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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

False claim of copyright is a criminal offense in the US. While prosecutions are extremely rare, they have happened. It is worth getting a lawyer to help you file a formal complaint with the US Department of Justice. While the odds of criminal prosecution are low, there's a good chance paperwork from a US Attorney's office asking some questions will be sent to the offender. That will reach their legal people, and something useful will probably happen.

See Lentz vs. Universal Music.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.

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By my understanding, you are mistaken or out of date. What you wrote is true for takedown notices issued under the DMCA, but YouTube is allowing companies to order takedowns or monetize other's videos without going through the legal DMCA process. That's what ContentID is about.

YouTube seems to claim that the DMCA counter-notice procedure applies.[1]

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684

It's a two step process. The first step happens within YouTube's guidelines and do not involve the DMCA. It then can escalate to an actual DMCA notice / counter.

Critically though, going to DMCA is really bad for the uploader because Youtube does not remove the 'strike' against your account when it gets escalated. So content uploaders almost never go here.

Do I read this correctly? Using available legal options for protecting content you genuinely own labels you as "troublemaker" and will cost you your account when done repeatedly?

That link is for actual DMCA notices. With the Content ID take-downs, Google never actually receives a DMCA request. The music company (etc.) politely asks YouTube to take down the video, and YouTube complies out of the goodness of its heart. (Well, and a bunch of contracts that give some sort of quid pro quo for the arrangement between YouTube and these companies.)

It looks like these are all Content ID takedowns (well, actually not takedowns; whoever is making the requests is taking the ad revenue from the videos, but leaving them up). In these cases, YouTube has their own dispute system, but it doesn't touch the DMCA.

I think this is the relevant page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6013276?hl=en&ref_...

All of which makes Google liable for theft. They created the system, they run the system, they transfer the money. It's all facilitating copyfraud. Just because Google agrees to host the content doesn't mean that they are incapable of being able to be sued for their intentional actions.

It's not legally theft if Google makes a decision to start paying party B instead of party A.

You're choosing to let YouTube publicly host the video until further notice, and in exchange they agree to pay you whatever cut of ad revenue they deem appropriate. There's no question that under the terms you agree to, they can demonetize your videos at will. And if they also see fit to start paying somebody else when your videos get played, that's not something you have legal standing to complain about.

What it probably is, is fraud on the part of whoever's falsely claiming to Google that they have a copyright interest.

Part of the problem here would be that none of the claims sent to MumboJumbo have been through the DMCA. They all use Youtube's internal system instead, which was built to appease the big music publishers.

But these are Youtube complaints, not DMCA complaints.

Virtually no consequence.

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