Then the affected party can file a counter-notice to have the site put back up.

After that, it's up to the courts, if either party wants to take it that far.

Re:Will the Google project resume now?

There are even sites out there to generate your own DMCA counterclaim quick and fast.
One such is: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html [cmu.edu] or here: http://www.ucmo.edu/dmca/counter.html [ucmo.edu]

People unfortunately probably go to lawyers first, a little bit of knowledge goes a long way.

However, DMCA misuse is something that can be sued for and withdrawing the already DMCA'd request doesn't lift that vulnerability in court...there is a provision for DMCA misuse.

Re:Will the Google project resume now?

Why does a takedown notice get more respect than the site owner? Because a person sending such a notice seems more sue-happy than the site owner?

Site owners can sue too. That is, unless when you sign up for hosting you agree that your site can be taken down for any reason.

Except that the DMCA is specifically worded to screw Google and other hosting companies over if they don't take a "Shutdown Site Now, Think Later" position. I.e., if the DMCA complaints turn out to be true, and Google didn't shutdown first and think later, Google becomes liable for everything.

Brilliantly worded bit of kit there. It's like an anti-terrorism law that states "If you don't make a citizen's arrest, and it turns out that random Arabic/Mexican/Just-Not-White-Enough chap really is evil, you're liable for anything he does cause you COULD have stopped him."

Absolutely stupid idea, but hey, it's ""Intellectual Property" Law", leave your brain at the door.

Uhrrr..

It's already back up, you know. http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/ [google.com]

Ah, CoreAVC

And CoreCodec. The company that _seriously_ demanded online activation for a $10 video codec. Including dongeling it to your current hardware config.

Re:Ah, CoreAVC

Yes, it is/was bad. It took time rather a long time (months) to get the whole process of activation more or less working. In the mean time, people were waiting for bugfixes and promised features, not understanding why it all was taking so long. Perhaps you can still get a glimpse of it all on the forums. As for development-costs, I don't actually think you can earn them this way. Some people will pay, most people will just try an alternative if paying/activating is too complicated. OEM Licensing is probably a better way to (a route which they also have taken) Last, codec is $14,95. There is a cheaper version, but that has no Interlace support among others, so pretty much useless in many circumstances.

Damage Control

While I always admire when a company admits they were wrong about something, I have to think that this is just massive damage control. Imagine what their inboxes looked like over this fiasco :-)

Re:

Still, better than if they didn't apologise. I personally believe they are at least a bit honest in this..

Re:Damage Control

Judging by nothing other than his posts to the Corecodec forums, Dan Marlin is an arrogant fuckwad who knows nothing about the law or copyright, and he DESERVES to be prosecuted for his ILLEGAL DMCA takedown notice.

Re:Damage Control

How could he have believed ANYTHING? He didn't verify whether or not it was an infringing item or if it breached a circumvention measure. This isn't a mistake of a nature that would have been viewed kindly by a Court in the old way of doing things.

If you don't know if it does or not, you're taking a 50-50 chance on it being perjury or not.

In and of itself, that's something that'd get you in trouble in a Court if it was anything other than this stupid crap, which shouldn't be around in the first place.

Before the DMCA, you had to file an infringement case, go before a Judge in a hearing on the matter, and get an injunction to get the same effect. With the DMCA, they don't have to bother with that. With the DMCA, they only have to send takedown letters to the appropriate parties to get a result. There's no Judge in the middle, determining whether they, in fact, have a case or not- they don't even have to face any music for being wrong and doing it frivolously unless the person they do it to is flush with cash and pursues the counter hard. With the old way, you had to go to the trouble of filing a suit- and if you got it wrong, there was decent chances of the lawyer and the plaintiff being sanctioned for the sillybuggers we see these days.

There's a reason the stuff was the way it was before the DMCA. Congress was foolishly led to believe that the rights holders with standing needed a "quicker" way of fixing things and to treat ways of circumventing "protections" as criminal acts.

Why would you want CoreAVC on the Free Desktop?

Can anyone tell me why you would possibly want to plug CoreAVC into MPlayer and Xine or GStreamer based applications when these already have native H.264 playback?

For decoding, ffmpeg (Which has a code base used throughout a tonne of the Free Software world) already has a decent decoder, and for encoding we have x264 (Developed by the folks behind VLC)...

I know that CoreAVC claims to be super optimised, but is it really that much better? I have always assumed that they were just milking those Windows users that didn't know of ffdshow [sourceforge.net].

Re:Why would you want CoreAVC on the Free Desktop?

I read about this deal yesterday, and yes, it appears that the codec is much better than what's available on Linus right now. It's apparently using hardware acceleration and multi-threaded programming. Ffdshow is supposed to come out with those features soon, though.

Re:Why would you want CoreAVC on the Free Desktop?

Well, when decoding a 1920x1080 (1080p) image on a little bitty dual core AMD machine used as a media centre, you will see why :)

The ffmpeg decoder is awesome, it is a reference quality codec, it renders EVERY frame as good as it possibly can... which is not really how you want video, you want a usable frame rate FIRST.

As a customer of CoreCodec (both the windows h.264 multi threaded codec AND the symbian media player) I am glad its all sorted.

Re:Why would you want CoreAVC on the Free Desktop?

CoreAVC is incredibly fast; a machine which could barely handle 720p with libavcodec can probably manage two decode two 1080p videos at once. It also tends to introduce a lot of artifacting errors, but if you couldn't play the video at all it's probably an improvement. Personally I've just been confused as of late after installing Linux on this laptop. On windows libavcodec would decode 1080p h264 video no problem, but in linux mplayer fails miserably on 720p videos..

DMCA working as intended

At least this segment of it, I'm not sure what else it contains.

1. If you post material online, someone can send a DMCA notice and have it instantly taken down. They must though state that legally and in good faith they have strong reason to believe they are copyright owners.

2. If you challenge it, you send a DMCA counternotice and the material is put back up. You must though state that legally and in good faith you either are the copyrightholder or its in public domain. By doing this you also have to reveal your name. Obviously if you are not willing to reveal your name, you can't counternotice.

(the only potential misuse I could see is if people have a good reason to post anonymously, like whistleblowers - anyone know of any use like that? Obviously this would however confirm that any material taken down is not falsified or the company could not claim copyright)

3. If both parties are in good faith, then obviously let the lawsuits commence. If one of the party was not in good faith - well, they can be smacked down very hard quite easily. It looks like CoreCodec just discovered they were not actually in good faith and are doing damage control.

Credit where credit is due.

the only potential misuse I could see is if people have a good reason to post anonymously, like whistleblowers - anyone know of any use like that?

Scientology critics?

If one of the party was not in good faith - well, they can be smacked down very hard quite easily.

Inconceivable!

It looks like CoreCodec just discovered they were not actually in good faith and are doing damage control.

I think that's what they said, yes. Their message is basically "we fucked up, sorry, we're making sure we can't fuck up that way again".

Voluntarily admitting they fucked up when they fuck up, let alone bothering to figure out how they can avoid fucking up again, is unfortunately rare enough for organizations that it's actually impressive to see one do it without having to be dragged through a lawsuit first. I don't think you're giving them enough credit.

Re:DMCA working as intended

You don't know the whole of it.

The DMCA wasn't intended to be used for this situation. It just gets used that way.

There was no copyright being broken.
There was no circumvention of protection measures.

However, it was used to pull down a site and a project for a time- for no other reason than a company stating that either were going on.

Sure, it's working as it's intended- but it's not what should be allowed. You shouldn't have the ability to willy-nilly do things like this and then maybe, just maybe, face the music of your actions after the fact after you've screwed up like this. Other things in the civil space typically require an injunction which takes time and usually requires more actual effort on the part of the party asking for it to get things to stop. With the DMCA, you don't need any of that crap- not even a Judge to determine if you're even full of crap or not. With the DMCA, you get to send a legal looking, nasty letter filed with a court and sent to the people in question, stating under of penalty of perjury that this is so and that they have to remove it or face possibly being held actionable along with the "infringing party". If you're wrong with the old way, you could face sanctions amongst other things- with the DMCA, it's really cheap in comparison.

Sure, it's working as "intended"- but the problem is, that "as intended" is the very problem everyone's up in arms about. There's less legal consequences for a screwup of this nature. There's less consequences for someone going around and doing it for things like printer cartridges where the company's trying to use it to keep people from refilling the expensive ink on them- and to keep buying the wasteful expensive ink cartridges. The DMCA's busted.

Which is it?

So which is it? Is it "sorry we did this", or "sorry we got caught?"

Perjury

I may be wrong, but when making a DMCA notice don't you have to swear under penalty of perjury that it's correct? Can you just 'apologise' when you get caught sending out bad ones? Or do CoreCodec potentially face legal action now?

This doesn't make any sense

The DMCA takedown notice [chillingeffects.org] that they sent says:

We have directly verified by downloading the file from the Site provided by Google Inc. that the file does include CoreCodec's copyrighted Software. ...
Respectfully,
[private], CEO CoreCodec, Inc.

So according to this, the CEO has legally stated that his company downloaded the software and confirmed the violation. But today, he says it was just an overzealous legal department, and no such download happened. In that case, he signed a letter making legal statements that he knew were false.

If I ran this project, I would not be satisfied by an apology posted in a forum. They sent a legal statement and that requires a legal reply. I would continue as the DMCA stipulates, stating that the project does not infringe. I think I'd also be looking for a few lawyers to get fired. And the CEO needs to be quaking in his boots with the fact that his signature is on a legal notice that is a complete lie.

Why so harsh? They apologized, right? Because these stories happen all the time and I'm sick of companies getting away with it. If you send a legally binding letter with your signature on it, forcing someone to take down their web site, invoking a legal process - then you damn well better be sure that you were in the right. If we let this go, then the procedure becomes:

1. Company sends take down notice
2. Alleged infringer has to prove that they aren't infringing
3. Company allows them to put the project back up

That's not fair. That means any corporation can take down any site, any time, anywhere, with no fear of legal reprisal. That's not how the DMCA works and we need to stop them from using it that way. The DMCA is not carte-blanche to shut down web sites.

Re:This doesn't make any sense

You're absolutely right. Hang them out to dry as an example to others.