Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

>Further, under §512 (f) the RIAA's deceptive claim is liable for sanctions:

This is wrong, because they didn't make a 512 claim. If you read the letter, the only part that's asserted under penalty of perjury is that they're authorized to act in behalf of their member companies, which is true.

> RIAA are not injured due to utilisation of a non-member's mechanism.

They're injured when the tool is used for copyright infringement. No issue with standing here.

>Any potential copyright infringement which might occur through use of youtube-dl is at the volition of users, not the software's authors, actions would properly be directed at such users for individual acts of infringement

This ignores the fact that circumvention itself creates liability in the right circumstances.

The claim is couched as, and appears to have been read by Github as, a §512 claim, bearing several of the conspicious elements of a §512 notice. As my footnotes document, it was widely read as same (it took me some time to realise it was not a §512 claim myself).

This could be argued as intentional, deceptive, and hence fraudulent.

>This could be argued as intentional, deceptive, and hence fraudulent.

Fraud requires a false statement, generally. The letter clearly cites 1201 and never cites 512, and is missing essential elements of 512, (e.g. it never claims direct infringement). There's no way 512(f) applies.

A false representation of a matter of fact—whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of what should have been disclosed—that deceives and is intended to deceive another so that the individual will act upon it to her or his legal injury.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Fraud

See also 18 USC 1001.

There's no false representation of a matter of fact, here.

And 1001 applies to lying to the government, which isn't relevant here.

My intent is to show legal definitions of fraud differing markedly from your assertion.

I said generally. It remains the case that the letter here is not plausibly fraud.

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