Adobe Goes After 27-Year Old ‘Pirated’ Copy of Acrobat Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS
> Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partnersThere's a whole secondary and very interesting story to be told here about the nasty relationship that has formed between copyright holders and these firms specializing in takedowns that cling to them like barnacles on a whale.It's obviously tempting to outsource a job like tracking down copyright violations which doesn't play in to any of your business's competencies, but it also seems quite likely that the companies who provide this "service" typically do so in a way that looks good on a paper report that a manager at the host company receives, but doesn't actually benefit them optimally for the money they spend on it.Takedown companies seem to go after violations that will net them the fastest and most reliable takedown rates. They want to run up the score so that they can say "last month, we took down 5482 violations of your copyright in Adobe Reader" or what have you. This means, largely, going after posts and uploads on sites that have "quick service" DMCA takedowns like Twitter and YouTube. You're not investing time on random websites that may or may not even respond. No human intelligence is required (indeed, even desirable) in this process. It's effectively humans being paid the lowest possible wage to do an automated job. In some cases I suppose it's probably fully automated.