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.

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.

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.

Or for that matter, car-dealerships operate on the same model.

1. Platforms could detect they're sellng the same piece of good and automatically sort by price

2. There's no material difference between vendors other than pricing and offering, e.g. in customer service

3. vicious anti-competitive behaviour like those illustrated here are heavily regulated

When all these are true the vendors that survive would be ones that offer the best price among those who offer goods of the same level of crappiness.

No matter where you go and buy a fungible consumer product (SKU), the retailer was regulated by law to give you the best price available anywhere in the world at that exact microsecond.

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.

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.

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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notice_and_take_down

> Provided the notification complies with the requirements of Section 512, the online service provider must expeditiously remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material, otherwise the provider loses its safe harbour and is exposed to possible liability.

Which include :

> Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number and email address

>> Shopify says that it’s not feasible for the company to investigate the validity of all takedown notices in detail. As such, these false claims resulted in actual removals and the affected stores also received strikes on their accounts.

It isn't a good system but Youtube in particular was loaded with pirated content in the early days before Google invented automated copyright moderation so they most likely needed to do something drastic to delete pirate accounts to avoid legal trouble with the copyright lobby and everybody else just copied the idea as a "best practice".

In other words, they don't want to spend the money to fulfill their responsibilities.

That was built into it on purpose.

That's the context I was referring to. If Shopify requires an address and phone number from DMCA claimants, then won't the DMCA claimants simply sue Shopify for making the process too restrictive?

It looks like Shopify has decided not to play that specific game.

>Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party //

The complaining party is a party with a [genuine] complaint of copyright infringement. A specious claimant is not really a complaining party. Whilst an email address may allow you to contact a party, it's not really sufficient to contact a [genuine] complaining party; the email address will put you in touch with lots of correspondents who are not complaining parties but instead are vexacious complainants.

Requirement for a notarized affidavit delivered by registered mail would seem like it would be no bar for genuine complainants who were subject to a loss that the court, or public process, should care about.

That might be too onerous? Maybe parties should prove they have registered the copyright in their works at the USPTO, as they would in an infringement proceeding?

This situation seems like what happens when you let corporate interests write the laws and you just sign them in.

That does not answer whether Shopify is free to use more information to filter out fraudulent claims; though my understanding is that Shopify is not really allowed to filter out fraudulent claims at all, so that point is moot.

Where the DMCA went wrong in my opinion is it should have been upon notice you have one business day to notify whoever posted the content, and they get one business day to respond. If they take down the offending content, then all is well (the amount you could gain from two days of something being up isn't worth your court costs) If there is no response at all, only then is content taken down automatically. If there is a response that the content doesn't infringe then content stays up, but the response must contain full legal contact information: the accuser is required to go to court to get the content taken down. Note that court mean the count of law in the country the accused lives in.

The above is how normal cases should work. There are some tricky things that need to work different. If the accused is in a country that doesn't recognize copyright, if the legal contact information is invalid, if the accuser is submitting many false claims, or the middle party doesn't do their part there are problems. I'll post my ideas, but there is room for better ones and a lot of details need to be worked out.

If accused party is in a country that doesn't recognize international copyright (China being the big example), then take downs need to happen immediately - we cannot trust your courts to protect our people so you in turn are assumed wrong, take it up with your government. (I can't think of anything better here - I'm open to better ideas)

If the legal contact information given in the response is invalid, then the entire account should be terminated and all content deleted.

Many false claims needs to be legally defined. I'm going with the copyright owner and (not or!) their authorized agents send more than 100 take downs that after 1 year are still up and no court case has been filed.

If the middle party (youtube) doesn't react to court orders to take things down, or to the poster asking to take infringing content down then they are in trouble. Otherwise they are only a middleman.

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.

What they are not prepared to defend is their users' content.

The writers definitely intended towards that spectrum's latter.

As a piece of enforceable legislation, it is heavily-flawed.

Then build something reasonable to replace it.

To the implementation established through corporate lobbying of media corporation over the last century; yes, I'd very much agree.

The core is, people who create useful works deserve to make a living and not simply have the financial benefit of those works go to others who are rich enough to exploit them.

I'd be interested if you don't agree with that core, if you could explain why?

Monopoly is not the route we should be taking to achieve that. Copyright only manages to support a select few artists. It does so by making it more difficult to create art in the first place!

The overwhelming majority of copyright benefit (in dollars) goes to "others who are rich enough to exploit" the system itself, not to the artists who are in need of "a living". Those absurdly wealthy groups make it more difficult and more expensive for artists to compete with them. The tool they use for anti-competitive behavior is copyright. Copyright is only useful for anti-competitive behavior, because copyright is literally defined as monopoly.

---

If we did not have copyright, people would still be free to financially support artists. There would only be two major differences:

1. Artists would not be able to compel people to financially support them.

2. Giant corporations would not be able to compel artists to give them monopoly over their art. Artists would be entirely free to create new art, and to seek direct financial benefit from that art.

I argue that the second effect is by far the greater of the two, particularly in respect to artists who need a living wage.

Yes, in the copyright system we _have_ in USA/Europe (probably globally). But fundamentally copyright was birthed out of protecting creators of works (authors of books in the case of Queen Anne's Statute). Capitalism is fundamentally corrupting of every system, but that doesn't mean the "core" of the underlying system was bad -- that is all I argue for here, that a just copyright system that actually encourages sharing of works could exist, modelled on the fundamental core of copyright which is protecting authors/creators from predatory industries and maintaining things such as right of authorship (being acknowledged as author).

To be clear, you should not be able to profit from claiming original authorship of those works: that would be fraud.

The problem with the DMCA is that in practice it's ridiculously lopsided. It's *supposed to be* under penalty of perjury but no harm comes to those who make false claims.

Have any companies been successfully sued for attempting to police DMCA fraud on their platform? Be interesting to know how courts treat good-faith efforts and if there have been instances where a company just phoned it in and got in trouble for half-measures.

However, companies often have policies that are more restrictive than DMCA (YouTube, for example, will remove things that the DMCA would not require).

Because if Shopify gets the take-down request and ignores it, they are now potentially liable for the infringing content remaining available after the complaint has been made. Reviewing each complaint requires billable hours for someone, and just blanket accepting every one and removing the content is easily automated and incredibly cheap. And because they're so big and handle so many websites, even if every complaint is invalid and bullshit, the stores that get nuked in the process won't hurt their bottom line as much as a potential IP lawsuit would.

If sending fraudulent claims like this resulted in the sender going to jail this wouldn’t be much of a problem at all. But it doesn’t.

Prison is a massive cost to society, we should avoid it except where it's entirely necessary.

The rationale is that the DMCA gives complainants the ability to restrict others' speech, and so the law wants to strongly disincentivize abuse of that power.

In any case, I didn't express it well. What I intended was that, in my personal opinion, these matters should be treated as a civil matter in view of copyright essentially being a tort.

USA Americans seem to contort the notion of speech beyond recognition. Being prevented from publishing a video someone else created, say, doesn't inhibit your right to express any opinion (aka freedom of speech). But of course, disincentivising abuses of power is always good.

Yes. DMCA claims are made under penalty of perjury.

> Being prevented from publishing a video someone else created, say, doesn't inhibit your right to express any opinion (aka freedom of speech).

Indeed, the inhibition of free speech is when you are prevented from publishing a video you created, because someone else falsely claims that they created it. Hence the felony.

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%.

I personally think that DMCA was terribly designed - but a replacement would need careful consideration from all sides.

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".

If you're an asshole there are many methods online to really screw with your competitors :(

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.

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.

> 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.

Maybe instead of moderation and response, it would function better as a blackbox middleware to the customer support onboarding process. So instead of tackling the problem at the customer level, you use AI/ML to enable your existing support staff to scale their workload.

The picture I have in my mind is a pre-processor for new tickets that would add a series of tags to a support request. That would allow your support staff to be assigned to tags where they specialize. This simplistic implementation would probably integrate into existing service management platforms without having to stand up Yet Another B2B.

Not only is this a lie you've been willingly sold, it appears you've bought it and taken it home.

This said I don't think you should feel too bad, we the consumer buy these same lies all over the place "If we have to follow these regulations then it's going to be a big problem for the industry".

At the end of the day some of the problems do not scale easily and cheaply. In these cases business have the choice of willingly being good societal actors and taking a loss of profit in order to prevent issues, or by means of regulation be forced to behave in a fitting manner.

That was unkind. I didn't think we behaved that way, here, but I'm often wrong...

It certainly can be done, but that usually means the shareholders need to hold off on that second lambo. That doesn't often play well, in the boardroom.

The law is designed specifically to enable this, because the recording industry bought a bunch of politicians, and said "hey we need to have a zero cost zero risk mechanism for us to remove content we believe to be pirated, without having any penalties for being wrong, but there must be penalties for the host services if they try to stop us".

This is how the DMCA should have been designed in the first place.

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.

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.

Because if everyone did this, the scammers would eventually not bother.

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.

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.