Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
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Most of the YouTube issues aren’t DMCA claims but their own Content ID horseshit where there’s automated matching, zero policing of catalogs and associated rights, and seemingly zero recourse for misrepresentations.
I’m friends with a YouTuber (with just under 1M subs) who has licensed music for his intro/outro. Other people have taken that music and created remixes, then uploaded those remixes to rights management companies with access to the Content ID system. They then flag the original work automatically, which allows them to divert monetization from the YouTuber. It doesn’t go into escrow pending dispute resolution. The claiming company just gets to steal the money and keep it no matter what the ultimate result is. On top of that the initial appeal/dispute process is decided by the claiming party instead of someone neutral like YouTube themselves. It’s usually a huge hassle to resolve. My friend has lost thousands of dollars through this.
The automatic diverting of money to the copyright troll is the part that gets me. That really ought to open YouTube up for liability just as much if not more so than hosting copyright violating material. Copyright trolls should be facing fraud charges and systems that reward them should be under intense legal scrutiny.
Sadly, that’s not how it works and even if there was enough interest to organize and lobby for a positive change, there’d still be zero chance of congress anything useful in the foreseeable future.
It started to affect someone’s bottom line.
Can they stop the shit dmca takedowns on YouTube too?
While they could, that is also a different situation. YouTube copyright claims are generally done through YouTube’s own system, not through the actual DMCA process. That system is designed first and foremost to prevent YouTube from getting sued. It’s rigged in favor of the people claiming copyright because those are the ones doing the suing. Any attempt to fix it increases the chances of a lawsuit.
These trolls messing with Google are making actual DMCA claims, which is a formal legal process and opens the claimant up to potential liability. False claims are perjury. And by affecting Google search results on a large enough scale, they are hurting Google’s business. Those sites getting taken down abelong to current or potenti customers.
Not only are false DMCA claims perjury charges, iirc they’re also a civil claim of their own and have statutory damages and nearly automatic recovery of legal fees on winning the case. Still a high bar though because you must prove they knowingly misrepresented the facts.
DMCA is such a shitty law. But companies like Google choose the safe route and believe every DMCA claim without first using humans to investigate them (because that will cost more money), and this is the result.
I pity the independent creators and makers who get fake DMCA takedowns all the time while Google does nothing to protect them.
If Google really wants to save themselves from this kind of trouble, maybe spend some lobbying money to get DMCA repealed.
DMCA is such a shitty law. But companies like Google choose the safe route and believe every DMCA claim without first using humans to investigate them (because that will cost more money), and this is the result.
Isn’t that because Google would be liable if they ignored DMCA claims and a judge found in favor of the claimant?
Only if they’re wrong, but yea. The risk vs reward is massively against the favor of standing up for a defendant
Yeah, it’s all about incentives. Google’s behavior is what the law incentivizes.
DMCA == guilty until proven innocent
And good luck proving your innocence to the automated systems that Google uses to respond to DMCA requests…
Google makes it too easy to create fraudulent DMCA claims. Now they want to keep up their own laziness, and therefore they even go to court.
We are living in crazy times…
DMCA should never have existed to begin with
NGL, this bullshit is rampant in the 3D printing space, with fake accounts declaring infringement on IP they don’t own (much less do the claims even mention anything remotely relevant to the allegedly infringed IP), and it frankly comes down to a deep-seated flaw in cost-cutting automation processes. Specifically, if the monitoring systems in place weren’t 99.99% trigger-happy bots and 0.01% exploited human labor, maybe this wouldn’t be a fucking issue… But, that would take Google, et al, deciding that profit wasn’t THE reason for existing. 🖕🏽
You can’t weaponize a law that was always intended to be a weapon.
If the only would do so on YouTube.
Google sucks, fuck em. I have 34,858 Microsoft accounts that I use to submit DMCA claims to MS to remove Google products from Bing results.
4 sooth?
DMCA do stand for Don’t Make the Cearch engine Angry
