So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report, revealing 43 percent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It's the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it "counted suspended sites as rejected notices." That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015.

In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as "abusive." The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. "Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices," WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure.

"These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don't have to," WordPress wrote. "Sounds great in theory, but it doesn't always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator, sometimes the bots turn on their creators."

TorrentFreak pointed out that WordPress includes a Hall of Shame section of these reports to highlight particularly egregious takedown requests, like one from Attributor.com in this period that asked for an academic paper .PDF to be removed... from the site of the copyright holder. (Access to the file was offline for five days, WordPress noted.)  The most high profile of these happened last fall when legal representation for Janet Jackson requested several takedowns, including a Tim Howard meme where the goalkeeper saved viewers from a famous wardrobe malfunction. WordPress denied the requests on fair use grounds and wrote up a response... that included as many Jackson song lyrics as possible.

Beyond DMCA requests, the transparency report outlines things like trademark violation notices, law enforcement and government information requests, and government takedown requests. For the latter figure, WordPress only obliged on 17 percent of 101 requests it received in the latest six-month period. Russia contacted WordPress the most in this area, producing 72 requests (perhaps due to its odd meme censoring). WordPress granted those requests 26 percent of the time.

As for the US, there were no takedown requests between January 1 and June 30. However, there was one court order that WordPress complied with.

Source: So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015