This isn’t music, but it’s very relevant. File-hosting service Hotfile is being sued by a number of Hollywood studios for copyright infringement, but this week it has counter-sued one of them: Warner Bros. Why? It claims that the studio has been misusing an anti-piracy takedown tool built by the site for rightsholders to remove infringing content which they owned the rights to. “Warner has made repeated, reckless and irresponsible misrepresentations to Hotfile falsely claiming to own copyrights in material from Hotfile.com,” claims the new lawsuit. The allegation is that Warner Bros was taking down files willy-nilly based on keyword searches, without checking that they really were infringing. For example, searches based on movie The Box ended up with takedowns for other non-Warner Bros content with the words ‘the box’ in their titles. Hotfile claims Warner Bros’ motivation was commercial, after proposing a deal where it would present e-commerce links to users searching for files it had taken down. “By increasing the number of links it was taking down with Hotfile’s SRA, and indeed falsely inflating these numbers, Warner was increasing the number of times it could present ecommerce links to Hotfile’s users for its own enrichment,” claims the lawsuit. Source: TorrentFreak
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