Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it
theverge.com
theverge.com
If they really wanted to solve it, here's an idea: if you get a takedown notice you also get a button that says "I am sure my content does not infringe copyright and I'm willing to go to court for it". YouTube reinstates your content and, if the entity with the claim disagrees, they can take you personally to court. Is this good? No, but that's on the DMCA. Is it better than now, when you have no recourse? I'd say yes.
I think the reason why the person in the article didn't do this is that the DMCA counternotice process requires the person filing the counternotice to provide their full name and address so they can be served if the rightsholder decides to sue them. With problems like swatting going around, I think many people would be reluctant to provide that information to someone who they already know is trying to mess with them.
A single button to immediately and without human review or notice period restore the video and monetization, remove the strike, and declare you are willing to solve it in court would solve a lot of the issues with ContentID abuse on YouTube.
Such a system would likely have to sit behind strict identity verification to prevent abuse, and some people wouldn't like that. But that's the price for sharing a platform with some very blatant infringers
Agreed that Youtube's system has problems with how long it gives claimants to respond to the initial content ID dispute and with people spamming false claims. It's definitely not a perfect system.
IIUC, YouTube's copyright system is not a digital implementation of the DMCA. It's an additional system that occurs before the DMCA notice/counter-notice process so the laws about the DMCA are moot because it's not a DMCA notice (yet).
I'd be curious to know if this has ever been challenged in court as an unconstitutional prior restraint. Pretty obvious problems if you get people e.g. issuing fraudulent takedowns 10 days before an election.
The bigger issue is that Content ID has always been a way for YouTube to side-step the DMCA in a way that's beneficial to big copyright holders -- channel operators assume risk fighting a takedown in a way that was never a part of the DMCA.
"Comply with the DMCA" is the issue. If the law requires user-generated content hosts to take down content and leave it down for 10 days or they lose a legal protection that keeps them from being incinerated by lawyers, that's effectively a legal requirement that they take it down for 10 days, i.e. a prior restraint, which is typically not allowed.
> The DMCA doesn't provide strict timelines (just that the initial takedown requires the provider to "act expeditiously", and nothing for restoration).
What's this about the 10 days in 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(2) then?
Of course there are plenty of corporate authoritarian imperatives for why they don't. This comment is a thought experiment to demonstrate their complicity in how their system is routinely abused.
Thankfully, I was able to find the contact info for the Content ID provider in question - and within a day of emailing them they pulled the Content ID claim, noting that the customer of theirs who uploaded that think-break-containing song did so in violation of the company's ToS (which specifically forbids uploading music containing common samples like that for this exact reason). It ended up being a happy ending, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth w.r.t. YouTube's policies and practices when it comes to Content ID and copyright claims in general.
You'd think that YouTube could at least categorize those who perform and record unambigiously public domain works and advise people using automatic match software to be _very_ sure there's an infringement.
Someday if I have time and patience, I may try to see what legal options I have against one of these deep-pocket companies who are making false (and libelous) claims about the recordings I have made. They're accusing me of theft, and it's provably false.
What's annoying is sometimes I'm on the road and don't get to responding to the request for several weeks.
So, the system exists to placate large rightsholders. It's not going to be modified to cause them problems.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_ID#History
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y...
It's even worse than that: the DMCA counternotice also requires the person filing the counternotice to agree to the jurisdiction of the USA courts, even if they live somewhere else. I think many people would be reluctant to take that additional legal risk.
Like all you would have to do to, perhaps not fix, but heavily mitigate this, would be to have YouTube just... hold onto the revenue until the dispute is resolved. It's barely even a change. And most of the time, when creators do counter the claims, they're eventually dropped but again because of how that system works, YouTube has already funneled all their money to the claimant, irrespective of the determined validity of the claim. And it would discourage bullshit claims because even as low-rent a scam as this is, it is some amount of work, and if there's no payout, you necessarily reduce the number of scammers who will attempt it.
I don't know if that's a DMCA thing, I admittedly haven't researched it in a long time, but I don't see how that would put YouTube at any kind of liability. Any reader, do feel free to correct me.
If the media companies had their way, everything would work like YouTube Content ID, because that's the system that minimizes their enforcement cost. What they want is to make everything Someone Else's Problem.
They do that: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7000961?hl=en
Edit to quote the full section because the cherry picked quote is misleading:
> If you dispute a claim within 5 days, any revenue from the video will be held, starting with the first day the claim was placed. If you dispute a Content ID claim after 5 days from the original claim date, we'll start holding revenue the date the dispute is made.
Someone who didn't have the rights resampled the original song and submitted it to a label (not sure that's the right term), and the label proceeded to DMCA every single video the guy had posted.
Over a thousand videos, having to gather all that info for all of them, go through the appeals process on all of them. For him it was a manual action one at a time. From the label they have an API to bulk initiate claims
You should have to negotiate a percentage fee, not assume the claimant is entitled to 100%
This is likely why the only other ‘competitors’ you see are peering based or based on a subscription model. Neither of which can really compete with YouTube which really doesn’t need to *directly* make any money
YouTube ended up in that situation for two reasons. First, the original YouTube before Google bought it was playing fast and loose with the law and was in the process of getting sued over it after Google bought them. Second, Google wants to license Hollywood content for YouTube TV etc. So between wanting to settle the lawsuit and wanting to sell their soul and become Comcast, Google agreed to do a lot of this draconian BS that isn't otherwise required by law.
A competing service that just wants to be YouTube without being YouTube TV could plausibly follow the law without steamrolling the little guy quite as much.
Which means you need it to not suck or have some other countervailing advantage which is enough to overcome that, e.g. TikTok, but without the geopolitical issues of that one.
Additionally both sides of the dispute normally still want the monetization, they just disagree about who gets the proceeds. And because of the time value curve of YouTube videos (most make something like 90% of their revenue in the first few days), demonetizing has a good chance fo essentially erasing the revenue of the video for the creator.
This is exactly what the YouTube copyright counter notification is. The problem is that YouTubers aren't lawyers, so they don't want to risk going to court.
I owe money for a toll road? Hmmm, I must have accidentally blocked that user, deleted the message thread and reported it as spam. Sorry.
It's unclear, to me, if youtubers could proxy this through an attorney.
Yes. An authorized representative is allowed to submit a counter notification on your behalf, so they would put their name and address instead.
The problem with the victim first mentality is that it causes you to underestimate how much agency people actually have (e.g. being unaware of how excessive tenant protections decrease the supply of housing available to low-income earners).
That said, again, how is a small creator, which at least several nines of all creators are, supposed to scratch up the legal and financial resources to fight massive corporate interests and industrial scale fraud? Why is the onus on them, rather than the platforms that enable this kind of behavior? Like, I'm not trying to be overly sarcastic here, I'm genuinely curious how you make sense of this in your head. Is it like "oh well, that's the way of the world, fuck em?" kind of thing, or is it based on some kind of sound principle? Because the way things are do not really help anyone, except behemoth media interests, and especially hurts the quality of content online, which if I can make an assumption, you and I both consume. Which also, ironically, hurts the very platforms that (I suspect) you are trying to stan for here. Make it make sense?
Believe it or not, I shitpost on the internet for fun. Sometimes, I get flagged for bullshit reasons (moreso Reddit than hackernews), and there's nothing I can do about it. Since it's for fun though, it doesn't really cost me anything outside some minor frustration.
> That said, again, how is a small creator, which at least several nines of all creators are, supposed to scratch up the legal and financial resources to fight massive corporate interests and industrial scale fraud?
This article is talking about a small-time copyright troll who is obviously pretending to be Nintendo. There is virtually no risk of calling their bluff because they obviously aren't going to commit identity fraud in court. Chances are, the troll has better things to do than to leak your personal information, but if you're worried about that, you can hire a lawyer to file the counter notification for you for a couple hundred bucks. I'm sure there are ways to do this yourself as well if you need to fight a lot of claims. Just spitballing here, but if you have a business owner friend, you can use their business address and have them be your representative and file on your behalf.
If we're talking about large corporations with armies of lawyers like real Nintendo, then there's not much you can do besides hiring a good lawyer and listening to their advice. For very straightforward cases, you can probably play lawyer yourself so long as if you do enough research and preparation (again, just spitballing). Also, it's not like Nintendo is unaffected by legal costs. In fact, any legal action will probably be several times more expensive for them than it would be for you. If they're pursuing legal action, they likely genuinely believe they're in the right.
In part because of these stupid DMCA rules preventing people like me from expressing their creativity.
I can appeal the strikes, but every time I do so I risk losing my channel forever. I don't monetize, and I only make parodies of stuff that came out over 10 years ago. So I've already accepted that the existence of my channel is ephemeral and that one day it will probably disappear forever.
But I don't have any other platform to go to if I want to share my 5-10 minutes long edits with more than 4 people.
Why am I not allowed to continue an art form that owes its name to the platform that spawned it? Is protecting the copyright of some random anime adaptation or cartoon (that no one gives a shit about anymore) seriously more important than creating novel art?
Copyright lasts WAY too much.
And no, I don't really want to go to court over this bullshit. But I am firmly convinced that it's in my rights to produce it. It's just that what counts as "my rights" depends entirely on the jurisdiction, because the law is a joke meant to protect people who can afford good lawyers -- it's not meant to actually enforce justice. Or rather, the concept of justice is so malleable that it basically means nothing in a globalized world.
Also, I'm from Europe. Which court should I go to when I infringe on an american dub copyright for a japanese cartoon, exactly?
At this point, if you are still using YouTube (or another platform), you're part of the problem (we've already been talking about this specific issue for 15 years already !!), use something like PeerTube instead !
Even more so if you're in Europe, heck, we even have the example of VLC basically violating DMCA and US patent laws for decades and they are still online - notably because they're not under US jurisdiction :
https://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions/#What_a...
> Also, I'm from Europe. Which court should I go to when I infringe on an american dub copyright for a japanese cartoon, exactly?
Well the copyright and the site are American so probably America.
The GP isn't asking for an audience. (Except if you mean "with the king", because that's exactly what the comment is asking for.)
> Well the copyright and the site are American so probably America
The GP didn't tell you who the copyright owner is. And Google is present in more than one country.
That said, yes, your last paragraph is a good hint. The world should just think very hard about blocking every large US business.
If you are an American citizen, the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution mentions your God-given right to any audience that wants to listen to you.
That's literally what copyright is
You can broadcast it. You don't have any kind of right to an audience to watch it. I don't even know what that would look like.
Then people want to use it in the sense of, you don't have a right against someone else interfering with your interaction with your willing audience, i.e. you don't have a right not to be censored by a government or corporate oligopoly. But that is a far less defensible proposition.
You can speak your mind. That doesn't mean YouTube is obligated to broadcast it for you, nor does it mean your speech is being suppressed if they choose not to.
The modern one where the adversarial video host is owned by the search engine with 90% market share that disfavors competitors in the search results? That's a different story.
Of course, the better solution there might be antitrust rather than common carriage requirements, but something's got to give.
YouTube isn't obligated to broadcast it, and in some cases it's debatable whether they're the ones suppressing it, but it is still being suppressed.
I don't mean in the legal US sense of the legal right to free speech, I mean the actual speech itself. If most people can speak but you cannot, and completely absent any question of rights and legality, how is that not suppression?
If you have the option to send a letter, then your speech is not being suppressed. And if the telegram company is being considered a common carrier, your speech will not be suppressed.
All of these things (protected classes, common carriers, etc.) have already been considered.
Reverse it. Why do -I-, a private citizen or company, have an obligation to amplify your speech for you, often without compensation?
I don't.
I'm not asking you, or YouTube, to stop suppressing speech. I'm objecting to the weasel-words. When you apply a special case to a user to reduce the reach of their content, that's targeted suppression. Suppression can be good! I'm grateful that YouTube suppresses spam and violence, but I'm not going to call it some newspeak term like unamplification.
I'm not sure why adding the reason of sexual orientation changes speech from being not-amplified to suppressed. Both cases are suppression. A fire suppression system doesn't turn into a fire unamplification system when it's used on the homes of heterosexuals.
"I can't speak freely because Platform A won't carry it" isn't a thing when Platforms B through ZZZ exist. And if B through ZZZ have less reach, well, so be it.
Under very basic principles of law, only the owner or exclusive licensee of a copyright has standing to sue for copyright infringement. Furthermore, copyright law does not obligate copyright owners sue or license like trademark does. Therefore, for uses which are inconvenient[0] to sell a license for, but not damaging enough to go to court, copyright owners will often tacitly permit the use by simply failing to enforce their rights.
The problem is that courts have a very high bar to recognize tacit permission as a license. It's not impossible; there are some famous examples of 'implied license', but no competent lawyer would actually recommend you go to court and claim such a thing. One particular complication would be that if, say, you sued Fake Nintendo, and claimed fair use as a rationale for using Real Nintendo's content, Real Nintendo might want to actually sue you just to kill the fair use claim[1].
Just as an example of how complicated tacit permission can get:
Bungie's Destiny 2 is a perpetually updated "live service" game with an ongoing policy of removing content to keep download sizes reasonable[2]. As a result, there is music in the game that is no longer accessible. Bungie does not want people uploading the game soundtrack to YouTube, but they also don't want to turn that removed music into lost media, so they had a policy of not taking down "music archivists" that only uploaded the removed content.
One of the YouTubers that got taken down for reuploading live Destiny 2 music got pissed about it and started filing fraudulent DMCA takedowns in Bungie's name to music archivists. Bungie tried to get in contact with YouTube to have the fraudulent takedowns removed, but it took over a week of PR damage to everyone involved (and, if I remember, actually suing the idiot kid that did this) before YouTube would restore the videos.
If there is one thing that is badly drafted (and not just irritating) about the current DMCA 512 system, it's that there is no procedure for third-party counter-claimants to challenge fraudulent or mistaken claims. However, the current mechanisms of copyright make that impossible to provide. There is no database of who-owns-what and who-licensed-what; rights owners do not want such a database to exist; and it is entirely possible for multiple parties to have standing to sue the same person for the same act of infringement on the same work. Under regular copyright law, if Nintendo wants to sue you for, say, using the officially-licensed Mario DLC in your Minecraft streams, Microsoft can't intervene and stop them on the basis that they own Minecraft. How, exactly, should YouTube proceed if they have two parties swearing under oath conflicting information, and not obeying the right one puts you on the hook for billions of dollars in copyright liabilities? The current system is designed to make it easy to cheaply operate social media, not to actually be fair to its users or to stop online censorship.
[0] Reasons for this inconvenience can include:
- The transaction cost of negotiating a watertight contract for a very small deal. Generally speaking you don't want to make deals with understandable / 'plain language' licensing terms for the same reason why web browsers don't have an API to load unsigned arbitrary kernel modules from third-party servers.
- The licensing in question being contrary to exclusive licensing arrangements with other companies - though exclusive licensing contracts can also mandate the licensor or licensee enforce each other's rights to prevent this sort of thing
[1] In general, common law mechanisms like fair use create an incentive to sue, which is a very bad thing for people who don't like getting sued.
[2] This is a terrible policy, but the policies of console manufacturers require you to ship games as packages, so you couldn't just stream in assets as needed.
It's fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don't have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.
It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I'm either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?
The DMCA notices from Google direct me to the complaint in the Lumen Database. In those notices it lists my domain along with hundreds of others for each complaint, so I'm not alone here.
I'm assuming a third party company is being paid to look after sending DMCA complaints for businesses. If they remove 100,000 URLs by sending DMCA notices, they can charge higher fees or get more contracts compared to other companies that only take down 10,000 URLs. There are no repercussions, so might as well automate the process and aim for big numbers.
Just because you own the game, doesn't mean you have the rights to use it in more than a personal setting. That's basically always been the case. You bought a personal license, not a broadcasting one.
The main reason for not attacking such things in the past was that it was a wasted effort at control. Too small a target, requiring too much effort. Automation, through things like audio recognition, changes that.
That's the long and short of it. It suddenly became trivial to do and the consequences won't be apparent for quite some time, so there are no consequences as far as the lawyers and accountants are concerned.
Publishers could charge upwards of $200 for these. Larger publishers could offer package subscription deals for you to be able to stream content from their games.
There's some back and forth about the exact underlying licensing, without an industry standard just yet - free streams are sometimes exempt, or require a partial license.
However, there is movement towards this concept.
[0] https://ablis.business.gov.au/service/ag/music-streaming-and...
In the case that the copyright audio is coming from a game, there is no way currently for the platform to automatically verify that you have a license or not, so once again they shoot first, ask question later.
This is unfortunate, but as usual, bad actors ruin the commons for everyone.
I guess my point is that this arrangement was fine for a very, very long time. Why is it suddenly not fine in the last handful of years? Who is standing to gain here? In my view, it hurts the very platforms and industries this is trying to "protect." Twitch/YT/etc. are harmed because the content will be inherently worse, and copyright audio IP is hurt because it will spread to fewer listeners. Not only this, but if it were available to me, I actually would pay to license the audio I use, but there is no mechanism to do that!
A similar dumb thing happened a few years ago with the PGA tour - they decided that anyone re-posting PGA clips without their permission, even if it was for commentary/parody/etc., was all of a sudden not permissible. So, all the golf content on IG/TikTok/etc got catastrophically worse overnight, and PGA (which struggles with viewership, especially young viewers) gets less free exposure. There's absolutely no way this was a positive outcome for anyone involved, so why?
> We've had the capability to detect audio for a long time. What changed suddenly in the last few years to deploy/enforce this at scale? Certainly not any improvements to detection. I've made a whopping total of $46 in something like 12 years on these platforms. Something tells me this level of enforcement is ridiculous and against the spirit of the law, and I'm certainly not an expert on the DMCA or a lawyer, but I'd be willing to wager a lot that this strict interpretation is misinterpreted. No one is submitting any takedown requests to this content, which to be clear, averages like 1.3 viewers and has less than a few thousand follwers. And when I describe in-game audio - I mean literal 2-3 second song clips like "barbie girl" song happening when you score a goal in rocket league will get your VOD DMCA'd and you can't upload it to YT. That is a newer thing. You really can't view the last 20 years of DRM and the way it's played out, and say something like "this is how it's always been, now automation." That doesn't add up.
I'm not exactly a big fish here. I don't make money. There is no takedown request, nor would there ever be, because it's silly.
If a new automated speed camera catches you on a road you've been speeding on for 7 years it doesn't mean speeding used to be fine it means you'll now receive consequences for doing things which were never fine to do! It also doesn't mean the speed limit always used to be the current value or anything like that. This is because "when regular enforcement began" has no causal relation one way or the other about what used to be fine or whether that was different than what's fine now. It is only an effect, one where "what was fine changed" is only one possible cause.
To trivially prove your point wrong - I actually do have the right under fair use to make content of my own with copyrighted material. This has literally always been ok. Platforms are taking these actions to protect themselves from potentially hosting copyrighted content on their platform that would not consistute fair uses, and since I, a user of their platform, have to abide by their policies, it's their decision. Assuming we are now on the same page here, continuing your speeding ticket example - this is not so much like that, as getting pulled over in a labeled 40 zone and the cop goes "well, we didnt know if you'd be breaking the law later or before this, so just to be safe, here you go" or, "actually that's not really the speed limit." take your choice here, they both apply.
So yea, it has always been ok.
As the other commenter mentioned, my point was having done something for many years does without receiving a notice does not inherently imply it was fine to do all those years prior. That does not mean I agree that's how large hosting platforms should work, just that their stance has always been "fuck what the user should be able to easily do with content" rather than some new policy the day you got your first notice.
People have been used to infringe copyright on the internet for decades but this has never been right.
If you want to be able to share stuff you don't own the right for, change the laws.
Meanwhile if you're still using platforms to host these videos, and not something like PeerTube, you're part of the problem.
Also, cynical as it may sound, I assume the rise of a popular, successful peer-to-peer YouTube alternative would, in the US at least, result in the passage of even more consumer-hostile legislation, think "three strikes"-style anti-torrent laws with actual teeth (e.g., rather than requiring ISPs to make mostly idle threats to cut off Internet service against their own interests, imagine if ISPs were instead empowered to collect fines resulting from default judgements against repeat infringers, with a percentage of each fine collected paid to the ISP).
And I don't care about the USA at this point, they made their bed, now let them lie in it, in fact the more they squeeze their fist, the sooner the free world will get the courage to dump them.
I myself am guilty of abusing the DMCA. When I was fighting fraud for eBay and PayPal, if we found someone hosting a phishing site, we would use the DMCA to get them to take it down, claiming they were violating the copyright of the logo. We would send DMCA notices to any host in any country. Most would just oblige. A few would reply and inform us they weren't in the USA.
But it worked because the platforms feared the consequences of not following it, and there was no risk to us.
The DMCA needs fixing by adding severe consequences for incorrect use.
The platform could become liable for all the content across the entire platform if they don't act on a single DMCA notice, if they lose their protection as a platform because of it.
But that is also pretty dumb to base your entire income in a platform that can delete your account for any reason at any point in time.
I can look for another employer if I have issue with mine. There is more than youtube but the number of alternative platforms where you can monetize your stuff are much smaller than the number of companies where I could find a job so there is that.
> An employer that can fire you at any time?
There are many places in this world where an employer can't fire you at any time and for any reason. There are even jobs where you really can't get fired unless you are really looking for it.
> At least creators have more control over their income.
Not sure control is the right word. They are bound to the market.
Getting access to the real names and addresses of these people is a nice bonus too; I'm sure their intelligence services would have plenty of uses for this information.
If there's one way of making the DMCA (and similar legislation around the world) go away, spinning it as an anti-free-speech law with national security concerns is probably it, especially considering the upcoming US administration.
The moment some game creator decides to test this will get very interesting. Not good interesting.
Immediately got taken down for copyright infringement. Completely destroyed my desire to ever make a let's play video again.
And it was for a 10+ year old game. It is unfortunate
> As long as you follow some basic rules, we will not object to your use of gameplay footage and/or screenshots captured from games for which Nintendo owns the copyright ("Nintendo Game Content") in the content you create for appropriate video and image sharing sites. To help guide you, we prepared the following guidelines: [...]
The legal gray area definitely still exists for many of the smaller/indie game studios, but this kind of licensing is more common than not today.
Would you say a screen capture of Microsoft Excel is also copyright infringement? If not, what would you say is the legal basis for treating that differently than a video game?
This is one of those areas where principles like “fair use” and “transformative use” don’t really matter, since we’re talking about YouTube de facto policy, not the law. If YouTube decides to honor the claims, then that’s what happens. And YouTube generally errs hard in the direction of rightsholders just to be safe.
Ironically, it was a bible software manual and the screenshots she looked at accidentally had text from a copyrighted bible translation. So she was right that those screenshots had copyright issues, but for the wrong reason.
You might think that's obvious, but you'd be wrong. Software publishers were cracking down on duplicating manuals as a means of trying to curb software piracy.
I can practically guarantee that the "obstinate employee" was given clear direction by their manager on the subject.
Though you do have to keep in mind that depending on when exactly this happened, Kinko's might still have been a collection of hundreds of largely autonomous regional partnerships, each of which could set their own policy.
They were, however, willing to three-hole punch the resulting pages if I removed the binding myself.
Later that day at another, nearby Kinko's, an employee, who happened to be the manager on duty, cut and punched the pages with no questions asked other than "have you seen our selection of binders and report covers?"
This was around 2008, so many years after the corporate consolidation, subsequent acquisition, and rebranding as FedEx Kinko's.
Reading a book is interactive; you imagine the narrative/interpretive voice as you go through it. You might read a phrase one way where someone else might read it differently. Listening to someone read a book removes that difference but still conveys most of the plot.
Aaand Idk if book reads are on YouTube but typically people pay for audio books and some revenue goes to the author
That said, it would be absolutely petty and foolish to pursue any action against it.
Games contain art, music, sound fx, text/story, motion design, and other elements that are copyrighted.
Again, it would be petty and foolish to pursue it.
Yeah it is. However most uses of an Excel screenshot would probably be considered fair use, and Microsoft probably doesn't care for 99% of use cases.
If you look at Wikipedia's Excel article they have more details on the legal rationale behind their use of a screenshot [1]. It looks like Microsoft allows the use of product screenshots in certain cases as well.
I also took a quick look at an Excel textbook I had on my shelf and it specifically stated in the copyright notice that they had permission from Microsoft to publish the screenshots used within.
Platforms should only accept takedown requests through channels in which a person has credibly identified themselves so that they can be held accountable in this way.
DMCA has protection for creators. You can say "Copyright holder is wrong, put my content back up and I'll see them in court." and "They did this maliciously, I'll see them in court."
However, YouTube fake DMCA system is using the provision of "We don't have to host any content we don't want to." so creators are stuck dealing with corporate bureaucracy. Personally, I think YouTube should lose DMCA protection if they want to run this side system.
* YouTube has no liability for incorrect take-downs (17 USC § 512 (g) (1))
* That limitation on liability only exists if they restore access to the disabled material within 10-14 business days of receipt of a counter-notice (17 USC § 512 (g) (2) (C))
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
YouTube doesn't have to host any content they don't want to. However, it seems likely that a court would say "that doesn't absolve you of complying with the counter notice provisions of the DMCA. You can't just say that you don't want to host any content that goes through a counter notice." There are always limitations on the whole "we don't have to host things we don't want to." I doubt a court would let them use that as an excuse to ignore an explicit mandate of the DMCA, but IANAL.
I think the problem is more likely that creators don't want to sue YouTube or have the resources to go up against Google.
Why not? (at least legally speaking, it'd be a PR disaster I'm sure)
YouTube is not obligated to host any videos on their platform and US law allows for businesses to discriminate for almost any reason (except specific protected classes like race or sex).
In this case, the identity of the legal department would be directly connected to the infringing content found in the video which YouTube would have access to to verify. It also wouldn't be a takedown but a royalty demand or they could have registered "Let's play" as not requiring royalties. In principle though, YouTube or even the creator could just do all of this upfront.
That's my idea, in the vein of, "We have the technology to do this better."
I think it should switch to the strike system that YouTube, at least, favors: if you issue three fraudulent DMCA notices, you lose the ability to do so again in the future.
Sure. But you don't have the right to harass people who haven't done so. I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I would imagine that at some point, vexatious litigation protections ought to kick in.
Yes, it'll cost money. But these fraudulent claims cost money, too.
With blood.
No I'm not being edgy. That is the only way anything is going to change regarding the litany of fucked up corporate practices in our country. Our governments are ineffective at best and are active abettors at worst (read The Chickenshit Club for why they won't ever seriously prosecute execs). Boeing (completely different scenario from the OP but it's recent) has no qualms with killing to maintain the status quo, why should people that want actual change be any different?
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/29/bungie-youtuber-settle-l...
Those people being targeted by this troll should band together and sue.
Sue the troll?? Good luck finding them. How would you even begin? A ProtonMail email address? No way.
Sue YouTube?? Again, no way.
Until either YouTube or the US Congress thinks this is a large enough problem to deal with, it's not going away.
Like, if enough people used enough fake accounts and started relentlessly submitting takedown requests on the biggest channels making the most revenue, not only would YouTube start to see the revenue issue, but the big channels would start making noise. Go after one troll sending the requests, another one takes its place. Seems like it would force YouTube to at least reconcile with this particular flaw in the system.
Use youtube's bad policy against itself.
Companies could easily do this by including a tracking number for each communication, along with a copy of the communication then checking that tracking number on requests for confirmation.
Question is, will there be enough incentive for them to do so.
> A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it’s not clear [if] YouTube can stop him
It's also an example of pragmatics, specifically a conversational implicature, where the omission is forcing the reader to rely on the context of the sentence to fill in the blank or derive the meaning.
So while you are correct about the grammar, language use is often more complicated in practice.
It's definitely valid as-is. It's debatable whether it's unclear (what would the alternative meaning be if you think it's unclear?)
Looks like this may be called an "empty complementizer"; some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementizer#Empty_complemen...
Both steps aren't trivial, and configuration errors are more common than actual spoofing. DMARC is supposed to fix everything, but only if the domain owner cares enough to do more than the bare minimum setup
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/email-security/dmarc-dki...
An email @nintendo.com is not that hard to get for the legal team of nintendo
The only way to get Google to care would be for content creators to start abandoning the platform on mass, but they don't really have anywhere to go (sorry Vimeo). Even then Google views content creators as a dime a dozen, so to get the numbers you need to make them notice would be exceptional.