There’s a middle ground: sabotage. DMCA complaints have asymmetric incentives. You can, afaik, send a near-infinite number of (generated, duplicated, likely-to-not-exist) complaints at the cost of an email. As a host, you are obligated to comply with each individual report. Automating the process of decoding arbitrary emails, mapping to content you have and verifying that it’s copyrighted is extremely hard if not impossible, so you end up with a manual defense against an automated attack. This can obviously be exploited for purposes of sabotage.
Imagine sending bulk emails to the police reporting all people you don’t like for all crimes you can think of, without any risk. Or if you could call mayday on the sea, get other ships to reroute and risk their lives, with no consequences.
If you even reply to them you acknowledge their validity and accept whatever legal geography they send it from to be judged on, if you're outside the US. ignore them
Sadly that is nor good advice
You can find yourself being extradited. The legal grounds matter little, as you may find yourself in a Kafkaesque process that will ruin your happiness
Fake DMCA bogus can also index you out of google, even your homepage where no 3rd party links are found if you don't fight them
I got lawsuits from the RIAA but non related.
You can safely ignore DMCA's if they're not applied to your jurisdiction, BUT your host and other providers won't when they go upstream unless they also are like in china russia or whatever ignores the US asks
I only know of cases getting condemned in my country when they accepted dubious plea deals. Very few. Anecdotical.
I read somewhere if you think a law Is unjust, you must break it, but do so publicly accepting facing any consequences.
If extradition is on the table, and jail on the US, maybe we need some more martyr's to suffer through this to make a point that copyright is absurd nowadays.
I love this analogy because we find it wouldn’t work because it would likely raise some flags: 1) sudden influx of reports, 2) the person reporting leaves no reliable way to reach them back, 3) the people are already not on the police’s radar, so that in itself becomes suspicious.
How can we replicate these checks on the web?
Not a lawyer. Just watched and read a good bit about this kind of thing.
Due to the following bit in the notice:
> Gareth Young, Internet Investigator, swears, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate
It would appear that in this situation, incompetence in fact constitutes fraud.
Perjury is lying under oath. The statement must be made under oath to be eligible for perjury. And making a statement under oath is a formal process, dictated by court or law.
You cannot make yourself be under oath. Swearing something to be true doesn't count, unless there is a legal context that makes it true. Swearing in a witness in court makes that happen. Some laws (like DMCA) make statements in certain documents oathful. But it is the law, not the document, that decides that.
In my common law country, at least, when you swear something, it's an oath, and only an oath. We have a non-religious variant, no almighty God required, where you solemnly affirm to the same effect, and false information provided is perjury, punishable by up to 7 years imprisonment (if you perjured yourself in a judicial proceeding), unless you perjured yourself to get someone falsely convicted for a serious crime, then it's up to 14 years.
We also do statutory declarations, where you only declare it to true, but false information in one of those is still a crime, with a lesser penalty.
Oh, and we have a fun wee clause that maybe your jurisdiction doesn't? Where if you swear an oath, it can still be perjury even if it's not being sworn in a judicial proceeding. Only 5 years though.
So yeah, what does "swear" actually mean in the US? I don't get how you'd swear a DMCA takedown without your oath being taken. I figured if it was legit sworn, they'd do the usual "sworn this day X at BLA, witnessed/authorised/etc by Z"
Are they just trying to sound legal and scary, or is that format required in a takedown?
Not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I've been an occasional customer of the judiciary sufficiently to pick up the vagaries.
Sigh.
I guess it's the third option. Which is frustrating, because I think that it's still harmful, especially when it's so obviously false.
Can't somebody take the precedent set by those lawyers using ChatGPT to whip up nonsense for the court, and take these DMCA mills to tadk for conduct unbecoming for not verifying that, in fact, any software generated flag actually has merit before the Courts?
The Courts have been clear and unambiguous that their time is not to be wasted on BS, and that an attorney has the Duty of Care to ensure that what they vouch for is representative, and truthful.
Why is this still done at the scale it is if, in fact, the Courts are enforcing due rigor?
...The answer likely is, they aren't, and big tech is usurping the authority of the Courts to weigh in, thereby disrupting due process. In doing so, their legal team is committing the same censurious behavior, by advising their client to act unlawfully too.
Frankly, I'd start being thrilled at such notices if I could find an attorney willing to take a shot at holding notice generators to account for false positives, and service providers who cancel service without complying with due process accountable.
In fact, if the Courts were sufficiently dedicated to it, it would create a selection pressure on attorneys to ultimately be truthful, lest they be hunted by one of their fellow attorneys who actually is honest, and willing to check.
Who watches the watchers? Another watcher, with the incentive to reap a reward for proving the falsity of a claim.
Let the attorneys feast on one another for a bit, and eventually we should reestablish some sanity.
The courts don't care about that either. In at least one of the cases against ISPs (cox I think) the RIAA sent a large number of DMCA notices for works they didn't even own the copyrights to. After years of work the ISP's lawyers found a bunch of them and told the court who did reduce the damages they were on the hook for to account for the invalid DMCA notices but the court took no action whatsoever against the RIAA for sending them.
The issue is they've never been requested from the gateway that the DMCA notices is being sent to. They might be blocked by the gateway, they might fail to resolve on the gateway for other reasons, or they might work. Nobody checked before sending the complaint.
Sure, in this case, 30 minutes spent and done.
Recently I got a per capita tax bill for a town I didn't live in. They wanted payment for the last 8 years. I lived in a different town entirely (2 towns during the time in question).
When I filled out their form to contest it, they asked for deeds or leases for the duration to prove I didn't live there.
I told them I wouldn't provide such documentation without some proof to the fact I didn't live where I said I did. They responded to ignore the bill, it would be removed (which it was).
To me even the time I spent on this was excessive. In a just world, they'd be liable for my time. Entities, private or government, shouldn't be able to incur costs on our time and life due to their bullshit reasons or error.
I would support such a law.
Too few people take stock of the fact that those who deliberately waste their time are stealing from them.
Government and legal entities should be optimizing for people's time.
I believe it’s not only a matter of financial reimbursement but also respect and acknowledgement of an individual’s time, which is a non-renewable resource. Law like this would encourage organizations to be more careful and responsible, fostering a culture of respect and accountability.
I think that what's going on here is incompetence, not fraud.