Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/warner-bros-repeated-includes.html
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There could be no greater justice than to have a robot blindly apply the demanded takedowns.
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But then Google saved from actually being hoist on their own petard. They are such sniveling bitches for the big media companies.
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just teco and ddt…why? what the heck is grep?
grep is a standard unix command line utility for searching files.
In a typical day at work I might use it 50 or 100 times. Its just so useful, particularly when combined with regular expressions.
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It always makes me sad when I read these, and at the end they say something to the effect of “google caught these asshats’ mistakes, and decided to not block the sites.”
I say let them block themselves. They have nobody to blame but themselves. Why should google go to the effort of a good-faith evaluation when Warner isn’t? How else would Warner learn that they’re doing something really fucking stupid and potentially expensive?
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Think of the recursive possibilies. Could Warner Brothers sue itself for taking down its own website? Who would win?
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Life without grep and regular expressions would be horrible. I often find myself wishing I could grep through everything in my apartment to find what I’m looking for.
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Justice. That’s who.
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The day I don’t use RegEx is the day someone took away my computers. Randall’s superhero scenario isn’t too far fetched. I recently used it to save some colleagues like … 80 work hours?
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I don’t understand how Warner Bros could produce this bad of a program. It obviously doesn’t use a list of allowed sites, which would be really easy to add in. I would imagine a program like this would go through huge amounts of testing, but it appears I’m mistaken.
The logic required for determining if a site contains your product and is using it illegally would be quite complex, and it seems like adding a list of allowed sites would be one of the simplest parts of creating this program. Maybe the programmer overlooked this when he was creating it, realized his mistake during testing and said, “oh well”.
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Exactly. Even the Amazon link is legit:
Like many other large corporations, WB farms out shit like this. Sometimes, they get what they pay for.
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“I don’t understand how Warner Bros could produce this bad of a program.”
One, they farm it out like @Donald_Petersen said, two THEY JUST DON’T CARE if they spam huge amounts of false positives. There are no penalties or incentives to not do false takedowns, and especially not when Google shields them from things like this.
The DMCA supposedly has some penalties for bad legal takedowns (never enforced of course, lololol) but on Youtube there’s not even that risk because they have a contractual agreement with Youtube that precedes the DMCA, so technically they’re not doing DMCA takedowns, just administrative pre-DMCA takedowns that Google has agreed to do out of the goodness of their hearts. Complete bullshit, but it helps shield them from even the unlikely possibility of penalties.
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If I were in charge at Google, I would have gone ahead and honored the takedowns.
Then Warners could submit the objections to each and every one of them and wait for themselves to reply.
Think of it as a karmic lesson.
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Google would never even dream of teaching WB a lesson. They are 100% on WB’s side here.
Eric Schmidt made the calculation - how much do they stand to lose by pissing off a user? Very little. Even if it’s Pewdiepie, and they have, they know he can’t jump ship, and even if he does one of the other legions of vloggers will replace him. How much do they stand to lose by pissing off a big media company who have tons of bored predatory lawyers? Potentially tens of millions and loss of content, and an outlier billion dollar chance with a crazy jury damage award.
So they decided to always do whatever the big media companies ask for as default position. They’re not enemies here, Google is their willing prison bitch and will fall over itself to cover for them, like here.
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Yeah, I guess it’s pretty obvious that they don’t care!
I’m just appalled at it from a programming perspective. Whoever programmed this overlooked this in the planning stage, got to the testing stage and said, “Well, our sites (or our client’s sites) get pulled into the results, but that’s ok! Time to release it!” But then again it almost sounds like they never got to the testing stage 
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This makes plenty of sense, given that the Warner brothers and their sister Dot have been trying to escape from the Warner Bros. studio lot for years. In their attempt to suppress the Warners, it was inevitable that Warner Bros. wound up suppressing itself instead. Such ouroborosian absurdity abounds in the wake of Yakko, Wakko and Dot.
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Well yeah, considering that’s what the “re” in “grep” stands for.
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