Humans indeed make errors; I'm suggesting that the penalty for utterly false DMCA notices (i.e. saying my Hamlet monologue infringes the Star Wars copyright) be significant enough that rights holders put a modicum of effort into not submitting notices with errors.
Because an individual human can make errors, that's unavoidable. But a system made up of individual humans (and computers) can catch errors, refuse to submit a DMCA notice unless there's ~100% certainty, etc.
Here's a sketch: an automated system finds (alleged) copyright infringement, a human watches the content to check if it does in fact contain e.g. Star Wars, a second human finds the matching content in their library, and a third human verifies the work by human 1 and 2 and writes up the DMCA notice.
The current system seems to have zero penalty for submitting false DMCA notices, imposing significant costs on anyone a rights-holder decides to target.
Clearly it's not been realized, I'm saying we should put in place and enforce harsh penalties for false DMCA notices, so such systems become realized. As an example - I want you flag photos with dogs in a set of many photos. It's a hard problem to find EVERY such photo in the set with perfect accuracy. It's not that hard to find SOME photos that definitely contain dogs.
The copyright/DMCA notice system currently has a lot of Type 1 (false positive) errors, because it costs rights-holders nothing to send a notice. Lots of legitimate and non-infringing videos/content/urls/sites are getting taken down because of absolute bullshit.
I'm suggesting the world would be better if we moved to a system with more Type 2 (false negative) errors; where occasionally an infringing piece of media is left up, but we see fewer false positives.
Yes, on real-world data, on a first pass, I doubt you'll get >99% accuracy. But you don't need to; you can do (something like) three passes, that each have ~98% accuracy, and the end result has effectively zero errors (of the type we care about).
Here's a system, in the real world, that does this currently: blood donation screening. We very much don't want HIV (and other pathogens) in the blood supply. So first pass - donors are screened out, based on various risk factors (risky sex, IV drug use, lived in certain areas, whatever). Second pass - antibody testing. Third pass - antigen and nucleic acid testing. If ANY of these register as 'likely to have HIV' the blood is rejected. In my country (Canada) this has meant zero instances of HIV transmission through donated blood. 100$ effective - but we have surely thrown away (or not collected) blood that was perfectly fine. That's the cost. But it works, in the real world, very, very well.
We could absolutely demand a similar level of accuracy for DMCA notices - the cost will be a) additional work for rights-holders and b) some infringement will be missed.
I don't think we're talking past each other, unless there' some confusion around the fact that politics, the judiciary, etc.., are real world factors.
And that even if an actually working system is set up, there's no guarantee it will still be functioning, as designed, past the first few days.
But even getting to the initial stage is already pure speculation, unless you have convincing proof/analysis. Considering that it needs to be accepted, and physically implemented by a real world government, not some hypothetical government of the distant future.
