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Comment by arlattimore | Hacker News Reader

> Our lawsuit targets bad actors who set up dozens of Google accounts and used them to submit thousands of bogus copyright claims against their competitors. These fraudulent claims resulted in removal of over 100,000 businesses’ websites, costing them millions of dollars and thousands of hours in lost employee time.

So Google needs to remove the sites first, likely to be legally compliant themselves, hurt the businesses in question, then sue to be able to re-instate the websites that they knew shouldn't have been taken down in the first place?

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Yes, but blame the DMCA, because this is literally what it requires content providers like Google to do:

> OSP must accommodate and not interfere with "standard technical measures." "Standard technical measures" are defined as measures that copyright owners use to identify or protect copyrighted works, that have been developed pursuant to a broad consensus of copyright owners and service providers

Basically, if somebody claiming to be a copyright owner (even if they aren't) files a claim saying they have copyright over someting (even if they don't) using "standard technical measures", Google "must accommodate and not interfere", meaning they need to take down first and ask questions later.

What a shitty law, how did that get passed? Or is there something I missing from all this?

Unanimously approved by Congress to implement a treaty obligation

as this was the mid-late 1990s, both the law and the treaty obligation did not consider the future state of the internet, and it mostly focuses on physical but electronic mediums

distinctive bills to patch the DMCA have largely failed due to general partisan paralysis in Congress for decades now, it simply needs to be a rider in must-pass bills but so far it hasnt been

I see, so it never got updated properly?

Also knowing how little the average politician probably knows about this subject I don’t see it changing.

Copyrights are basically a long lineage of shitty laws on top of older shitty laws all due to people lobbying to become rent seekers, most on works that they themselves never created.

Follow the money.

If they are following DMCA procedures and notifying the targets, they can (even if there would be actual copyright liability otherwise) restore without risk 10 days after getting and notifying the complainant about a counternotice, at which point the copyright claimant needs to sue the end user.

(Some hosts are lax about the end-user side of DMCA safe harbor process, because they have no user-side liability that they feel the need to avoid, and there's no other benefit to them, besides PR, for taking any action after a takedown.)

It would be fair to say google should put more work into vetting DMCA takedowns, but DMCA is a bad law, and it is enforced badly. A long term coordinated effort at fraudulent takedowns should be criminal in several ways: The false report should be criminal. It should be a sworn statement. There should be a statutory penalty against the reporting party. Reporting parties should be bonded on a sliding scale. The criminality should not be able to hide behind the corporate veil.

Google is suing, and it's not even the harmed party. Obligatory IANAL disclaimer applies, but surely a strong first-party case could be made for, at least, tortious interference?

> Google is suing, and it's not even the harmed party.

Google is a harmed party; the false reporterts have engaged in the crime of theft (of services/labor) by false pretenses against Google.

(Its true that that crime was merely instrumental to their goal of harming other businesses, but its a real crime and a real harm to Google.)

"A particularly damaging batch of fraudulent notices targeted more than 35,000 URLs operated by a Google customer that spends tens of millions of dollars per year on Google search ads. The effect was a significant drop in traffic during the holiday season, revenue losses for the customer and its sellers of $5 million, and a loss to Google of between $2 and $3 million." So you'd think the competitor firms could certainly sue also, if they were so inclined.

> It would be fair to say google should put more work into vetting DMCA takedowns

They're effectively not allowed to, by the law, that forces them to assume every take down is good, or they end up at legal risk of being liable for the content. DMCA is just fundamentally broken.

I'm not an expert in DMCA but yes I believe that to be the case. The only recourse for the victims is to file a counter-notice, which obligates the service provider to start a waiting period. Then the victim has to wait out that period before having the content reinstated.

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