5 ms·

Google, nor any other corp, should be a Judge on a legal matter. That's why a Judge should be involved. The entire idea of of the DCMA is just massively flawe

Google, nor any other corp, should be a Judge on a legal matter. That's why a Judge should be involved. The entire idea of of the DCMA is just massively flawed and biased towards a world where only big publishers and big criminal enterprises exist.

bruce511 3y ago
There are 600 million DCMA notices to Google along every year. Let's be insanely Conservative and assume there are a billion across all platforms. Let's say a judge can review a notice every 5 minutes. 12 an hour, say 100 in a day. Say 20 000 per year. So 50 per million, 50 000 judges per billion requests. Let's say a judge costs 100k per year. With say another 100k in costs. That's a price tag of 10 billion per year. I'm guessing the real number is likely well over double that. So your plan to include humans, never mind actual judges who went to law school and so on, is, well a non-starter.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Flood the system as a form of protest.
- 0xffff2 3y ago
  This is an argument to re-write the DMCA to prevent frivolous claims, and thus reduce the total number of claims. It's not an argument to throw up our hands and pretend that it's unreasonable to expect human involvement.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I don't think anyone is advocating for the status quo, but that doesn't mean human involvement is required either at an initial stage. One proposal is that you should need full legal identification to file a takedown claim, and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. This would solve 99.999 of the problem.
    - devrand 3y ago
      > One proposal is that you should need full legal identification to file a takedown claim How exactly? Require a government issued ID? What if it's fake? How would you validate that the ID is authentic? Even if it is authentic, how do you ensure that person has proper rights to issue the takedown? > and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. How? They could either not be who they say they are and/or not located in the United States. Like in this exact case, the two defendants are located in Vietnam. There's zero chance they're going to show up, so it'll result in a default judgement that will never be collected on. The best suggestion I've seen so far is to require an escrow deposit on takedowns that is forfeit on fraudulent/malicious claims. However, this then raises the issue of who would determine that. Also, this deposit could potentially tie up a lot of money of legitimate claimants, becoming a financial burden for them and preventing them from issue further claims (which further adds to that burden).
      - jakderrida 3y ago
        > and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. Honestly, I think both conditions might be met with an already vetted credit card number, which obviously involves an associated identification of a person or company. When signing up for cloud service providers, I'm always terrified that I'll leave something on and incur a massive bill. Basically, every cloud service move I treat as if I'm walking on eggshells. I'd assume those issuing a DMCA would end up the same way.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        >How exactly? Require a government issued ID? What if it's fake? How would you validate that the ID is authentic? Even if it is authentic, how do you ensure that person has proper righgts There is an infinite list depending on how strict you want to be. They could require government ID. They could require a notary. They could require a court order. There will always be a balance between ease of takedown for legitimate claimants vs fighting false claims.
      - jbishop156 3y ago
        > How? They could either not be who they say they are and/or not located in the United States. Require either US Identity papers or a corporate identity that is registered in the US in order to file a DMCA (or <country here> id/corpid for filing a <country specific> copyright claim) Furthermore, tweaking the reporting times for DMCA would help: 1. Claim made, soft-takedown immediately (delist but don't remove) 2. Proceed to hard-takedown after 24 hrs if no counterclaim is made. 3. Counterclaim made, reinstate and inform original claimant. 4. Original Claimant can then either sue or obtain a court-ordered injunction. 5. Optionally Claimant can pay a nominal fee for "human decision-making" by Google or a mutually agreeable arbitrator. 6. Respondent has 14 days to file their own nominal fee to move it to arbitration or can proceed to countersue.
  - palmfacehn 3y ago
    It needs to be easier to claim damages from inaccurate takedowns. Not only do you need to prove that the claimant knew his takedown was false, you also need to demonstrate "tortuous business interference". A simple, fixed price minimum damage for inaccurate claims would solve this. No more robo-claims because a forum user mentioned keywords which a poorly written scraper matches to their (brokered) client's intellectual property.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  You mean you actually have to pay a significant number of humans to run a giant monolithic content platform responsibly?! But our profits!
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Petty technicality, but most jurisdictions in the USA don't require judges to have gone to law school, passed the bar or even know how to read.
- everforward 3y ago
  Yup, that's about right for enforcing the current system of copyright, at the current level of enforcement, but with better than piss poor accuracy. Frankly, we're over-enforcing copyrights, which is why this looks ridiculous. It doesn't make economic sense to try a sane system for most of these complaints because we'd be spending thousands of dollars on court costs to take down a webpage that gets 10 views per day. There should be a nominal fee to file a DMCA complaint just to prevent wasting everyone's time with enforcement actions against pages that no one cares about. Call it $10 or maybe $50. If the site is causing damages to you, the $10 is worth it, but if they aren't causing the $10 of damage to make it worth filing then nobody else should have to deal with that paperwork either.

bruce511 3y ago

There are 600 million DCMA notices to Google along every year. Let's be insanely Conservative and assume there are a billion across all platforms. Let's say a judge can review a notice every 5 minutes. 12 an hour, say 100 in a day. Say 20 000 per year. So 50 per million, 50 000 judges per billion requests. Let's say a judge costs 100k per year. With say another 100k in costs. That's a price tag of 10 billion per year. I'm guessing the real number is likely well over double that. So your plan to include humans, never mind actual judges who went to law school and so on, is, well a non-starter.

nerdponx 3y ago
Flood the system as a form of protest.
0xffff2 3y ago
This is an argument to re-write the DMCA to prevent frivolous claims, and thus reduce the total number of claims. It's not an argument to throw up our hands and pretend that it's unreasonable to expect human involvement.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I don't think anyone is advocating for the status quo, but that doesn't mean human involvement is required either at an initial stage. One proposal is that you should need full legal identification to file a takedown claim, and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. This would solve 99.999 of the problem.
  - devrand 3y ago
    > One proposal is that you should need full legal identification to file a takedown claim How exactly? Require a government issued ID? What if it's fake? How would you validate that the ID is authentic? Even if it is authentic, how do you ensure that person has proper rights to issue the takedown? > and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. How? They could either not be who they say they are and/or not located in the United States. Like in this exact case, the two defendants are located in Vietnam. There's zero chance they're going to show up, so it'll result in a default judgement that will never be collected on. The best suggestion I've seen so far is to require an escrow deposit on takedowns that is forfeit on fraudulent/malicious claims. However, this then raises the issue of who would determine that. Also, this deposit could potentially tie up a lot of money of legitimate claimants, becoming a financial burden for them and preventing them from issue further claims (which further adds to that burden).
    - jakderrida 3y ago
      > and be on the hook for damages and penalties if is malicious. Honestly, I think both conditions might be met with an already vetted credit card number, which obviously involves an associated identification of a person or company. When signing up for cloud service providers, I'm always terrified that I'll leave something on and incur a massive bill. Basically, every cloud service move I treat as if I'm walking on eggshells. I'd assume those issuing a DMCA would end up the same way.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      >How exactly? Require a government issued ID? What if it's fake? How would you validate that the ID is authentic? Even if it is authentic, how do you ensure that person has proper righgts There is an infinite list depending on how strict you want to be. They could require government ID. They could require a notary. They could require a court order. There will always be a balance between ease of takedown for legitimate claimants vs fighting false claims.
    - jbishop156 3y ago
      > How? They could either not be who they say they are and/or not located in the United States. Require either US Identity papers or a corporate identity that is registered in the US in order to file a DMCA (or <country here> id/corpid for filing a <country specific> copyright claim) Furthermore, tweaking the reporting times for DMCA would help: 1. Claim made, soft-takedown immediately (delist but don't remove) 2. Proceed to hard-takedown after 24 hrs if no counterclaim is made. 3. Counterclaim made, reinstate and inform original claimant. 4. Original Claimant can then either sue or obtain a court-ordered injunction. 5. Optionally Claimant can pay a nominal fee for "human decision-making" by Google or a mutually agreeable arbitrator. 6. Respondent has 14 days to file their own nominal fee to move it to arbitration or can proceed to countersue.
- palmfacehn 3y ago
  It needs to be easier to claim damages from inaccurate takedowns. Not only do you need to prove that the claimant knew his takedown was false, you also need to demonstrate "tortuous business interference". A simple, fixed price minimum damage for inaccurate claims would solve this. No more robo-claims because a forum user mentioned keywords which a poorly written scraper matches to their (brokered) client's intellectual property.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
You mean you actually have to pay a significant number of humans to run a giant monolithic content platform responsibly?! But our profits!
qingcharles 3y ago
Petty technicality, but most jurisdictions in the USA don't require judges to have gone to law school, passed the bar or even know how to read.
everforward 3y ago
Yup, that's about right for enforcing the current system of copyright, at the current level of enforcement, but with better than piss poor accuracy. Frankly, we're over-enforcing copyrights, which is why this looks ridiculous. It doesn't make economic sense to try a sane system for most of these complaints because we'd be spending thousands of dollars on court costs to take down a webpage that gets 10 views per day. There should be a nominal fee to file a DMCA complaint just to prevent wasting everyone's time with enforcement actions against pages that no one cares about. Call it $10 or maybe $50. If the site is causing damages to you, the $10 is worth it, but if they aren't causing the $10 of damage to make it worth filing then nobody else should have to deal with that paperwork either.