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Comment by lysp | Hacker News Reader

The major issue in this is not the bot/automated process that initially flagged the video (although I don't agree with that either).

The primary issue is that the appeal process was rejected. This shows that either all appeals are rejected outright or the person who was physically responsible for checking it didn't read the appeal or view the video.

I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably assume "this is me personally performing a 300yo song" - either by reading the appeal notes or viewing the video could assume that it breached copyright.

This is why there needs to be damages / fines for all incorrect appeal rejections. Because if there's no penalty for getting it wrong, there is no motivation for a company to actually do anything about it.

If it costs them $1000 - $10,000 for getting it wrong, it will be more cost effective for them to pay someone $20/h to double check before rejecting an appeal.

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Somebody presented the idea here on HN the other day about $1 fines - both for individuals and for the music copyright abusers.

The nice thing about this IMO is 1$ is a small amount for me and you, but for a big corporation like sony this will cost them thousands every time it gets invoked (because legal will probably get involved).

Of course it needs to be slightly more advanced I guess but it would be a good start.

At most one guy from finance will be involved to rubber stamp the budget for the quarter.

I don't think so. The idea that they should pay anything back will probably be very hard for them to wrap their head around. ;-)

No, it won’t. Corporations understand the phrase “cost of doing business.” If you want fines to deter corporate wrongdoers, they have to be substantial relative to the company’s profits or revenue.

This is probably a good idea, but it's not really implementable. Google isn't a law enforcement entity, so they are probably not in a position to fine anyone.

And IANAL, but charging for claims is probably not allowed by DMCA.

Google can ban youtubers for breaching a threshold of community guidelines.

Apply the same to process to incorrect flagging of copyrighted content. Break the rules, prevent Sony from uploading for a day or two (or some other functionality).

This will never be implemented because there is a symbiosis between a mega content creator and an advertising company.

Sanctioning a producer like Sony would be a sanction against google itself.

I'm afraid the little people will have to suck it up.

Or, decentralize, and stop being controlled.

I agree. I'm going to give Mastodon a try.

https://mastodon.social/about

Private groups can levy fines. They can raise the costs of ads for these publishers on their platform, take a portion of the revenue from their content, or simply cease doing business with them until it's paid.

For example, late fees on unreturned video cassettes.

ContentID has absolutely nothing to do with DMCA takedown notices, especially in a legal sense.

They might use a computer with possibly AI to handle it. So the procedure must involve something like a CAPTCHA or human-human-interaction to be effective.

All divisions, subsidiaries and parent organisations lose all their copyrights for any false claim.

Or a cost of $1000 or so per flag, refundable upon the copyright infringement being valid.

There is a large amount of piracy which gets legitimately flagged. It's unfair to ask copyright holders to perpetually "loan" millions of dollars to hosters, which is what this scheme would effectively enforce.

"It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's been a theoretical basis of the criminal justice system (or at least something it claims to aspire towards).

The argument that lots of crime happens and it's difficult to make sure that efforts to police the law only target the guilty doesn't hold up under that. We're not meant to bias towards punishing a few innocent people because of that difficulty.

This is disproportionately unfair to small business in the space, tho.

Ok, how about a $1000 to remove the the content immediately, refundable upon investigation, otherwise the content stays live until the investigation finishes?

Then perhaps make the charge per block of reports?

How large a block should be could be a difficult thing to judge. Perhaps a bock could just be all the reports made in one day. Perhaps let the reporter chose: if anything in a given block of reports is rejected then they all are and need reporting again, this would make the reporter group the definite infringements together but be more cautious with the more spurious/speculative reports. Though a concern with any system like that is implementation and UI/API complexities.

Can they not file a civil suit to recover damages?

It'd cost more than you'd likely recover. Even a video with a lot (1M+) of hits only generates a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of revenue (depends on how many of those users skip the ads basically).

Might be worth trying to put together a class action suit for all of the people that this keeps happening to... but again, the recovery would likely go primarily to the legal firm, though it might be enough to get Google to wake up and do something about their auto-rejecting appeals system.

Small claims, filed in your local county. Sony isn’t going to send a $500/hr attorney to fight a $5000 suit.

I won a case against American Airlines doing that (a baggage related issue.)

Can you file against Sony in your local county when the problem happened via an international company like Facebook or Google, rather than at your local airport? I have no idea, but I'd like it if there really were a simple, and cost-effective way for the little guy to throw some rocks at Goliath now and then in egregious cases like this.

Sony does business everywhere, and if it's flagging the copyright in your country I assume it is possible to sue the local company.

"county" isn't the same word as "country". In the US, you bring small claims suits in a county court...county is very localized, and there are thousands of them in the US. Usually the terms of service of video hosting sites will require lawsuits to be brought in the home county of the company (probably somewhere in Delaware or California for Facebook and Google), and they're likely the offending party here (since Sony files through Facebook and Google, and those companies are the ones who're imposing a terms of service that prohibits uploading "copyrighted" materials), so it is not at all clear one could bring a small claims suit against Sony in your local county. If fact, it seems unlikely, based on my understanding of the law.

I wish it were possible, but I don't know that a county court would consider itself to have jurisdiction in such a case.

Yes, you live there, so the violation happened in your country.

If you live in an "insignificant" country it is possible Sony as no presence and so your win won't get you anything. However in the US or most of Europe Sony has enough presence that some part of them will have to pay.

I said "county" not country; you're having a different conversation. We're discussing small claims court at the county level. You don't sue someone in "United States court", you sue them in a county court, usually in the county where the matter being sued over happened, but sometimes the appropriate jurisdiction is the home county of the person or company you're suing (if it's not the same as where the matter took place).

The best explanation for this I could find is here: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/small-cla...

But, it doesn't really answer the question. The agreement between Facebook or YouTube and the uploader definitely requires suits be brought in the jurisdiction of the company (so, Delaware, probably, but maybe California). Sony is using Facebook or Google to do their dirty work in these cases...so, who can you sue and where? I don't think it's at all clear that Sony could be sued in a local small claims court for a matter like this, though I would like for them to be.

Sony might if that suit could set unfavorable precedent, no?

Not sure how much precedents matter in small claims. It usually boils down to how the judge feels about the issue.

Small claims judges in the US are generally supposed to follow precedent, but they don't make precedent. Regardless, in most cases a small claims case can be appealed to a regular circuit court and receive a de novo (completely new) review. (of course, for a corporation, that means hiring an attorney...)

Might be worth trying to put together a class action

But first check the terms of service to make sure you didn't agree to mandatory arbitration and waive the right to class action.

Exactly usually to use these services you basically wabe away any and all rights.

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