Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code - the company's flagship coding assistant product - has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/#petardism

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In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with "takedown notices." These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order:

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7

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RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall, free online paywall remover. Get access to articles without having to pay or login. Works on Bloomberg and hundreds more.

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Copyright is a "strict liability" statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren't aware that you had done so. What's more, "intermediaries" - like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers - can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there's no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright - even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can't know whether they've licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work).

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn't just be onerous - it would still permit copyright infringement, because there's no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine.

As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, *if* they "expeditiously remove" material upon notice that it infringes someone's copyright.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice *can* choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also *choose* to allow their user to "counternotify" (dispute the accusation) and *can* choose to reinstate the material, but they don't have to.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Just as an intermediary can't determine whether a user has the rights to the things they post, they also can't tell if the person on the other end of a takedown notice has the right to demand its removal. In practice, this means that a takedown notice, no matter how flimsy, has a very good chance of making something disappear from the internet - forever.

From the outset, DMCA 512 was the go-to tool for corporate censorship, the best way to cover up misdeeds.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

I first got involved in this back in 2003, when leaked email memos from Diebold's voting machine division revealed that the company knew that its voting machines were wildly insecure, but they were nevertheless selling them to local election boards across America, who were scrambling to replace their mechanical voting machines in the wake of the 2000 *Bush v Gore* "hanging chad" debacle, which led to Bush stealing the presidency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

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Brooks Brothers riot - Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

The stakes couldn't be higher, in other words. Diebold - whose CEO was an avowed GW Bush partisan who'd promised to "deliver the votes for Bush" - was the country's leading voting machine supplier.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly "estimate" the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines:

https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/

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An open invitation to election fraud - Salon.com

Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.

Salon.com

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Diebold sent *thousands* of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold's flood:

https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold

Diebold wasn't the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest.

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Online Policy Group v. Diebold

EFF protected online speakers by bringing the first successful suit against abusive copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). When internal memos exposing flaws in Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting machines leaked onto the Internet, Diebold used bogus copyright threats to silence its critics. EFF fought back on behalf of an ISP, winning an award of damages, costs, and attorneys' fees. Equally important, the case set a precedent that will allow other Internet users and their ISPs to fight back against improper copyright threats.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

There's a whole industry of shady "reputation management" companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on "reputation management" services to clean up his online profile:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html

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Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Push to Cleanse His Past Online

After he left jail in 2009, Mr. Epstein hired a host of people to make him look better on Google, Wikipedia and many other places on the web.

The New York Times

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

There are lots of ways to use the takedown system to get true information about your crimes removed from the internet. My favorite is the one employed by Eliminalia, one of the sleazier reputation laundries (even by the industry's dismal standards).

Eliminalia sets up Wordpress sites and copies press articles that cast its clients in an unfavorable light to these sites, backdating them so they appear to have been published before the originals.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

They swap out the bylines for fictitious ones, then send takedowns to Google and other search engines to get the "infringing" stories purged from their search indices. Once the original articles have been rendered invisible to internet searchers, Eliminalia takes down their copy, and the story of their client's war crimes, rapes, or fraud disappears from the public eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

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Pluralistic: 23 Apr 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

The takedown system is so tilted in favor of censorship that it takes a *massive* effort to keep even the smallest piece of information online in the face of a determined adversary. In 2007, the key for AACS (a way of encrypting video for "digital rights management") leaked online. The key was a 16-digit number, the kind of thing you could fit in a crossword puzzle, but the position of the industry consortium that created the key was that this was an *illegal integer*.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

They sent *hundreds of thousands* of takedowns over the number, and it was only the determined action of an army of users that kept the number online:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

The shoot-first, ask-questions-never nature of takedown notices makes for fertile ground for scammers of all kinds, but the most ironic takedown ripoffs are the Youtube copystrike blackmailers.

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AACS encryption key controversy - Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom's principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they'd have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Viacom didn't want a *takedown* system, they wanted a *staydown* system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent *anyone* from uploading those works.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

(This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:)

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

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Broadcast Yourself

blog.youtube

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

Youtube's notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to "claim" video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one - not even the world's leading copyright experts - can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

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Pluralistic: Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding (27 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow 22h ago

However, there *is* a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform.

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Cory Doctorow 22h ago

For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living - whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets - the "copystrike" is an existential risk.

Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician).

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@pluralistic there's good reasons why voting machines are illegal in Germany.