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The problem is that it's extremely risky as a platform operator to stand up for blatant abuse of copyright infringement tools under the current model, especiall
by noirscape 4y ago
The problem is that it's extremely risky as a platform operator to stand up for blatant abuse of copyright infringement tools under the current model, especially when you do anything at scale.
Basically if you operate any website, as long as the DMCA request you get is reasonably properly filed, you are required to process it or else you risk legal liability.
It's a goddamn mess and when you're operating on the scale of say, Google, you don't have the option to risk that liability and hire people who can examine those claims. No, what you do is blindly process all claims and just hope that people counterclaim the bad ones.
It's why for example GitHub sticking it's neck out for 1201-related violations (where they manually investigate any anti-circumvention related takedown) is such a big deal. They are running a risk by doing that where if they tell the RIAA (who usually files these requests) to go fuck themselves, that they could be forced to eat crow in court, but they're doing it because well... the RIAA abused that part of the DMCA to file a dodgy claim against youtube-dl[0].
Improper DMCA claims are technically punishable as perjury but the actual process is so draining that it's super rare to see someone convicted for it.
[0]: The RIAA assumes that youtube uses actual encryption to protect people from downloading them. They're wrong - YouTube doesn't use widevine or anything like that for regular uploads (movies are a different case, they do use widevine), they have their own rolling cipher which is just a plaintext javascript file that your browser fetches when loading YouTube. Youtube-dl contains a python reimplementation of that cipher. Fully legal insofar as section 1201 is concerned, but the RIAA filed it under that anyway (because they'd have no actual standing to file a regular DMCA claim for basically blatantly reusing Google code, since the RIAA isn't Goole).