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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Take the top apps and automatically raise a list of apps with similar names each week. Pay someone to investigate and flag if necessary.

I feel like there's a general unwillingness in some realms to do anything at all if the solution is "manual labor until a better tool is available."

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There might be legal concerns as well. I know under the DCMA safe harbor provisions that basically as soon as you start doing manual moderation you are now liable for anything that gets through.

Could you expand on that?

Not an expert, but the only part I see like this is section 512(a) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

This seems to apply to network traffic, whereas I'd guess what to host on the Play Store would be covered by 512(c) instead. If so, the "red flags" test would seem to require at least some automated content checking.

But all the above refers to copyright, rather than the trademark violation and fraud in the WhatsApp clones.

I don't think that's true. A safe harbor can't make you liable for something, it can carve out a specific case where you are not liable. So the DCMA safe harbor could say that they are not liable if they never moderate. That would mean that by moderating they would give up their ability to claim safe harbor. It would not make them liable. Their liability would then be judged based on what they did (ie was their moderation negligent in some way).

Did you mean DMCA?

Or don't allow apps with similar name than a popular one in the first place.

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