Record Labels Want to Remove Kim Dotcom’s Music Album

A number of music industry groups have been trying to take down Kim Dotcom's music album called “Good Times” for a while now. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and other outfits claimed that MegaUpload founder’s music somehow infringes the rights of their musicians. However, it turned out that they fell victim to a DMCA prankster.

A few months ago, Kim Dotcom released his first music album called “Good Times”. He didn’t sell it, as he wisely understood that the beginning artists should give their works away for free to anyone interested, otherwise they will never become known.

Dotcom has also uploaded an official copy of his album on his own cloud hosting service Mega, and his homepage links directly to Mega storage place. Everything went fine, until a few weeks ago a number of copyright owners started sending takedown requests demanding to remove Dotcom’s music on copyright grounds.

For example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), representing the major music labels, has sent a number of DMCA notices to Mega service, claiming that the album infringed the rights of various musicians. As a result, the album was removed and reinstated a few times, and finally it is unavailable yet again.

Previously, Mega emphasized that the takedown requests were clearly mistaken, accusing IFPI of failing to check the requests and doubting the accuracy of all their notices. The problem is that all the takedown notices mentioned the same link, so the suspicions are that the “mistakes” were orchestrated by someone. It looks like IFPI and others were made to believe that the link pointed to albums of other musicians. The team of TorrentFreak site decided to do their own research on the issue.

Eventually they ran into a series of Pastebin pages where the URL of “Good Times” was linked to titles of other albums. A number of the musicians mentioned in the pastes were the same as those listed in the DMCA notices. Apparently, this can explain the mistakes.

This situation is concerning for a number reasons. For example, it shows that the copyright outfits don’t verify the legitimacy of their takedown notices. In this way, the pranksters can easily get the rights holders to censor legitimate material. Besides, in many cases Mega is not able to check the validity of a claim or just fails to find out whether or not a user has permission to publish it. As a result, Dotcom’s service has almost no options to stop the abuse.

The storage service says that it aims to process all takedowns promptly, within mere hours. Since all the files stored within the service are encrypted, they cannot verify the claims and check the legitimacy of content. Nor can they verify if the user has a valid ownership/license or not. But after this precedent with Dotcom’s own album, Mega will set up a system where repeated takedowns will be flagged to prevent such type of abuse. But now we can expect “Good Times” to disappear from Mega a few more times. For everyone who wants to take a look at it, the album will also be released on the music service Baboom.