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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Excuse my language but that is 100% bullshit. If it's not feasible for you to investigate these claims before kicking your own customers out then it's not feasible for your business to exist. Investigating these claims before acting on them should be considered a cost of doing business.

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The fault here lies with the US government for passing an easily abused law like the DMCA where there are woefully insufficient consequences for fraudulent takedown requests and where fighting fraudulent takedowns requires you to dox yourself to the individual committing DMCA fraud.

I can't blame businesses for not having sufficient staff to investigate takedown fraud when any business that did would probably be uncompetitive given how easy it is to send fraudulent takedowns and how much time and money it costs to investigate them. Most customers would almost certainly rather accept the risk of being the victim of a fraudulent DMCA takedown than pay extra to avoid it, in part because most people probably don't understand how easy it is to abuse the DMCA.

This is a very easy position to take when you are not familiar with the scale of the task at hand. You have 10,000 reports come in every day. How do you get through them? One person won't do, so you will need a team. Who will you hire? Are they educated in copyright law? Hiring people with that sort of education for something as rote as content moderation will be difficult and take a long time (and probably cost a lot), so good luck. Are they interns and people with no related education hired for low wages? Great, now you have a team, but it seems that reports are being mishandled and copyrighted content is getting through. Legal liability is on the line and a PR disaster is brewing. We need to reign in these minimum wage moderators. Where do we go from here? Moderator-moderators who validate the validation from the moderators? Now we're back to where we started. And who will validate them? Etc, etc...

The scale is a problem they created for themselves. If they didn’t take the time to build the legal/monitoring team you describe, they shouldn’t have taken on more customers than they could afford to support.

Would you make the same defense if the company that makes M&M candies said that since they have hundreds of factories they would have to hire 10,000 janitors a day to keep cockroaches out of candy bags? After all, it’s very complicated to collect and manage so many people and schedules.

Eh, this is a two part issue...

They are under a strict legal obligation to follow the DMCA.

They are under a far less strict to nearly non-existent legal obligation not to fuck their customers completely over.

The first issue is an "IS" problem. The second issue is an "OUGHT" problem. If you want to solve the Is-Ought problem you have to change both sides of the equation to an is, or to an ought via law.

The difference is that keeping cockroaches out of candy bags is a much more black-and-white problem that can be solved by following the same unchanging set of steps every time. Moderating and distinguishing copyright material requires awareness of a lot of abstract and often arbitrary rules and is prone to being done incorrectly. I am not defending this, it is for sure a shitty situation and is exactly why things like Youtube suck when it comes to DMCAs, but I am clarifying that it is a non-trivial issue with no easy solution that is brought on by the DMCA being ripe for abuse. It's just the reality of the thing. Moderation at that scale is probably never going to graduate from being shitty purely because of the nature of the problem.

It's not my problem to determine how a company complies with regulations. They can either resource themselves or go out of business. I don't care.

I agree in principal but I think it depends on the process to submit DMCA takedown requests. If it's trivially easy to abuse this system then I don't think it's fair for the burden to fall on the company (note: in general I'm pro-consumer, not pro-corporation).

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