8 ms·

The problem with Shopify is that literally anyone can open a fake account and submit a DMCA to take down any competitor. Check how basic their form is >> https

by Lentor 3y ago

The problem with Shopify is that literally anyone can open a fake account and submit a DMCA to take down any competitor. Check how basic their form is >> https://help.shopify.com/en/legal/dmca#/form https://help.shopify.com/en/legal/dmca#/form We've been harassed by the same scammer that placed 7 fake DMCA over the past 2 weeks and Shopify automatically removes you content with zero check. That dude just mentioned the product pages he wanted and used totally irrelevant links as a source for what he claims was the original content even a .xyz domain. Shopify support does absolutely nothing even if you send them 20 emails. Hundreds of legit businesses are affected by this loophole exploited by scammers. See https://twitter.com/hashtag/FixShopifyDMCA?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/hashtag/FixShopifyDMCA?src=hashtag_click

jakewins 3y ago
What does the scammer get out of it, is it a way to “take over” someone else’s order flow by being the sole supplier of some good?
- jermaustin1 3y ago
  Not a scammer, per se, but a competitor. Easier to compete when the other products have all been taken down.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 3y ago
  That is the benefit I see. The scammer is eliminating the competition.
- Lentor 3y ago
  take down competition
- threeseed 3y ago
  There are many people who make their livelihood by drop-shipping products from China. Since the products are identical the only way of succeeding is being the store that the customer sees first. Some invest heavily into SEO/Paid Ads. Others try and harm competition like the DCMA requests and leaving negative reviews. But one thing I've seen first hand is that the competition is brutal. Everyone just steals website content, images, marketing material etc from the competitors. Whatever they can do to get ahead.
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    I’m sympathetic to content creators generally but I find it hard to sympathize with drop-shippers - it seems like such a silly, useless and unnecessary business. Perhaps there’s an analogy to High Frequency Trading though - they “provide liquidity at the margin” for crappy goods?
    - jermaustin1 3y ago
      Drop-shipping DID have a purpose back in the 80-00s when you couldn't buy the stuff one off from platforms like AliExpress, but most dropshippers aren't doing it like the drop-shippers of yore did it. Starting the "back in my day rant": In the past, you would actually negotiate with your manufacturers about how many items you would purchase over the year, and that would determine the discount you got on their SRP. You could then mark it up, but for the most part you didn't, and your profit was your discount. Now days, though, everyone is just plugging directly into AliExpress/Temu/Wish, and marking it up. They are just a lazy low/no-value middle-person between me and cheap knockoffs from China. The "clever" ones are worse, because you might not even realize you are buying a knockoff. The packaging, images, titles, and descriptions will be 1:1 with the real product.
      - kayodelycaon 3y ago
        While this is true of people only doing drop shipping, my company does a lot of drop shopping and JIT delivery. We have our own inventory, but we also have contracts with vendors that are not available to consumers. We are also better equipped to guarantee supply chain integrity and have much better customer service. Getting a warranty on a part can be difficult, but we have dedicated people who work with vendors every day. All the customer has to do is stick a shipping label on box.
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      Philosophically, how do drop-shippers compare to, say, furniture shops that only have showpieces on display. And when you pick a piece, they pass along the order to the manufacturer to deliver. Or for that matter, car-dealerships operate on the same model.
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  1. Identify a thriving niche, and stores within that niche. 2. Copy everything they do. Steal their photos, descriptions. Everything, really. Launch a bunch of stores that sell the exact same thing, with exact same listings, etc. 3. Attack the store with bogus DMCA takedowns, deluge them with fake reviews. 4. Boost your own store(s) with fake positive reviews. 5. Replace the stores you are competing against. If you're located in China and can do that with impunity, what are the owners going to do? Amazon seems to be happy for any business.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
> We've been harassed by the same scammer that placed 7 fake DMCA over the past 2 weeks and Shopify automatically removes you content with zero check. So much for " The e-commerce platform typically receives thousands of takedown notices per month from rightsholders, which are in part processed automatically. That works well in most instances, but not always." As a person who's built at least half their career on Rails, I want Shopify to succeed in a big way, but every "platform" acts the same way. What's worse is that I've read other stories from Shopify creators who are having their stuff directly ripped off, and their complaints have no effect. Why do the people running platforms all wink and nod, and agree to enshittify the service for the creators in the same way, leaving them nowhere else to go? Seems like there's an opportunity to make more money by breaking the mold, and being a platform that favors creators over complaints. Ahhh, don't worry; I'm sure AI will sort all of this out shortly. <eyeroll> Anything to avoid hiring actual people with brains to sort these kinds of things out. If these automated systems are so great, you'd think there'd be relatively little gray area for human beings to sort out, but no one seems to actually do that, until a stink is made on some social media that the company can't avoid.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Providing good service costs more and the vast majority of customers will not pay for it no matter how much it hurts them.
TuringNYC 3y ago
How does a major corp allow this to happen. Isnt the solution as simple as: 1. Forcing a seasoning period on new accounts before they create DMCA requests 2. Ranking the # of DMCA requests by account and increasing scrutiny of top complainers Could someone in the know explain how Shopify can continue to avoid the problem despite obvious solutions?
- ensignavenger 3y ago
  The DMCA does not allow 1, and they risk the possibility of legal liability if they do 2. The DMCA has no concept of fraud prevention builtin, and any efforts a web operator takes to prevent fraud fall into a legal grey area that could increase the operators liability. This is either a flaw in the DMCA, or a.feature, depending on who you are.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    >depending on who you are. The writers definitely intended towards that spectrum's latter. As a piece of enforceable legislation, it is heavily-flawed.
  - abigail95 3y ago
    There are plenty of solutions within the law that aren't a grey area. As an example, send a DMCA/C&D to shopify.com - do they have to take down their homepage? Of course not. Did they set up a robot to take down their homepage when it receives a request? Of course not. > DMCA has no concept of fraud prevention Yes it does. The safe harbor requirements require that material removed expeditously upon proper notice. A bogus notice is not proper notice. Acting on a bogus notice is against shopify's own notice and takedown procedure. They are creating more harm for themselves by doing this.
    - ensignavenger 3y ago
      But if the recipient gets it wrong and misclassifies a proper notice as a bogus notice, they are liable under the law. There is no safe harbor for "we acted in good faith but we were wrong".
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
The solution to it all is discourage false reporting by imposing penalties. The reason for frivolous lawsuits, DMCA takedowns, rape accusations, fake news and internet misinformation is that people feel no practical consequences for false reporting. If you are caught with a blatantly false report you should be faced with a stiff penalty. The penalty should be just enough so that normal people feel twice before false reporting. This should discourage 99.9% people from false reporting and then allow authorities to assign adequate resources to deal with the rest 0.1%.
- munk-a 3y ago
  This can have a chilling effect on the reporters - remember that small businesses and large corporations are on both sides of this interaction at different times. If Sony BMG can just wholesale steal your music from bandcamp and threaten to drown you in legal fees if you dare formally file a DMCA it'll lead to a lot of pain and marginalization for some people - just like the ability for anyone to make these complaints with very little verification causes pain for other folks. I personally think that DMCA was terribly designed - but a replacement would need careful consideration from all sides.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    I also think DMCA is terribly designed, but it is no wonder -- it was designed by and with only interest of copyright holders. As to chilling effect on reporters, I disagree. We have laws to protect people from libel, and yet it does not have chilling effect on reporters. And yet it is essentially exactly the same thing I am thinking about. The damage from libel is to an individual. The damage from misinformation is to entire society. The reason libel laws work is that the number of cases isn't overwhelming the court system. But if you rewind time 20 years and you suspended libel law for a moment, if everybody could publish in a newspaper or TV whatever they want about whoever they want. What do you think would happen? A deluge of false information about everybody. What would people say about somebody wanting to introduce a libel law? That "it would have a chilling effect on journalism".
adrr 3y ago
Are you on the plus tier? They would verify before they would act, nothing was automated.
- munk-a 3y ago
  There's something dystopian about "Oh, fair legal treatment is available... for a subscription."
qingcharles 3y ago
I had a business a decade ago where our competitor hired someone to consistently email PayPal and tell them we were actually selling CSAM. PayPal had to act every time by immediately blocking our account and putting us out of business for a week while they checked and saw that we were not in fact selling anything untoward. If you're an asshole there are many methods online to really screw with your competitors :(
- braiamp 3y ago
  The sad part is that legitimate users are the ones being affected when the content actually infringes on other persons right. There must be a faster way to counternotice without the lose of revenue in case something untoward is happening.
cj 3y ago
My sister’s Etsy shop (which is her family’s sole source of income) was hit by this scam last Christmas during the holiday rush. DMCA takedowns from copycat vendors to wipe away competitors to (temporarily) steal business. It’s not a problem Etsy or others take seriously, even when the attack hits stores with multi-million dollars per year in sales. It’s yet another case of a tech company refusing to staff enough workers to manually review and verify things that computers shouldn’t be doing by themselves.
- nikanj 3y ago
  Etsy makes the same amount of money regardless which seller you order from, so they have little motivation to prevent sabotage amongst sellers
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    Well, maybe short term. But this looks like something that can very well kill them in the longer term by making their platform so toxic no one would want to touch it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  The app we're currently releasing does not have an auto-signup. Each account signup request is reviewed manually. Needless to say, this is difficult to scale. It's fine for our app; which Serves a fairly small demographic, and does not make money, but it would be a big problem for major-league outfits. I have a feeling that one of the first commercial applications of AI, will be moderation and response to customer complaints. We'll have to see how well that works.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > I have a feeling that one of the first commercial applications of AI, will be moderation and response to customer complaints. > We'll have to see how well that works. Worth noting that almost all of YouTube's front facing customer service is heavily, heavily automated, which is a source of constant hostility and aggrivation for YouTubers, in that they must interact with these ML agents, get a stupid, nonsensical answer, then reply again to get a human reviewer who (usually) resolves the situation that would've been faster resolved by a human in the first place and let to less frustration for all involved. I think it's a fantastic idea to not automate the process of signups for a service, and yes, it will substantially slow down the process. But I think everyone has just about had their fill of all these services that produce bad outcomes extremely quickly when a trivial amount of human involvement would've handled whatever issue better, in a perfectly acceptable time frame. If you don't want to have a customer service department that is well staffed and well paid to handle customer complaints/problems/issues/what have you, then my suggestion is do not involve yourself with or build a company that will need one. Simple as. Edit: And like, I think it's fair to extend this to all these sectors of a normal, functioning business that silicon valley companies are happy to "automate" to cut their costs: - If you don't want to provide the resources for human approval for your platform, then don't start a platform. - If you don't want a provide the humans to moderate content, do not host content. - If you don't want to handle verifying ID's and driver's licenses, running background checks, and all the rest that is Bog Fucking Standard for a cab company, then don't start a cab company. It just blows my mind how many of these business have gone into the field of X or Y and just... not done or half-assed huge aspects of those fields, and then shrug their shoulders when people get pissed that they can't get help. Do you think all these dinosaur businesses you're trying to disrupt went out of their way to find an excuse to hire on customer service agents for the hell of it? No! They needed people to solve problems for customers with the product they sell!
marcosdumay 3y ago
> literally anyone can open a fake account and submit a DMCA to take down Doesn't the law require this? > Shopify automatically removes you content with zero check Doesn't the law also require this? AFAIK, the only thing the DMCA allows is for them to put the content back after you swear to them that it's not copyright infringement. But it's not very clear how much evidence they should request.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  > after you swear to them that it's not copyright infringement. But it's not very clear how much evidence they should request. Should they? I thought the whole point of DMCA Safe Harbor is that third parties (such as providers and hosting services) don't have to figure out what's infringing and what's not but merely accept statements from all the involved parties. If removal on notice is one-click process, restoring on counter-notice could (should!) also be an one-click process. And if DMCA doesn't prohibit proactive counter-notices, marketplaces that care about their sellers should let them preemptively swear that all their products are not infringing on anything, and save the counter-notice, so takedown requests would be immediately served with "we took the content down for a femtosecond (as legally required), but we got this counter-notice, so we restored the content - now you can go to a court". Not sure how legal this could be, but giants like Etsy's or Amazon's legal teams surely can test those waters if they would want to stop the DMCA abuse.
- powersnail 3y ago
  Does the law require the website to provide an UI to every user for filing DMCA take downs? Can't Shopify only receive DMCA through mail?
wnevets 3y ago
All I see is a login page when I click your twitter link
lelanthran 3y ago
Just spitballing here, but why can't you file a DMCA takedown against the scammer immediately? Because if everyone did this, the scammers would eventually not bother.
- remram 3y ago
  That wouldn't remove the takedown against your account, or stop the scammer from sending more takedowns (with new, free accounts).
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > That wouldn't remove the takedown against your account, or stop the scammer from sending more takedowns (with new, free accounts). If everyone retaliated to fake takedown notices by spamming every single page and/or item listed by that account, they'd have no choice but to stop. They do what they do because it makes them money! If they want to sell, they need an account which doesn't have every single item DMCA'ed.
    - remram 3y ago
      The person spamming DMCA notices is not going to do it from an account that has items for sale. Quoting the parent, emphasis mine: > The problem with Shopify is that literally anyone can *open a fake account* and submit a DMCA to take down any competitor.

by Lentor 3y ago

jakewins 3y ago

What does the scammer get out of it, is it a way to “take over” someone else’s order flow by being the sole supplier of some good?

jermaustin1 3y ago
Not a scammer, per se, but a competitor. Easier to compete when the other products have all been taken down.
c0wb0yc0d3r 3y ago
That is the benefit I see. The scammer is eliminating the competition.
Lentor 3y ago
take down competition
threeseed 3y ago
There are many people who make their livelihood by drop-shipping products from China. Since the products are identical the only way of succeeding is being the store that the customer sees first. Some invest heavily into SEO/Paid Ads. Others try and harm competition like the DCMA requests and leaving negative reviews. But one thing I've seen first hand is that the competition is brutal. Everyone just steals website content, images, marketing material etc from the competitors. Whatever they can do to get ahead.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  I’m sympathetic to content creators generally but I find it hard to sympathize with drop-shippers - it seems like such a silly, useless and unnecessary business. Perhaps there’s an analogy to High Frequency Trading though - they “provide liquidity at the margin” for crappy goods?
  - jermaustin1 3y ago
    Drop-shipping DID have a purpose back in the 80-00s when you couldn't buy the stuff one off from platforms like AliExpress, but most dropshippers aren't doing it like the drop-shippers of yore did it. Starting the "back in my day rant": In the past, you would actually negotiate with your manufacturers about how many items you would purchase over the year, and that would determine the discount you got on their SRP. You could then mark it up, but for the most part you didn't, and your profit was your discount. Now days, though, everyone is just plugging directly into AliExpress/Temu/Wish, and marking it up. They are just a lazy low/no-value middle-person between me and cheap knockoffs from China. The "clever" ones are worse, because you might not even realize you are buying a knockoff. The packaging, images, titles, and descriptions will be 1:1 with the real product.
    - kayodelycaon 3y ago
      While this is true of people only doing drop shipping, my company does a lot of drop shopping and JIT delivery. We have our own inventory, but we also have contracts with vendors that are not available to consumers. We are also better equipped to guarantee supply chain integrity and have much better customer service. Getting a warranty on a part can be difficult, but we have dedicated people who work with vendors every day. All the customer has to do is stick a shipping label on box.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    Philosophically, how do drop-shippers compare to, say, furniture shops that only have showpieces on display. And when you pick a piece, they pass along the order to the manufacturer to deliver. Or for that matter, car-dealerships operate on the same model.
TrackerFF 3y ago
1. Identify a thriving niche, and stores within that niche. 2. Copy everything they do. Steal their photos, descriptions. Everything, really. Launch a bunch of stores that sell the exact same thing, with exact same listings, etc. 3. Attack the store with bogus DMCA takedowns, deluge them with fake reviews. 4. Boost your own store(s) with fake positive reviews. 5. Replace the stores you are competing against. If you're located in China and can do that with impunity, what are the owners going to do? Amazon seems to be happy for any business.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

> We've been harassed by the same scammer that placed 7 fake DMCA over the past 2 weeks and Shopify automatically removes you content with zero check. So much for " The e-commerce platform typically receives thousands of takedown notices per month from rightsholders, which are in part processed automatically. That works well in most instances, but not always." As a person who's built at least half their career on Rails, I want Shopify to succeed in a big way, but every "platform" acts the same way. What's worse is that I've read other stories from Shopify creators who are having their stuff directly ripped off, and their complaints have no effect. Why do the people running platforms all wink and nod, and agree to enshittify the service for the creators in the same way, leaving them nowhere else to go? Seems like there's an opportunity to make more money by breaking the mold, and being a platform that favors creators over complaints. Ahhh, don't worry; I'm sure AI will sort all of this out shortly. <eyeroll> Anything to avoid hiring actual people with brains to sort these kinds of things out. If these automated systems are so great, you'd think there'd be relatively little gray area for human beings to sort out, but no one seems to actually do that, until a stink is made on some social media that the company can't avoid.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
Providing good service costs more and the vast majority of customers will not pay for it no matter how much it hurts them.

TuringNYC 3y ago

How does a major corp allow this to happen. Isnt the solution as simple as: 1. Forcing a seasoning period on new accounts before they create DMCA requests 2. Ranking the # of DMCA requests by account and increasing scrutiny of top complainers Could someone in the know explain how Shopify can continue to avoid the problem despite obvious solutions?

ensignavenger 3y ago
The DMCA does not allow 1, and they risk the possibility of legal liability if they do 2. The DMCA has no concept of fraud prevention builtin, and any efforts a web operator takes to prevent fraud fall into a legal grey area that could increase the operators liability. This is either a flaw in the DMCA, or a.feature, depending on who you are.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >depending on who you are. The writers definitely intended towards that spectrum's latter. As a piece of enforceable legislation, it is heavily-flawed.
- abigail95 3y ago
  There are plenty of solutions within the law that aren't a grey area. As an example, send a DMCA/C&D to shopify.com - do they have to take down their homepage? Of course not. Did they set up a robot to take down their homepage when it receives a request? Of course not. > DMCA has no concept of fraud prevention Yes it does. The safe harbor requirements require that material removed expeditously upon proper notice. A bogus notice is not proper notice. Acting on a bogus notice is against shopify's own notice and takedown procedure. They are creating more harm for themselves by doing this.
  - ensignavenger 3y ago
    But if the recipient gets it wrong and misclassifies a proper notice as a bogus notice, they are liable under the law. There is no safe harbor for "we acted in good faith but we were wrong".

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

The solution to it all is discourage false reporting by imposing penalties. The reason for frivolous lawsuits, DMCA takedowns, rape accusations, fake news and internet misinformation is that people feel no practical consequences for false reporting. If you are caught with a blatantly false report you should be faced with a stiff penalty. The penalty should be just enough so that normal people feel twice before false reporting. This should discourage 99.9% people from false reporting and then allow authorities to assign adequate resources to deal with the rest 0.1%.

munk-a 3y ago
This can have a chilling effect on the reporters - remember that small businesses and large corporations are on both sides of this interaction at different times. If Sony BMG can just wholesale steal your music from bandcamp and threaten to drown you in legal fees if you dare formally file a DMCA it'll lead to a lot of pain and marginalization for some people - just like the ability for anyone to make these complaints with very little verification causes pain for other folks. I personally think that DMCA was terribly designed - but a replacement would need careful consideration from all sides.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  I also think DMCA is terribly designed, but it is no wonder -- it was designed by and with only interest of copyright holders. As to chilling effect on reporters, I disagree. We have laws to protect people from libel, and yet it does not have chilling effect on reporters. And yet it is essentially exactly the same thing I am thinking about. The damage from libel is to an individual. The damage from misinformation is to entire society. The reason libel laws work is that the number of cases isn't overwhelming the court system. But if you rewind time 20 years and you suspended libel law for a moment, if everybody could publish in a newspaper or TV whatever they want about whoever they want. What do you think would happen? A deluge of false information about everybody. What would people say about somebody wanting to introduce a libel law? That "it would have a chilling effect on journalism".

adrr 3y ago

Are you on the plus tier? They would verify before they would act, nothing was automated.

munk-a 3y ago
There's something dystopian about "Oh, fair legal treatment is available... for a subscription."

qingcharles 3y ago

I had a business a decade ago where our competitor hired someone to consistently email PayPal and tell them we were actually selling CSAM. PayPal had to act every time by immediately blocking our account and putting us out of business for a week while they checked and saw that we were not in fact selling anything untoward. If you're an asshole there are many methods online to really screw with your competitors :(

braiamp 3y ago
The sad part is that legitimate users are the ones being affected when the content actually infringes on other persons right. There must be a faster way to counternotice without the lose of revenue in case something untoward is happening.

cj 3y ago

My sister’s Etsy shop (which is her family’s sole source of income) was hit by this scam last Christmas during the holiday rush. DMCA takedowns from copycat vendors to wipe away competitors to (temporarily) steal business. It’s not a problem Etsy or others take seriously, even when the attack hits stores with multi-million dollars per year in sales. It’s yet another case of a tech company refusing to staff enough workers to manually review and verify things that computers shouldn’t be doing by themselves.

nikanj 3y ago
Etsy makes the same amount of money regardless which seller you order from, so they have little motivation to prevent sabotage amongst sellers
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Well, maybe short term. But this looks like something that can very well kill them in the longer term by making their platform so toxic no one would want to touch it.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
The app we're currently releasing does not have an auto-signup. Each account signup request is reviewed manually. Needless to say, this is difficult to scale. It's fine for our app; which Serves a fairly small demographic, and does not make money, but it would be a big problem for major-league outfits. I have a feeling that one of the first commercial applications of AI, will be moderation and response to customer complaints. We'll have to see how well that works.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > I have a feeling that one of the first commercial applications of AI, will be moderation and response to customer complaints. > We'll have to see how well that works. Worth noting that almost all of YouTube's front facing customer service is heavily, heavily automated, which is a source of constant hostility and aggrivation for YouTubers, in that they must interact with these ML agents, get a stupid, nonsensical answer, then reply again to get a human reviewer who (usually) resolves the situation that would've been faster resolved by a human in the first place and let to less frustration for all involved. I think it's a fantastic idea to not automate the process of signups for a service, and yes, it will substantially slow down the process. But I think everyone has just about had their fill of all these services that produce bad outcomes extremely quickly when a trivial amount of human involvement would've handled whatever issue better, in a perfectly acceptable time frame. If you don't want to have a customer service department that is well staffed and well paid to handle customer complaints/problems/issues/what have you, then my suggestion is do not involve yourself with or build a company that will need one. Simple as. Edit: And like, I think it's fair to extend this to all these sectors of a normal, functioning business that silicon valley companies are happy to "automate" to cut their costs: - If you don't want to provide the resources for human approval for your platform, then don't start a platform. - If you don't want a provide the humans to moderate content, do not host content. - If you don't want to handle verifying ID's and driver's licenses, running background checks, and all the rest that is Bog Fucking Standard for a cab company, then don't start a cab company. It just blows my mind how many of these business have gone into the field of X or Y and just... not done or half-assed huge aspects of those fields, and then shrug their shoulders when people get pissed that they can't get help. Do you think all these dinosaur businesses you're trying to disrupt went out of their way to find an excuse to hire on customer service agents for the hell of it? No! They needed people to solve problems for customers with the product they sell!

marcosdumay 3y ago

> literally anyone can open a fake account and submit a DMCA to take down Doesn't the law require this? > Shopify automatically removes you content with zero check Doesn't the law also require this? AFAIK, the only thing the DMCA allows is for them to put the content back after you swear to them that it's not copyright infringement. But it's not very clear how much evidence they should request.

drdaeman 3y ago
> after you swear to them that it's not copyright infringement. But it's not very clear how much evidence they should request. Should they? I thought the whole point of DMCA Safe Harbor is that third parties (such as providers and hosting services) don't have to figure out what's infringing and what's not but merely accept statements from all the involved parties. If removal on notice is one-click process, restoring on counter-notice could (should!) also be an one-click process. And if DMCA doesn't prohibit proactive counter-notices, marketplaces that care about their sellers should let them preemptively swear that all their products are not infringing on anything, and save the counter-notice, so takedown requests would be immediately served with "we took the content down for a femtosecond (as legally required), but we got this counter-notice, so we restored the content - now you can go to a court". Not sure how legal this could be, but giants like Etsy's or Amazon's legal teams surely can test those waters if they would want to stop the DMCA abuse.
powersnail 3y ago
Does the law require the website to provide an UI to every user for filing DMCA take downs? Can't Shopify only receive DMCA through mail?

wnevets 3y ago

All I see is a login page when I click your twitter link

lelanthran 3y ago

Just spitballing here, but why can't you file a DMCA takedown against the scammer immediately? Because if everyone did this, the scammers would eventually not bother.

remram 3y ago
That wouldn't remove the takedown against your account, or stop the scammer from sending more takedowns (with new, free accounts).
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > That wouldn't remove the takedown against your account, or stop the scammer from sending more takedowns (with new, free accounts). If everyone retaliated to fake takedown notices by spamming every single page and/or item listed by that account, they'd have no choice but to stop. They do what they do because it makes them money! If they want to sell, they need an account which doesn't have every single item DMCA'ed.
  - remram 3y ago
    The person spamming DMCA notices is not going to do it from an account that has items for sale. Quoting the parent, emphasis mine: > The problem with Shopify is that literally anyone can *open a fake account* and submit a DMCA to take down any competitor.