Judge gives Universal Music 24 hours to explain takedown spree | Hacker News Reader

Judge gives Universal Music 24 hours to explain takedown spree

arstechnica.com

163 pointsgldalmaso33 comments

a site must wait at least 10 days before restoring the material.

(This in reference to UMG's taking down a news show about the video in question...)

That blows my mind. That means anything at all can be taken down for a couple of weeks without the slightest repercussions to the fraudulent party.

Welcome to 1998. That was when the DMCA was passed - signed by president Clinton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

It hasn't gotten any better since.

Yes, I know, I was none too happy about it in 1998, either - but I didn't know about the ten-day mandatory waiting period. Also, we didn't have YouTube yet or video blogs yet, so the issue of direct interference with free speech was not nearly so dire.

Actually, it's in the process of getting worse!

I might have used a little bit of understatement. You may not be totally familiar with the idiom.

The original purpose was to give an aggrieved party time to file a lawsuit, but clearly the process is ripe for abuse.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen YouTube videos taken down by "companies" with such names as "0wn3d Limited" and "Videosux Corp." The DMCA was broken from the start.

Why file a lawsuit? Takedowns issued by regexp bots are essentially cost-free.

The whole point of that provision in the DMCA was that filing a lawsuit to get a judge to order something to be taken down takes time. If that takes two or three days to happen the damage can already be done by that point if the item in question is allowed to continue being hosted for all of that time.

The problem with the solution (DMCA) is that it also removes the monetary burden of filing a lawsuit (making it very low-risk to just file thousands of these things off per day, never intending to ever followup with a lawsuit) and the sanity filter (the judge).

There are potential repercussions. A false claim of infringement leaves the claiming party open to liability for it. In practice this may not be easy to take advantage of, but it is there.

Sure, because history is replete with small actors successfully taking huge corporations to court.

Part of the problem is that when your home video is wrongfully taken off of YouTube, it's hard to argue damages during the time it was offline if/when you turn around and sue the label.

Arguing a perjury case is also probably a losing battle. Even if you win, it seems doubtful that you would recover any of the lost time, lost wages and/or sunk costs of lawyer fees.

Also, if you won a perjury case, would it be against 'the company' or just the individual that signed off on that particular notice?

So even if you turn around and attempt to pursue legal avenues against wrongful take-downs, there is not much to be gained.

If it's so easy to abuse the DCMA, I'm curious why the 'unwashed masses' haven't been issuing DCMA takedown requests for all the official music industry music videos on YouTube. Wouldn't that quickly highlight how broken the model is?

No one would ever attempt to prosecute a corporation for perjury (the penalty specified by the DMCA) if it sends out a piddling few hundred fraudulent takedown notices. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past them to throw the book at any individual they catch sending one. Individuals have neither the stamina for a long legal battle nor any means of plausible deniability ("The notices were automated!", "We don't know who sent it.", "The guy who sent it has been fired, problem solved.", etc.), and prosecutors like winning cases.

IANAL.

Ohhh...that would be so fun. Is Anonymous still up and running, they should take the case.

"M-E-G-A. Upload to me today"... and now this is going to stick in my head for the whole day.

I hope Universal Music is happy with the free promotion that their takedown notice is going to give to this stupid video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Anticipating yet another Streisand effect.

Sometimes I wonder how movie studios (and music labels) make money. I watch DVD quality new releases, as well as old movies, via sites such as Putlocker or Megaupload through 1channel.ch. I think they should simply partners with such sites and figure a way to make money with them. These guys won't stop their business.

>Sometimes I wonder how movie studios (and music labels) make money.

The vast majority of people get most of their content legally.

You mean like netflix, hulu, amazon video subscription, spotify, pandora, last.fm, turntable.fm, or all the ad-supported podcasts and blogs out there?

No DVDs et al.

What's a DVD?

It's what you buy second-hand from your local used media store so you can legally watch the video contained thereon, while giving the finger to the MPAA.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Considering the rate of piracy in China and India, I don't know if that's true.

The vast majority of people in the target market (i.e. the US). I don't think that the RIAA and MPAA are really targeting China and India... at least not in a heavy way.

They are too far down the alley so much money was spent on fighting these pirates they wont backdown. This industry rather goes down like a burning ship then starting to cooperate with these "rouge" sites. Look at what they do in the US with SOPA that is what they want and that is where they throw their money at.

I agree. If the industry had spent all that money in rethinking and reshaping their business model to something the consumers actually desired, maybe we'd be in a much nicer state right now.

I think perhaps it is a "too big to fail" kind of situation.

If the judge rules against UMG, it would still be business as usual after the dust settles. Contrast this to if a startup were to pull a stunt like this... I'd guess that you would never hear from them again.

These laws are written for entities that are "too big to fight." Not us.

> I think they should simply partners with such sites and figure a way to make money with them.

Oh, is that all? Simply...

They're not one of the sites listed in the grandparent post, but YouTube has a program where they share the advertising revenue. Though that would have been even more interesting if they had managed to do that in this case, because they'd be getting revenue for a something they do not own.

Yes.

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