> Why do we have push-button screw-people-over systems at all?
Because that's the way our shitty representatives in congress wrote the legislation?
Google could face real legal consequences for not responding to a DMCA request. They can't face any legal consequences for complying with a false one (DMCA, or their internal contentId system).
And companies with the DMCA/ContentId bots sending in these bogus notices know that they too are safe. Because a victim would have to jump over the insanely high hurdle of proving the company knowingly misrepresented their ownership of the work. The company can easily claim that is was not intentional, but rather a mistake caused by a bug in their software.
If congress cared about this, they could fix it in a minute: false DMCA takedown request = fine, regardless of knowledge or intent.
Can we fight them back? Can't we collectively submit our own DMCA requests on all their videos? Break the system so they have come to up with a new one.
No. Companies have a legally defensible narrative:
1. People were using Rhinna's songs without permission in large numbers.
2. The company wrote a program to automatically send out a takedown notice to violators
3. Whoops, the program made a mistake. We didn't mean to.
If you, dalore, write a takedown bot, it's obvious from the start you are acting in bad faith because there is no epidemic of people pirating dalore songs.
I do think that companies here are "acting in good faith" in so much as I do not think they are misrepresenting their intentions. I don't think Sony has a conspiracy to increase it's revenue by monetizing Minecraft gamer channels.
However, the law is written in such a way that there is no penalty for companies that write low precision, high recall, dumpster-fire grade take-down bot software.
This is the whole problem. Sick and tired of people complaining about YouTube/Google. For them to "fix the problem" just for their own platform would cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year in man hours to process every single last takedown request manually with no automation. Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
The laws are broken. It doesn't matter how "big" Google is. They cannot afford to protect the small guy. It's a choice between "hurt the small guy" vs. "go bankrupt". Fix the laws. Don't blame Google.
Manually processing DMCA takedown requests would be a huge hassle, but this is still on Google - even without the DMCA and just with regular IP law they would still have a system like this if for no other reason than to appease the companies they want on Play Movies / Youtube rentals. They have deals with the MPAA / mafia that certainly include draconian contentID as a prerequisite of you being able to "rent" movies on Youtube.
And Youtube has had for years Netflix-styled stars in its eyes. They want to be cozy with big media and trudging all over their individual creators is business as usual if it gets them favorable deals with the "big boys".
> Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
Why not Google themselves? If they're willing to take on the responsibility for false takedown claims by actively taking steps to remove a content creators': why can't Google themselves pay for enforcement of truth in the matter? They are creating EULAs and contracts around users basically having no choice in the matter, after all?
Because that's the way our shitty representatives in congress wrote the legislation?
Google could face real legal consequences for not responding to a DMCA request. They can't face any legal consequences for complying with a false one (DMCA, or their internal contentId system).
And companies with the DMCA/ContentId bots sending in these bogus notices know that they too are safe. Because a victim would have to jump over the insanely high hurdle of proving the company knowingly misrepresented their ownership of the work. The company can easily claim that is was not intentional, but rather a mistake caused by a bug in their software.
If congress cared about this, they could fix it in a minute: false DMCA takedown request = fine, regardless of knowledge or intent.