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They actually are not so required. This is often thought to be true but is very wrong. The only thing that happens if they say no is that they may be held lia

They actually are not so required. This is often thought to be true but is very wrong. The only thing that happens if they say no is that they may be held liable later if the content is found to be infringing. So in a case like this, which is nonsense, they could just say "no" without any fear because nobody is going to find it infringing in court. (This will likely surprise people or generate snarky responses, but oh well) Back when we had code.google.com, the DMCA team at Google used to spend a tremendous amount of energy and time evaluating requests to understand whether they were reasonable/made sense, because code.google.com got a lot of baseless requests to remove content. Google said no to a large number of baseless removals. Twitter could do the same here. (in practice i assume the volume becomes completely overwhelming at some point)

SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
Sure, but the article doesn't seem to argue that this complaint was so obviously frivolous that Twitter should have ignored it. (It doesn't really complain about Twitter at all, only Starz.)
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  Why would twitter ignore something that benefits its advertisers? Now they have a convenient excuse for what they did.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
It’s semantics really. Yes, Twitter can stick their neck out and ignore it, but it almost never happens. The end result is that Twitter understandably doesn’t want to have their legal team review every single DMCA request for validity. The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in the middle. As someone that had to deal with these reports, and we were tiny, the volume is insane. I cannot imagine the number of complaints Twitter receives.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  "The end result is that Twitter understandably doesn’t want to have their legal team review every single DMCA request for validity." I mean, humans are still involved in the process almost everywhere anyway, so it's not like they save a tremendous amount of overhead to flag weird ones. "The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in the middle." Sure, that i'm not gonna argue with
raxxorrax 8y ago
There is simply no business case here for disputing claims. Even if (and that is a big if when talking copyright law) the claim is invalid, why should the platform risk it? As you said yourself, Google had a DCMA team...
- DannyBee 8y ago
  "As you said yourself, Google had a DCMA team..." They still do, and they still push back, fwiw :)
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    Oh sorry, didn't mean to imply they got rid of it, english is not my native tongue. Sure, Google does, but would a smaller company be able to have a dedicated team for this? Success would pay in goodwill and sadly the currency exchange for that is pretty bad right now.

SpicyLemonZest 8y ago

Sure, but the article doesn't seem to argue that this complaint was so obviously frivolous that Twitter should have ignored it. (It doesn't really complain about Twitter at all, only Starz.)

Scoundreller 8y ago
Why would twitter ignore something that benefits its advertisers? Now they have a convenient excuse for what they did.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

It’s semantics really. Yes, Twitter can stick their neck out and ignore it, but it almost never happens. The end result is that Twitter understandably doesn’t want to have their legal team review every single DMCA request for validity. The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in the middle. As someone that had to deal with these reports, and we were tiny, the volume is insane. I cannot imagine the number of complaints Twitter receives.

DannyBee 8y ago
"The end result is that Twitter understandably doesn’t want to have their legal team review every single DMCA request for validity." I mean, humans are still involved in the process almost everywhere anyway, so it's not like they save a tremendous amount of overhead to flag weird ones. "The law is clearly broken but service providers like Twitter are caught in the middle." Sure, that i'm not gonna argue with

raxxorrax 8y ago

There is simply no business case here for disputing claims. Even if (and that is a big if when talking copyright law) the claim is invalid, why should the platform risk it? As you said yourself, Google had a DCMA team...

DannyBee 8y ago
"As you said yourself, Google had a DCMA team..." They still do, and they still push back, fwiw :)
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Oh sorry, didn't mean to imply they got rid of it, english is not my native tongue. Sure, Google does, but would a smaller company be able to have a dedicated team for this? Success would pay in goodwill and sadly the currency exchange for that is pretty bad right now.