There are provisions for this type of thing in the DMCA. I'm not sure to what extent these damages have been enforced, but it appears that the company that submitted these DMCA requests to Google has committed perjury by doing so in bad faith.
Penalties for bad faith DMCA takedowns have ranged from awarding lawyer's fees, &c, to the folks whose content was taken down, to having the party that issued the takedown issue a public apology and take a class on copyright law. It's also perjury, so criminal sanction is an option, though I don't know how likely that is to succeed, or how often it's been pursued.
Yes, it's theoretically perjury, but getting a prosecutor to go after it seems like a pretty far reach, even though it seems clear some of these notices are an abuse of the law.
Agreed, but proving someone is acting with ill intent is not as easy as it sounds.
Forget ill intent. Just make it punishable. The same way they wanted to make sites responsible for what users post, by taking down the entire (DNS removal). It should be equally as dangerous for them to make those accusations with such harsh consequences.
I don't think a DMCA takedown request is related to DNS removal. And I really don't think it's a good idea to punish people making good faith efforts to stop people pirating their content -- even if it turns out they're wrong about e.g. some gray area of fair use.
No, that would be a SOPA take down request.
IANAL but i believe you have to swear on penalty of perjury…
They do, but when you file a counter notice, you swear on penalty of perjury that you believe the original notice was filed "in error". IANAL either, but it seems like that means that if you want to take the most expeditious means of getting your content back up, you effectively surrender any recourse to call them on their perjury.