https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notice_and_take_down
> Provided the notification complies with the requirements of Section 512, the online service provider must expeditiously remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material, otherwise the provider loses its safe harbour and is exposed to possible liability.
Which include :
> Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number and email address
>> Shopify says that it’s not feasible for the company to investigate the validity of all takedown notices in detail. As such, these false claims resulted in actual removals and the affected stores also received strikes on their accounts.
It isn't a good system but Youtube in particular was loaded with pirated content in the early days before Google invented automated copyright moderation so they most likely needed to do something drastic to delete pirate accounts to avoid legal trouble with the copyright lobby and everybody else just copied the idea as a "best practice".
In other words, they don't want to spend the money to fulfill their responsibilities.
That's the context I was referring to. If Shopify requires an address and phone number from DMCA claimants, then won't the DMCA claimants simply sue Shopify for making the process too restrictive?
It looks like Shopify has decided not to play that specific game.
>Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party //
The complaining party is a party with a [genuine] complaint of copyright infringement. A specious claimant is not really a complaining party. Whilst an email address may allow you to contact a party, it's not really sufficient to contact a [genuine] complaining party; the email address will put you in touch with lots of correspondents who are not complaining parties but instead are vexacious complainants.
Requirement for a notarized affidavit delivered by registered mail would seem like it would be no bar for genuine complainants who were subject to a loss that the court, or public process, should care about.
That might be too onerous? Maybe parties should prove they have registered the copyright in their works at the USPTO, as they would in an infringement proceeding?
This situation seems like what happens when you let corporate interests write the laws and you just sign them in.
That does not answer whether Shopify is free to use more information to filter out fraudulent claims; though my understanding is that Shopify is not really allowed to filter out fraudulent claims at all, so that point is moot.
Where the DMCA went wrong in my opinion is it should have been upon notice you have one business day to notify whoever posted the content, and they get one business day to respond. If they take down the offending content, then all is well (the amount you could gain from two days of something being up isn't worth your court costs) If there is no response at all, only then is content taken down automatically. If there is a response that the content doesn't infringe then content stays up, but the response must contain full legal contact information: the accuser is required to go to court to get the content taken down. Note that court mean the count of law in the country the accused lives in.
The above is how normal cases should work. There are some tricky things that need to work different. If the accused is in a country that doesn't recognize copyright, if the legal contact information is invalid, if the accuser is submitting many false claims, or the middle party doesn't do their part there are problems. I'll post my ideas, but there is room for better ones and a lot of details need to be worked out.
If accused party is in a country that doesn't recognize international copyright (China being the big example), then take downs need to happen immediately - we cannot trust your courts to protect our people so you in turn are assumed wrong, take it up with your government. (I can't think of anything better here - I'm open to better ideas)
If the legal contact information given in the response is invalid, then the entire account should be terminated and all content deleted.
Many false claims needs to be legally defined. I'm going with the copyright owner and (not or!) their authorized agents send more than 100 take downs that after 1 year are still up and no court case has been filed.
If the middle party (youtube) doesn't react to court orders to take things down, or to the poster asking to take infringing content down then they are in trouble. Otherwise they are only a middleman.