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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

On what grounds would a company be penalized for taking down parts of their own websites? Should YCombinator be penalized if they delete a post?

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I think he's pointing out the problem that if they start penalizing false DMCA claims, people will find non-DMCA ways to take things down.

Given that publishers have managed to get Google's ContentID system to misidentify public domain songs, bird songs, and other such things as their exclusive property, bad faith or otherwise negligent copyright claims are a real problem.

Ref: http://www.geekosystem.com/rumblefish-birdsong-takedown/

I agree with you, but the problem the parent poster is pointing out, is that YouTube is a private site. Google should be able to do what they want. If they do something stupid (and I agree the copyright bot is stupid), then it's their own problem. In theory, a competitor could do a better job at not repeating goggle's mistakes, and beat them in the market.

It's worth mentioning that copyright bots are not even required by law. Google could be complying to dmca requests without automatic take downs. They're going beyond what the law requires because they want to be in Hollywood's good side. So a competitor could still be legal without the bots.

BTW, there probably are some viable claims someone could make against a person convincing third parties to remove their work from the internet, particularly if they could show financial harm. However, recordings of natural bird song and the like are unlikely to get protected via expensive lawsuits because the upside of that is incredibly limited.

I suppose we might see litigation whenever DMCA notices start getting used for election-related hijinks, though.

"Google is a private company" is not a set of magic words.

See my other comment for a simple scenario that shows why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497393

They shouldn't but if you can't have a perfect system then it's best to have a system as close to perfect as possible and that is something we do not have. So ideally an entity wouldn't be punished for requesting a takedown of their own content but because of the insane volume of bogus takedown requests I think it's better to punish those who send them and if anyone accidentally sends a takedown request for themselves then them's the breaks until the system can differentiate between legit, bogus, and self takedown requests.

Furthermore, I'm not sure how YC deleting a post and issuing a DMCA takedown request against content on their own site are the same thing. This isn't about deleting content at all. Whether a site deletes content isn't at issue whether it violates copyright or not. The issue is sending bogus takedown requests to others.

I read parent's post as taking about self-censoring bots like Youtube's Content-ID, and not DMCA sending bots. As far as I know, Google doesn't use the latter.

So if gmail's spam filter isn't perfect, it's better to have no spam filter?

No, exactly the opposite. I'm saying if you can't have perfect then take the next best thing. In your example the next best thing would be taking an imperfect spam filter over none at all.

I was asking, not implying any position on my part.

I don't think website owners should be prohibited from deleting user content as they see fit. But I do think the takedown bots are different. They are mainly used to avoid lawsuits and to appease the RIAA/MPAA; websites wouldn't choose to use them if left to themselves. I think they cause as many problems as bogus DMCA notices and should be discouraged.

I don't necessarily believe the discouragement should be legal, but maybe. For example, if human oversight was required before the content was removed, that wouldn't necessarily restrict companies' ability to remove content, but it would minimize bogus takedowns by bots.

Again, I'm not really staking a position here, I'm just trying to start the conversation while I figure out my own views on the subject.

For example, if human oversight was required before the content was removed, that wouldn't necessarily restrict companies' ability to remove content, but it would minimize bogus takedowns by bots.

Sure it would; it'd make spam removal impossible, for example.

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