It's also quite possible that someone falsely claiming to be UHC is doing this. This is a major loophole with the DMCA, there's very little vetting of takedown notices.
So weirdly enough:
* Not owning the copyrighted work and claiming you own it = Okay
* The work you're taking down not even being the claimed copyrighted work = Okay
* Saying you're authorized by the company to file the notice, and you're not = PERJURY
The DMCA is a disaster.
> If the user believes that the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material, the user may submit a counter-notice requesting the reinstatement of the material. To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information:
> (i) a physical or electronic signature of the user;
> (ii) identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled;
> (iii) a statement under penalty of perjury that the user has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled;
> (iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
You have to give them information to sue you (or do other nefarious things), but they don't have to provide you with information that say, you could use to sue them for perjury or try to recover damages from the time it was taken down.
> (i) the signature of the copyright owner or an authorized agent;
> (ii) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple works are on a single site, a representative list of such works;
> (iii) identification of the infringing material or activity (or the reference or link to such material) and information reasonably sufficient to permit the OSP to locate the material (or the reference or link);
> (iv) contact information for the copyright owner or authorized agent;
> (v) a statement that the person sending the notice has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
> (vi) a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the person sending the notice is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner .
I agree the system is intentionally asymmetric, because it was built by people who understand how quickly material proliferates once it’s been posted to the Internet. That makes it abusable to chill speech, as in this case. But the law was also written with an expectation that anonymity does not guarantee full participation in civil society.
"Contact information" could just be an email address, or even a social media handle.
The better question is: why have the people's representatives failed to protect their interests? Why didn't they foresee the abuses that hurt us all?
Nobody cares about copyright.
There is a vocal minority of us who do. But we're only slightly more useful on it than the privacy advocates, both sharing a good chunk of people who are lazy or nihlistic about the political process to the point of being politically irrelevant. As a result, a representative who brings up copyright reform gets like one call in support and zero net new votes. Meanwhile, they get powerful and patient adversaries from the Big Tech to the record companies and their billionaire artists.
Artificial Intelligence is going to change how we work. Many top software engineers on Hacker News may be ok for a while. Although everyone could use help.
But already many artists and junior engineers feel pressure. Lack of copyright protection can make that even worse for many. These are allies and people who we mentor.
Just brainstorming, Social Purpose Corporations could provide innovative co-op opportunities for artists and engineers. That's just one example.
I don't see the management class failing to forsee the financial reality in the global workplace. But I do worry about dependents facing division and hate. Bully that, right?
I can't fucking forsee every possibility, traps and all, though. Maybe not social purpose corporations but just hyper-incubators that enable a million small indy corps. Man, I'm imagining Jar Jar binks manning the hyperspace lychgates across from the content generators.
Sorry, stupid digression. I'm sorry for wasting cycles on that.
Whether AI decimates the likelihoods of everyone is only more likely with unchecked corpo power in control of everything.
AI is just the latest iteration of endless corporate abuses. They think copyright exists to keep the likes of us in line while they get to do whatever they want. If we infringe copyright, they compare us to raping and pillaging high seas pirates but then they turn around and say it's OK to infringe copyright on a massive scale so long as they launder it via AI first.
I want intellectual property gone so that we can do the same. I want them to be forced to open their weights too.
Because there are no "people's representatives" after the voting is done. They just go with the biggest bidder. That's why companies are spending bilions on lobbying.
DMCA counter-notice:
* Sent by an alleged infringer (in this case, that would be the artist) to an intermediary (in this case, TeePublic) asserting that a takedown notice the intermediary received was invalid.
* Requires the alleged infringer to provide information about themself ("authentically dox").
* Can enable the intermediary to restore access to the material without losing their liability shield.
* Doesn't affect the alleged infringer's copyright infringement liability in any direction (though as with takedown notices, there's the potential for perjury). If the alleged infringer committed copyright infringement, they were already liable for it, and remain so; if they didn't, then they never were liable and still aren't.
Intermediary refusal:
* Simply a lack of action on a takedown notice by the intermediary to whom it was sent.
* Doesn't require anyone to dox themselves, or to do anything in particular. The intermediary can throw the takedown notice in the garbage and go about their day.
* Removes the intermediary's liability shield; the intermediary can potentially be liable for infringement, when they would otherwise would have been immune.
(g) REPLACEMENT OF REMOVED OR DISABLED MATERIAL AND LIMITATION ON OTHER LIABILITY.—
(1) NO LIABILITY FOR TAKING DOWN GENERALLY.—Subject to paragraph (2), a service provider shall not be liable to any person for any claim based on the service provider’s good faith disabling of access to, or removal of, material or activity claimed to be infringing or based on facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, regardless of whether the material or activity is ultimately determined to be infringing.
(2) EXCEPTION.—Paragraph (1) shall not apply with respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber of the service provider on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider—
(A) takes reasonable steps promptly to notify the subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to the material; Applicability. PUBLIC LAW 105–304—OCT. 28, 1998 112 STAT. 2883
(B) upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph (3), promptly provides the person who provided the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) with a copy of the counter notification, and informs that person that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days; and
(C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network.
The argument you're making is applicable when a website decides not to publish your speech (they're not the government, so the 1st amendment is irrelevant), but the DMCA is different.
Using the DMCA like this is censorship by copywrite, and it does go against freedom of speech in society at large, but it's not a 1st amendment issue.
Freedom of speech is an American ideal. It's in the Bill of Rights because it was so important. Not as a tool to restrict this right to just government infringements. It is supposed to be a universal right.
I often wonder at those arguing that it's 'ok' somehow in some circumstances because, not protected except for the govt! Somehow they've lost sight of the ideal.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
If it was supposed to be a universal right for everyone/everything, it would be something like "no one shall make a law..."
American ideals are not restricted to the Bill of Rights. My entire point.
> It's in the Bill of Rights because it was so important. Not as a tool to restrict this right to just government infringements.
In the Bill of Rights, it's restricted to just government infringements.
Almost makes me wish it was mandatory for companies to support counter claims and to treat a customer no differently if they've filed a counter claim. (E.g., GitHub can't close your repos as long as you file a counter claim, unless they would have regardless of the DMCA claim.)
The DMCA is an exception because it's a law, just like a threat or any other illegal material/etc would be and removal of that thing can be mandated by law without it being a 1st amendment issue.
Eh, the DMCA is still a law providing for civil and criminal sanctions based on speech. There are probably fundamental First Amendment problems with copyright.
The answer to why the DMCA—and copyright as a whole—can exist is the Copyright Clause [1].
There is also no “capital, or otherwise infamous crime,” “criminal case,” or taking of private property “for public use, without just compensation” [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
> nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
I would argue that at least in some cases dmca takedown notices can deprive people of property, either by preventing them from making an income from their content, or causing them to lose access to a service for which they paid money, or have access to something of value.
I also think it deprives the poster of some degree of liberty.
Even if it isn't against the letter of the law it is against the spirit.
By that notion YouTube has the right to call a jury if I decide to cancel.
Where we agree is in the sanctions. For the safe harbor to be removed there should be more process, and it should be explicit.
It's like if there was a law that said if you send a notification to a storage or logistics company that you think one of their customers has counterfeit goods in their storage, the storage company is legally obligated to destroy the suspect property, regardless of whether there is any evidence that it is actually counterfeit. Or even just, that company is no longer allowed to provide service to that customer, and is allowed to seize and keep any property they currently have control over.
I could also talk about how many of these platforms have too much power, and the lack of competition makes it problematic if they have control to censor as they please, but that is really a different topic.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The 1st amendment didn't repeal this.
All of that aside, "science and useful arts" never referred to the little guys. This always referred to the interests of commercializing those endeavors.
Since section 8 exists DMCA is nearly entirely redundant. Repealing DMCA would do nothing to strip copyright owners of their rights.
> Repealing DMCA
Be careful what you wish for. Repealing DMCA would mean repealing Safe Harbor provisions, which would just make it just about impossible to run websites with user-submitted content. DMCA might have some problems, but do you really want website owners to be held liable for everything a user posts on their site?
> Since section 8 exists DMCA is nearly entirely redundant.
Absolutely not. There is zero overlap between the two. Section 8 doesn't establish any copyright law at all. It merely establishes Congress's right to regulate it.
> Repealing DMCA would do nothing to strip copyright owners of their rights.
That's a pretty loaded statement to make. There are obviously things that rights owners couldn't do if the DMCA was repealed. I think what you're really arguing that those things don't matter? That could be a valid opinion, but it's still irrelevant. If Congress has the power to regulate something, they also have the power to regulate it ineffectively.
Spam? Infringement? Irrelevant. Small issues compared to corporate censorship. Let it happen. Not a single person should be censored over it.
Source?
There are abundant claims to the contrary [1][2]. (I can't find any quality data either way.)
[1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/01/10/youtubes-copyrigh...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtubers-channels-are-being...
I was winning against 10-20 people by posting a lot of random "f this politician" garbage in the political subreddits (this was in late 2016 and it was a feeding frenzy), until someone posted a "check out this picture of me and my brother I haven't seen in 10 years wearing the same Ghostbusters shirt!" post. It wasn't his brother, he found it somewhere, but it was going viral and I was about to lose.
So I filed a DMCA takedown request with Reddit, and they deleted the post and the picture very quickly after, no questions asked. I ended up winning the competition, but I think we ended up giving the prize to the Ghostbusters guy anyways.
The DMCA is 100% an attack strategy, it works.
Of course this will not happen because the DMCA as used in practice has nothing to do with law or justice and is just a mechanism for corporations to attack humans.
That's not to say there's nothing good in the DMCA as written. The safe harbor provisions are now vital to the continued existence of independent communities on the internet. But in practice safe harbor is often ignored too.
It sounds like you may be envisioning a system where the burden is offloaded onto the people sending a notice, but that's just not possible. If you get an email from some person Alice you've never heard of before, you fundamentally cannot know just from reading the email whether it was sent by the actual Alice, or someone pretending to be Alice, or whether there's even such a person as Alice in the first place. To tell the difference, you would have to research Alice and find some independent way to corroborate her identity.
I'm envisioning a system where someone has to prove they actually own the thing before they can claim it, yes. And if proving identity is so hard then maybe there shouldn't be take-downs at all. Let the legal system where identification is required take over. Stop the hundreds of millions of automated para-legal attacks and make it a more managable flood of hundreds of thousands of actual legal actions.
And yes, KYC is extremely burdensome. I suppose when a DMCA claim arrives the recipient should then send back an email with a link to some third party corporation dedicated to KYC (out of a set of government approved companies) which the DMCA claimant will sign up with and pay a small fee to. Most likely the claimaint will have to have a webcam conversation with the KYC company and upload their identifying documents. The result of the identity and ownership check would then be sent to both parties and the process could proceed as per normal.
This would strongly discourage illegal false claims which currently have no mitigation and make up the majority of DMCA actions.
If by everywhere else you mean finance. Which means you want to burden every single website in America that accepts user-generated content with a banking-style compliance department.
I know if I were at UHC I’d be looking to leave before I ended up on a hit list.
UnitedHealth has half a million employees. If you think individual employees are at risk of getting on a hit list then you don’t really understand the scale of the company.
I’m constantly amazed by how some people adopt the uninformed narratives that sprang up in the wake of this murder. I’ve asked multiple people to guess how much cheaper our healthcare would get if we forced insurance company profits to zero and redistributed their C-suite’s compensation to their covered patients. The answer is always off by orders of magnitude.
It’s all very strange. The narratives around this murder and, by extension, the health care system are being invented by people informed about both yet widely accepted as fact. Even details about the scale of UnitedHealth seem lost on people. This is a very large publicly traded company with scores of employees.
The media is conflating the far-right and -left wing fringes who are celbrating Mangione as a person and his literal crime with those holding him as a symbol for their frustrations with our healthcare system.
If you're celebrating the person and the crime, you need to speak to a professional. (You're also in a minority. No, your subreddit isn't the world.) If you're upset about the system, it's reasonable to not care if you're being fucked by Bob or Alice.
[citation needed]
[1] https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol...
[2] https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... page 12
About a quarter of under-30 men and a fifth of under-30 women. For comparison, about 20% of Americans "think holding neo-Nazi views is" acceptable [1].
> excluding people who don't vote and have had their voting rights taken away
Where do you see the 2% of Americans [2] who have had their voting rights taken away being excluded by either poll? (Not challenging. That's just methodologically impressive.) Either way, none of what you're citing is material to an 80/20 margin.
I have friends in that 17%. But I also know people who thought Kari Lake was a shoe in, "defund the police" would work or that every guy is an incel. Echo chambers are powerful, especially online, where they can convince a quarter of a single demographic that they're in the majority on celebrating a dude capping a stranger in broad daylight.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-neo-n...
[2] https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/locked-out-2022-es...
Edit: Just noticed statistical manipulation is your job and you're maybe in a similar tax bracket
>> Trade private equity. Former aerospace investment banker, and before that, algorithmic equity derivatives trader. FinTech + Space + B2C angel & seed investor. Jackson Hole local; frequently in New York and the Bay Area.
I’m saying 20% of Americans can be found who believe almost anything. 20% of Americans supporting something is basically background.
> selectively moving groups around with your statistics to try and use simple numbers to make it seem like you're always right
I’m slicing the data to present a number bigger than 17%. I’m trying to find a group in which a majority support Mangione who aren’t on the far fringes of society. If you’re upset about the slicing and dicing you’re confirming my point.
> the vast majority of people under 40 (military age) finding it ok with Brian getting shot
Where do you see this?
18 to 29 is the most favourable bloc for Mangione, and there favourability is 39%. Not a majority let alone a vast majority. And that’s being generous by combining in somewhat favourable.
The Lizardman's Constant is lower than 20%, more like 4% for the survey result that gave rise to the name — and also, despite the name, not constant: https://gwern.net/note/lizardman
Sadly, this also means that your chosen example, instead of illustrating your claim, actually has something to say about the state of the American Overton Window when it was taken.
Lizardman’s Constant is, per Gwern, “‘jokester’ or ‘mischevious responders’.” They’re being disingenuous; think: “deez balls” voters.
I don’t think the 17% of respondents who think favourably of Mangione are trolling. I don’t think the 10% flat earthers (or, including those who are “unsure” about the Earth’s roundness, 19%) are bullshitting [1].
There is simply about a fifth of the population—and it’s a moving fifth, there isn’t a permanently-braindead section—that tends to respond one way in just about any survey about fringe or stupid theories. So 17% supporting Mangione (while making it seem like it’s everyone online) isn’t particularly surprising. (Even if a good fraction of them are responding provocatively for fun.)
[1] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...
This is very well known and the technique is often abused. Even the source article is presenting this information with a huge grain of salt.