Adobe wants Twitter to take down a tweet from five years ago that links to a site that allows visitors to download a 27-year-old version of the company’s PDF reader.
On March 6, a company that works on behalf of Adobe sent takedown requests for three tweets and several short URLs. One of the people who received the DMCA takedown request, well-known security researcher Mikko Hypponen, revealed that Adobe wanted a tweet of his that linked to the MS-DOS version of Acrobat Reader taken down. The news was first reported by TorrentFreak.
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What makes this story even weirder is that Adobe, for now, did not force Twitter to take down Hypponen’s original tweet, which is embedded above. The tweet that got taken down was posted by a bot that Hypponen runs, which is programmed to reshare some of his old tweets. (Hypponen runs a couple of bots like that.). That bot, because of this alleged copyright violation, was briefly taken down entirely. And that’s how Hypponen found out about the DMCA request, he said.
When he saw that, “I was laughing cause this makes no fucking sense,” Hypponen told Motherboard in a phone call. “But that’s Adobe for you.”
“None of this made any sense,” Hypponen added.
Hypponen’s bot that reshares tweets from 2016 was reinstated after he deleted the allegedly copyright infringing tweet, according to him.
Adobe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Companies often use the DMCA (short for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to take down links to pirated versions of software, movies, or music, or stolen documents and files. Sometimes, those takedown requests are plain wrong, or at least a bit petty. But this may be the most ridiculous DMCA takedown request the internet has seen.
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