4 ms·
No, google is doing what it can within the extremely tight confines of what the DMCA allows. The DMCA essentially prohibits companies from applying any judgeme
by olliej 3y ago
No, google is doing what it can within the extremely tight confines of what the DMCA allows.
The DMCA essentially prohibits companies from applying any judgement as to the validity of the complaint, so all google can do is try to identify fraudulent filers, but if a new entity makes a complaint it doesn't seem like there's a huge amount of signal available at that point to indicate whether that entity is legit.
The issue with the DMCA is it says something like "if you try to decide whether or not claims are valid, you also accept liability for infringement", which means there's near unbounded cost if you try to reject claims because the claims themselves are invalid, e.g. the DMCA "allows" a corporation to do that filtering but only in a way that no one would ever do.
Imagine you were running a forum, and you got a DMCA takedown notice for something someone posted. Let's say it's clearly obvious that the claim is invalid, and you reply with "hell no, that's clearly a BS claim". Later on someone posts something that is obviously copyright infringing. As I understood what people were complaining about (some 20 years ago sorry), because you rejected the earlier takedown you may now be liable for that infringing post. Hence, the only safe option available is to always start the two week takedown.
For many of these fraudulent claims that's the goal - they just want to censor the content. It doesn't matter if they ignore any future contact attempts, it doesn't matter if the person who got hit provides you evidence the claim is false, the DMCA basically requires that you keep the content down for two weeks to allow the original claimant to respond (which in these fraudulent cases they won't).
Google obviously does stop bring stuff back early now if it gets major publicity, but my guess is they have more lawyers than most companies can afford, and that they believe that if they were to go to court they could say they did their best to comply with the DMCA but the pressure (often incl. politicians) made them feel it was in the public interest or something to revert the takedown or whatever, and that that argument would hold up in court.
The problem is not Google here, the problem is a trivially abusable law that has no penalties for fraud.
- kevingadd 3y agoI'm not talking about "is this fake", I'm saying you can send Google a "dmca takedown" that doesn't provide all the information required by the DMCA, and they will still take the content down.
- olliej 3y agoAh, womp womp, you'd think that at least would be correct. My guess is they got enough shitty/badly done forms from real entities filing real reports and got threatened with lawsuits when they were rejected instead of the filers just going "oh, we'll fill out what we agreed to fill out" Sigh.
- soraminazuki 3y agoGP's comment was: > Google lying to the public like this should be considered false advertising. To which you responded with: > No, google is doing what it can within the extremely tight confines of what the DMCA allows. So lying is okay as long as the law makes it potentially expensive to do what you claimed you did? That doesn't seem ethical to me.
- olliej 3y agoNo, they're not lying, they have a bunch of systems in place to prevent the kind of abuse that they're allowed to prevent. The fact that the law encodes legal abuse that cannot be blocked, doesn't mean google is lying because it doesn't block things it's not allowed to block. The position you're taking is "if a law allows any kind abuse you're not able to stop, you can't claim you're trying to prevent abuse". The law is stupid and terrible, the lack of penalties for incorrect and fraudulent claims, the mandatory multi-week takedown even when there are multiple methods to demonstrate a claim is invalid, the lack of compensation for recipients legal costs (meaning that the majority of targets can't afford a lawyer to respond and just has to accept it), the restrictive and coercive terms that essentially force hosting providers to blanket accept every takedown demand and limit what anti-abuse steps they can take. That said, u/kevingadd said that they're accepting incomplete submissions as valid, which would seems like a thing they should be trivially blocking - my guess based on prior experience in corporate America, they kept getting incomplete/erroneously filled out demands that were otherwise legitimate, and the companies sending them threatened them for not accepting the demands anyway - but I feel at this point they should adopt malicious compliance and require perfect fill and perfect info, and just respond to threats with "we get millions of bogus requests, and those requests may also target content that you have intentionally published, and we're trying to minimize the impact to you".