Fan blog triggers copyright infringement claim but not from Star Trek

Star Trek fan blogs number in the thousands if not more on the internet.

And quite a bit of those Star Trek fan blogs are on Tumblr, the microblogging and social media website founded in 2007 and owned by Automattic, which has a list of sites for practically every fan. And there hasn’t been any issues with the blogs when it comes to Star Trek…not until recently.

The Tumblr blog, Mapping La Sirena, is all about taking a closer look at La Sirena, the main starship from Star Trek: Picard, according to the site. It’s a busy blog that goes really digs into Captain Rios’ ship, sharing details about the Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter with interested fans that include  schematics, floor plans, canons, and nuances of the ship. The blog is filled with fan art, deep dives, scene clips, trailer reviews and more. and more.

This shouldn’t be a problem, and it wasn’t until there was unexpected overlap with adult content that triggered a flurry of DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown notices.

This particular Star Trek fan blog has a similiar title to an adult content creator’s name.

Transparency.automattic reports Tumblr has received numerous DMCA takedown notices from DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc, a third-party copyright monitoring service used frequently by content creators to prevent infringement of their original work. And these complaints occurred all because of the name La Sirena which also happens to be the name of an adult content creator, La Sirena 69 who is one of Piracy Prevention’s customers.

In one copyright claim over 90 Tumblr posts were targeted by the monitoring service because of the keyword match to “la sirena.” But instead of Automattic being alerted to La Sirena 69’s potentially infringed content, the company reported many of mappinglasirena.tumblr.com’s original posts.

None of the reported links from mappinglasirena.tumblr.com contained infringing content from La Sirena 69—instead, they were, as expected, focused on La Sirena, the starship. Automattic rejected the complaints.

And the team at Automattic wasn’t happy about the reports as they manually investigate each notice of copyright infringement which takes a lot of time. The company suggests DMCA Piracy Prevention do a little more investigating of their own prior to making a copyright claim. A quick look at mappinglasirena’s tumblr site would have proven that the blog was discussing a speed freighter not their client’s customer. To my knowledge, Star Trek has never collided with adult content, unless you count fan fiction.