High Court Bans Singer From Hitting YouTube Rival With DMCA Notices (torrentfreak.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The High Court of Justice has issued a permanent injunction to stop a man filing copyright complaints against a rival's YouTube channels. As part of a fraudulent campaign against "the music mafia," the singer used copyright strikes and YouTube's repeat infringer policy to have a music publisher's channels suspended. The background to the dispute is nothing short of extraordinary. [...] The background to the dispute is an extraordinary maze of claims, counterclaims, and bitterness spread out over several years, during which documents were forensically examined and fingerprints subjected to professional scrutiny.
You Tube Does Not Care (Score:4, Insightful)
The High Court should have issued a permanent injunction against Youtube for blindly executing these takedown requests and making it impossible to appeal.
YouTube doesn't care whether it's a valid claim or some bogus claim from Santa Claus.
Re:You Tube Does Not Care (Score:4, Informative)
YouTube doesn't care whether it's a valid claim or some bogus claim from Santa Claus.
It's not about whether Youtube cares. It's that they could be legally responsible for not complying with the DMCA takedowns. To maintain their safe harbor, they need to process the DMCA takedowns and have a system to prevent repeat offenders. Part of the problem is that the law is vague on what constitutes a repeat offender and how to handle them specifically. As such, it's also in their interest to restrict there as well.
I believe they should loosen it up some, but it's all done to prevent losing their safe harbor status and having to go to court over it.
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No, they just need to actually accept counterclaims. Once the counterclaim is filed, you-tube has zero obligation or liability from keeping the video up.
Re:You Tube Does Not Care (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You Tube Does Not Care (Score:5, Insightful)
The other issue is that DMCA takedown notices are sent "under penalty of perjury," but there's never been a prosecution for perjury (and there never will be, since if there were, big movie and recording studios couldn't rely on automated systems to file the notices).
If the person who sent in the fake notice went to prison for doing so, fake notices would disappear in a remarkably short time.
(This case is in the UK, which would complicate things, but it happens a lot in the US, usually filed by big media conglomerates.)
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And the submitter is generally a lawyer, and they can fulfill the 'good faith' clause by pointing to the information provided by their client. The communication between a lawyer and their client is privileged, so there is no penalty for providing false information to your lawyer.
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The only thing "under penalty of perjury" is a statement "that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." Now, which "fake notices" are the movie and recording studios sending?
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> so, fake notices would disappear in a remarkably short time.
More likely they'd all be filed from overseas.
There are already a ton of bogus takedown notices filed from certain specific overseas jurisdictions in particular, especially ones that have no meaningful copyright enforcement at home and ban YouTube domestically in any case but use the takedown notices for "narrative shaping", i.e., state-sponsored censorship. (Clearly I am
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they need to process the DMCA takedowns and have a system to prevent repeat offenders.
I don't see the RIAA being blacklisted despite being repeat offenders.
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Could they do better? Probably not without dipping sufficiently into their bottom line to piss off their investors. I've said it before and I'll say it again if you want a forum you can say any speech you want as long as it's lega
Some nerd you are... (Score:2)
dickheads fussing over 80s arcade game scores
You realize that the tagline for this site is "news for nerds", right? What self-respecting nerd doesn't enjoy tales of spy-vs-spy reciprocal DMCA takedown notices and 80s arcade game scores?
Your nerdocity is revoked. No nerd diet, no nerd powers!
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Likely a victory by the biggest A$$hole (Score:4, Insightful)
The article at Torrentfreak is remarkably evidence free, and the music industry globally is well known for "sharp" business practices. Trying to make sense of the article I got the feeling it was about a guy who got screwed over, thought he found a way to get even, then got crushed.
It would be a much better story/act of journalism, if there were copyright filings and a timeline. As it is you have a story of gargantuan corporations siding with midsized corporation against an individual rights holder. Youtube is particularly well known for favoring connected/larger companies against smaller content creators. So a bit more of what happened on the Youtube side would be appreciated.
Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe Google needs to stop auto-acting like an asshole.
Their processes suck ass. They have unlimited money and yet no customer support. Customers are treated like insects. Everything is automated by systems that suck at automation.
They need to be broken up and regulated hard.
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Maybe Google needs to stop auto-acting like an asshole.
Their processes suck ass. They have unlimited money and yet no customer support. Customers are treated like insects. Everything is automated by systems that suck at automation.
Snape: "Obviously."
With the amount of money that Google/Alphabet/Youtube makes on the platform it's stupid that they don't have human CSRs that actually can handle both cases of egregious abuse and cases when their software breaks popular channels.
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No, Google does have CSRs and technical support for their customers. What no one seems to understand is that YouTube 'influences,' individual artists, and anyone that isn't a big corporation posting to YouTube isn't a customer, they're the product. The advertisers and large corporations very much have CSR and tech support lines. Even my paid Google Workspace account has a live support option. But, products don't get support. They don't care if your experience is great. It has to be just good enough no
They should settle it like rival rap artists (Score:3)
Bogus takedown notices are for pussies. Real artistic rivals shoot each other, then go on to be immortalized as a legend.
High Court of Justice of England and Wales (Score:5, Informative)
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This makes far more sense, because if it were actually the USA it sounds like someone could be facing actual jail time since it seems like the court found DMCA notices were used fraudulently.
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And the artist was in Pakistan and was filing cases against the media youtube channels in Pakistan itself. And won, from my understanding(regardless legit or fraudulently won).
I don't know which court has jurisdiction here, so it's kind of messy.
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Takedowns and de-monetizations by the big rights-holders - especially in the music business - are almost never overturned, never mind taken to court. So many of these are spurious claims against snippets of content which are a) clearly Fair Use, b) no threat at all to revenue, and c) could actually help generate revenue for rights-holders. Rick Beato's videos are a perfect example.
It's easy to say that Google's handling of DMCA issues on YouTube sucks - and it does suck hard. But the real problems are the DMCA, and IP laws / enforcement in general. The legislation effectively puts enforcement power into the hands of corporations which already hold far too much of far too many other kinds of power. Death to corporations, and to the politicians and legislators who suck their dicks.
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to say that Google's handling of DMCA issues on YouTube sucks - and it does suck hard. But the real problems are the DMCA, and IP laws / enforcement in general.
The second bit is the part people don't understand, or ignore. They just blame Youtube, and there is plenty to blame them for, but the reality is that the DMCA laws pretty much require this from them to keep their safe harbor status. Sure, there is likely some legal wiggle room. However, there will always be a risk if they're not proactive enough at handling takedowns.
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No it doesn't. YouTube could simply accept counter-notices at face value, and push the broken-ness of the sytem back for the courts to deal with.
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Re:And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
IANAL but my understanding of the DMCA is that when a provider receives a properly written DMCA counter-notice under DMCA s512, they are required to:
A.Notify the entity that filed the original DMCA claim that a counter-notice was filed.
B.Give the entity that filed the original DMCA claim a certain amount of time to file a copyright lawsuit against the alleged infringer
and C.If, after that time has elapsed, the entity that filed the original DMCA claim did not file a copyright lawsuit, restore the content.
In many of these cases where YouTube is ignoring counter-notices, there is no evidence that the copyright holder filed a copyright lawsuit (even after being given the opportunity to do so) so YouTube should absolutely be restoring the content in these cases. (at least from my non-lawyer understanding of the DMCA that's what should happen)
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The provider is required to take down the potentially infringing content, or become liable.
They are then required to report the notice to their user.
The user may submit a counter-claim.
If they user submits a counter claim, and the original submitter doesn't refute the counter claim, the provider must restore the content a
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If they user submits a counter claim, and the original submitter doesn't refute the counter claim, the provider must restore the content after 10 days and before 14 days.
Correct, but note that the original submitter has to do more than refute the counterclaim. They have to respond with
I suppose the submitter may lie to the service provider about having filed a court action. Not sure if there are any consequences to such a lie. Maybe it would help if that notice were also signe
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n many of these cases where YouTube is ignoring counter-notices, there is no evidence that the copyright holder filed a copyright lawsuit
In most of those cases, there was never even a takedown notice. Because the legally-defined process doesn't scale, YouTube and the major copyright holders have negotiated an alternative strategy, where YouTube automatically scans uploads for infringing content, and gives the uploader the choice of taking it down or giving any monetization to the owner of the infringed content. On the one hand, this gives big content owners too much power. On the other hand, it makes it easy for people to use their content w
If it's not a dmca complaint (Score:2)
More po po laws (Score:2)
Lets have more po po laws so we can weaponize them against people we don't like or get in our way.
Let's have more po po laws to make this world a shittier and shittier place to live.
Lets make more DMCA, YMCA, or whatever other po po shit we can dream up. Sieg Heil!