Google broke my heart | Hacker News Reader

Google broke my heart

perishablepress.com

542 pointsingve288 comments

So not only do they process illegitimate copyright strikes / DMCA takedowns, but they also don't process legitimate ones.

Google is broken to the very core.

This is what happens with a company that tries to minimize costs of support to zero.

Google has only cared about one thing for the last decade, being number 1. They were willing to sell their soul to beat meta and they’ll sell their skin to beat OpenAI.

You're getting at the crux of the issue: it's very hard to distinguish legitimate DMCA takedown requests submitted by individuals from illegitimate ones, and occasionally, they're going to make mistakes. Anything that the author said in his emails could have just as easily been said by someone else who was trying to take down the content illegitimately.

At the end of the day, the best option is to use an attorney who knows the right procedures and would also run the risk of professional consequences if they submitted false claims.

> Anything that the author said in his emails could have just as easily been said by someone else who was trying to take down the content illegitimately

Ok, but then Google needs to say what would convince them that the author is who they say they are. The author asked multiple times how they prove they’re the real author and Google’s replies never even acknowledge the question.

Google won't tell you this because they believe it would reveal information to scammers.

That's Kafkaesque. We're not talking about SEO here, just simple proof of identity. If they require something sane like ID, they could simply say so. If they need something insane, or have no process at all for proving identity, then this is no excuse.

In this case, a more likely explanation might be "Google won't do this because it would put you in a position to obligate them to do something else". There isn't really a risk of enabling scammers to issue false DMCA takedowns; as you note, that issue is resolved by requiring proof of ownership.

The only way to demonstrate that you own copyright to a piece of content is by going to court.

If that were true, how would the judge know who to rule for? Are you saying that anyone can become the owner of any intellectual property simply by filing a lawsuit?

Not all intellectual property is the same. Trademarks have to be registered, patents have to be filed, but copyright is automatically granted by law whenever someone creates a work.

Trademark issues are therefore really simple: is the user of the trademark the one who has it registered or not?

But copyright holders don't have any standard, obvious evidence they can point to that shows it's really their copyright. They can file a DMCA, in which case companies normally just assume the complaint is accurate - but if the party on the other end objects, the case has to go to a judge who will determine who actually has the copyright and if infringement occurred.

but then why have a process at all?

So they don't get sued again by record companies.

That’s like saying the DMV won’t tell you how to prove your identity because if they did people would use that info to get fake driving licences

The DMV is not a private company with enormous amounts of fraud/scam.

Anyway, it's what I was told when I joined Google Ads a long time ago and it seems consistent with their philosophy and behavior.

> The DMV is not a private company with enormous amounts of fraud/scam.

So it sounds like their policy of having a high bar for proving identity but still publicising what is required to meet that bar works for preventing fraud?

If anything, your argument is an indictment against Google.

> Anything that the author said in his emails could have just as easily been said by someone else

That's not true. He mentions that he is the owner of the books official websites, which are registered with Google, presumably with all of his personal and billing information.

It would take 2 seconds for anyone at Google to confirm this.

> It would take 2 seconds for anyone at Google to confirm this.

Not really... Google is literally too big, and the fact that they've offshored and/or automated support away and compartmentalized it all where no single IC employee could possibly do much.

I had a billing/tax issue come up with my small biz Google Workspace, and I was getting nowhere via the normal support channels... So I asked my brother in-law who literally works at Google (but not in that team) for help. He could not help me as he had no idea who or what department could handle that and neither did his team members, and it would take weeks apparently to find the right person. I'm not the only paying Google customer with that experience. Google products are great, until you run into an issue you need to talk to a human.

If googlers dont have an internal org chart they can check, then how do they verify who is on what team?

Something doesnt add up. Because that seems like a bare minimum to collaborate at all.

> Because that seems like a bare minimum to collaborate at all.

Now you're getting a clue why Google had like 3-4 competing communication tools at some point lol

I’m talking about something much more fundamental, the entire company would pretty much implode within 24 hours (or at most a week) if they couldnt verify who is who.

So it clearly cant be the case.

You're really giving credit in the wrong areas. Google is impressive for its ability to exist beyond the point of dysfunction. It's simply not the case that any Googler would need to verify the identity of any other any more than it is necessary for every server to verify the identity of every other. They only need to verify the identify of the tiny subset they are communicating with at any given time. This doesn't mean everyone has access to a coherent org chart, or that one even exists.

And how do they verify those of the subset they are in communication with?

Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?

> Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?

It's a hierarchical org chart. If you're really not sure ask Sundar.

It's likely any Googler can verify the identity of any other by looking up their username but it's unlikely that the same tool would do something like tell you how the YouTube recommendation algorithm works or who would know that.

They will know the names of frequent collaborators and something about the scope of relevant work but it's not like everyone at Google needs intimate knowledge of every workstream. At that scale it's unlikely anyone has the full picture.

Okay so we agree Google has a full org chart then somewhere.

We agree an org chart of some kind probably exists. We disagree on the capabilities. For example I am not confident that it has a concept of a team and if it does that a team would map to a product or feature.

You seem confused, I never claimed it would have such attached concepts? just a name and superior/subordinate relations

Bring back Google Wave!

They could have been Slack if they didn't transmogrify it into a social media platform (Google+) and then throw out the baby with the bathwater when it failed.

Google presumably has hundreds of support teams.

Aside from the huge array of stuff they've built in house, the "List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet" wikipedia page has 264 entries. Some of those bought other companies.

>If googlers dont have an internal org chart they can check, then how do they verify who is on what team?

You really think some guy in some offshore office for low pay, with his boss hounding at him about his KPIs, is going to go out of his way to bother with this?

Going from person to team is fairly easy, but going from team to person is hard. That is, you can often confirm a person is a member of a particular team or organization just by looking up their email address, but the reverse direction of finding the right point of contact for a particular team or organization can be difficult.

Searching for the tree root starting from a tree leaf is easy, but searching for the right leaf starting from the root takes a lot more effort.

Finding the correct team seems to be all that’s needed?

> If googlers dont have an internal org

> chart they can check, then how do they

> verify who is on what team?

Having worked at some very large companies, none of which published org charts, it's done by word of mouth and making informed guesses.

"Alice, I saw you were the last editor of this document. Are you still on that team, or can you point me to the best PoC?"

If Google is so big that it can't figure out how to communicate from one department to the other, perhaps it needs to be split apart.

It seems like we will need either legislation or litigation, if we want things to improve.

I wonder if they just prioritize big companies who they either have agreements with or are scared could actually cause them serious legal trouble, and deny everyone else as much as possible because they’ve calculated the risk/reward/cost of getting it wrong.

I don't like it, but the solution here is to hire an IP lawyer to handle the rights process.

Google won't talk to us normies because 1) it's a cost and they don't have to 2) they've convinced themselves that if they tell anyone anything, then the unwashed masses will take advantage of their process/get the service we're owed under law

> Google won't talk to us normies because

They really should....

> ... it's a cost and they don't have to

There are much bigger costs looming for Google if they continue to ignore DMCA

Google are in the hands of the Money Monkeys. Short term gain and get out before the pain.

What a shame.

I mean I don't disagree but "should" won't make next quarters line go up until it becomes an expensive enough problem to threaten that trend.

Google settled a massive lawsuit with Viacom many years ago. The details of the settlement are hidden, but it seems pretty clear that it involves extraordinary deference to large rightsholders who in exchange won't threaten to blow YouTube to smithereens every year.

or because of abuse https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47227937

Sounds like they need to spend some of those billions of dollars on fixing the process and complying with the law, then.

I don't get to ignore the law just because if I follow it, someone who doesn't might get one over on me.

All of this nonsense because Google wants to automate their DMCA takedown process and not hire anyone to deal with real cases as they come, as is their duty to copyright holders.

I have a different reading, the author is reminiscing to the times where trust worked on the web.

A company like Google could trust you for being really the author because who would lie? and those that lie about these things usually couldn't spell or use technology.

The world changed and now Google can't afford to trust someone that says he's the author, because people take advantage of that.

So if you ask me what's worse, this guy having to contact his publisher to get his book off the web, or someone being blackmailed to keep his youtube channel, imo they are right to require a proper lawyer

Google doesn't need to verify anything. They just have to pass along the takedown request and provide a flow for prompt reactivation with a counter notice. After that their responsibilities end and the two disputing parties can litigate.

Also, the ones abusing the system tend to know it better: often it's their jobs to figure out how to work it to get what they want. The people who just want to use legitimately often it don't have the time and experience to learn it.

(You see a similar thing with benefits and healthcare: often attempts to crackdown on people abusing the system just make it harder for legitimate users)

It's almost a law of nature.

If you are from US I want to let you know about a scam. Here in asian countries people with good enlgish accents are recruited to pretend to be US citizens and claim benifits that are unused by the real people. There is a whole proper process of how this works. The recruit is given full identity information and a software to make the call appear from the US. The officials on the US side are in on this and get a share for each successfull claim.

> At the end of the day, the best option is to use an attorney who would at least run the risk of professional consequences for submitting false claims.

What if folks signed their work with a private PGP key and published their public key? If you wanted to submit a DMCA request, simply sign a message to prove you’re the content owner. It seems like that could work.

How does that prove I am the original author? Can't I just download a work and sign it as my own?

Let’s consider a scenario where you’ve published a video with a public key, and you have a history of using that key for publishing your work. If someone else were to download that video, they wouldn’t be able to sign it because they lack the key. I believe the same principle applies to PDFs and ebooks.

They wouldn’t be able to sign it as me but they could sign it as themselves, taking credit.

My question is what mechanism proves the video is signed by the rightful owner?

You are completely missing the point. Mistakes can be made. But OP asked repeatedly what he must provide so Google can validate his identity. They didn't answer his questions, even after OP asked multiple times.

This is not a "mistake", that is negligence.

I suspect the author is self-published (I don’t know him well, but his emails seem to indicate this).

One of the things that you get, when dealing with a publishing house, is a bunch of IP lawyers on speed-dial.

If you register works with the LoC, it might help in these situations (it isn’t required, but this is exactly the type of thing that it’s supposed to address).

That's little more than corruption. Yeah sure, you can free your issue from the AI-washed auto-reject script if you know the right people. But it's nothing to do with what those people know. It's about who they are.

I also suspect those responses were all generated by an AI.

The whole point of the DMCA takedown process is that it's rubber-stamp on the part of the service provider and all decisions regarding validity are left up to the courts. That's why there's a provision built into the law for the person receiving the claim to file a counter-notice to get their content reinstated. If Google is inserting themselves in the middle and denying claims because they don't believe that the person filing them is authorized to do so, I'm not sure whether that's proper procedure under the OCILLA.

The times when google was the good guy of the internet is over. Now it's basically Microsoft with much higher product qualities.

> Now it's basically Microsoft with much higher product qualities.

At first I thought you meant "Now, [the good guy of the internet] is basically Microsoft with much higher product qualities."

I see what you meant now, in that google is reaching microslop levels of shittiness with slightly shinier shit.

Oh, damn. That’s the last way I’d want it to be interpreted. :D

It's not just goog, friend. It's capitalism down too the root.

Piracy is more a moral and political statement than an economic one.

This is a copyright law invented in 1998 from the UN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty These things predictably always have ways for moneyed players to abuse them and for organizations to half commit. Even China signed up.

>This is a copyright law invented in 1998 from the UN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty

Copyright law existed long before 1998, so it's hardly something "invented in 1998 from the UN". There might be some aspects it standardized, but so far as I can tell I can't see how it's relevant to this particular case.

We’re discussing a post about DMCA in this thread which is a policy pushed by the UN and adopted by the US as DMCA. Not sure what your point is.

DMCA is one of the worst parts of the internet and for some reason capitalism is the boogieman in this thread. IP law has become hyper restrictive/excessive, with little oversight, and favours large companies with teams of lawyers.

Capitalism is the boogieman because greasing the wheels to enact anti-consumer legislation is 100% in the spirit of modern capitalism.

Capitalism had moral authority from the invisible hand (with empirical support), but absent that, it's just another system of power, and clearly not a just one.

>We’re discussing a post about DMCA in this thread which is a policy pushed by the UN and adopted by the US as DMCA. Not sure what your point is.

So far as I can tell there's nothing to do with takedowns? From wikipedia:

>The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM). It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself

oh yea, because no other system has ever had a kafkaesque resolution system. Maybe look up the origin of those "kafkaesque".

Please take the snark and condescension to Reddit where it belongs. Just because I disagree with you does not mean I'm wrong, and assuming that it does makes you ignorant.

I have some experience in this regard, and Google, even though it’s known for nonexistent human support, isn’t even the worst. I helped a Chinese creator friend DMCA takedown a bunch of accounts on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok straight up stealing her content / impersonating her. TikTok’s response was fastest, one account was taken down within eight hours (to my pleasant surprise), another was taken down in three days. YouTube was all right, accounts were taken down in a week or so. Facebook/Instagram was the worst. They asked for the least info upfront in their takedown form, sent a bunch of follow up emails, then eventually just ghosted me. I initiated new email chains referencing the case ID but never heard from anyone. I had to negotiate with the account holder but that went nowhere either since my threat to take down the account turned out to be a joke. To this day the infringing account is still up.

They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

Downvoters: I am suggesting that the lack of care by a CEO in his younger years translates directly in his older years as the company grows and reaches global proportions

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719

Use your brain for once, or else don't (please) work for any FAANG companies

I'm for believing that people can change, but thinking that someone has changed requires some actual indication that they have changed

IANAL but if you send a DMCA notice and they ignore it, they are (partly) liable. That's the point of DMCA.

File in a small claims court (or notify of your intent to do so) and see how long it takes to get a response ...

I wonder if you could probably even suggest a fee for damages, wasted time, etc due to their slow response and hope it's cheaper than them getting a lawyer to assess it ...

You would need to be the owner, and would know where to file though. If it's not your content, and you're "helping a friend" (but not actually legally representing them) then my guess is they haven't received a valid DMCA.

Not small claims court, big boy court. Copyright infringement fines are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per incident as in per download.

OP needs to get a real lawyer and stop putzing around emailing a machine.

If you want a human at Google you need to send letters from a law firm.

> Not small claims court, big boy court.

Right, it's federal, not state law.

Also, register the copyright, assuming that's still working under the current administration. (Trump is trying to fire the head of the Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress and doesn't report to Trump.)

I was legally representing them. I had their photo ID and a signed legal authorization letter and screencasts of their private creator portal showing infringed works and dossier of side-of-side comparison of infringing URLs and original URLs with publishing timestamps highlighted. All the submitted documents were signed. It hardly gets more concrete than that.

Other replies say it isn't small claims but a federal case, with large potential damages.

Either way, ignoring dcma is asking to be sued. And you can't just block or ignore a court summons.

I mean, you can block or ignore them if you’re sufficiently good at bullshitting, and they lose steam before figuring out your weak spot.

Which statistically for the insurance industry happens with 90% or so of all claims.

If you give yourself just enough plausible deniability to work around the penalties (or even if you don’t, if the math is in your favor enough!), at a minimum it can give you a boost for the next quarter, which is key.

Fake DMCA requests that harass creators are far worse than not taking action in legitimate cases.

The whole copyright policing thing should basically just die.

Or have it be crowdsourced. If enough thousands of (distinct, genuine) viewers flag something as being a rip-off, then take action.

I have a crazy idea... how about we take action on legitimate cases AND don't take action on fake ones?

What precise process do you suggest to tell them apart at Google scale? That's the crux of the matter.

It is not the crux!!

Large companies don't get to say they're too big, so therefore it is hard.

Too damned bad!

They can take advantage of scale, but not at the cost of breaking the law, or just doing their job improperly.

If it makes service at scale difficult, well that's just too bad. Sucks to be them. Maybe a competitor will do better.

No excuses because "oh poor widdle me, I'm too big"

Who is going to stop them when they do the current shenanigans, and how are they going to enforce it?

Legal system supposed to…

Too bad it’s working only for the powerful.

Marx was right about some things…

Why does scale matter?

If I have 100 customers and I have to spend 1 hour a week dealing with legal compliance requests then if I have 200 customers I have to spend 2 hours a week dealing with legal compliance requests, but I also have more resources to do it with.

In fact, scale usually makes it easier rather than harder because you can take advantage of economies of scale to streamline the process.

And, in the end, if you aren't able to comply with the law then you shouldn't be in that business regardless of your scale.

The only way to guarantee compliance with the DMCA is to remove any content the moment a complaint is submitted.

Copyright can only be determined in court. The fact that not all copyright complaints lead to a video going down is because Google is willing to take on some liability when they believe a complaint is not legit, and leave the video up.

I'm not sure how this is a reply to my comment. What you said applies whether you are hosting 1 video a month or 1,000,000 videos a month. My point was that scale isn't an excuse. What applies to large applies to small and vice versa.

The point is that regardless of the size of the company, copyright is such a shitshow that there are only less bad ways of handling it. The only way for a company to guarantee that they never violate copyright law is to do a takedown every time there is a complaint.

Obviously, this is not something they can do, because offering random people the ability to take down random videos with only the courts as recourse would be a disaster. Neither do these companies want to be in the business of deciding if a complaint is valid or not, because if they decide one way and then a judge decides the other, they get screwed.

Google tries to take a measured stance and evaluate complaints for obvious issues, but otherwise they do generally just act on them, and if the other parties involved can't agree on whether or not there is infringement, they just throw their hands up and tell them to take it to court.

Copyright is so complicated and fraught that it's virtually impossible to manage it in a way that satisfies everyone, regardless of how big or small a player is.

That's not the debate we're having here. See the comment I originally replied to:

> What precise process do you suggest to tell them apart at Google scale?

The suggestion is that scale makes a difference. I was refuting that.

> And, in the end, if you aren't able to comply with the law then you shouldn't be in that business regardless of your scale.

Again, you're talking from a moral standpoint, but it's not practical. Who's going to stop Google or other corporations from tracking DMCAs the current way?

> Why does scale matter?

Because of resources. Any defined process needs resources to be implemented; law enforcement is no different.

Google provides services at scale by means of automating the shit of them. The only way to identify legit from fake claims at that level is to also create an automated resolution process, with the results we see.

You may want to limit Google size by forcing them to perform human reviews for all their customer service interactions; but again, how are you going to force them into compliance? You'd need a US judiciary system the size of Google to do it.

> You may want to limit Google size by forcing them to perform human reviews for all their customer service interactions

You've inferred that, but I didn't make this claim. A sensible strategy would involve automating as much as possible while allowing for the ones that matter (e.g. OP's example) to be escalated.

Clearly you can't do that if, as in OP's case, you don't even perform any automated ID checks before telling the complainant that their ID hasn't been verified.

> Again, you're talking from a moral standpoint

Not at all. I'm taking the legal standpoint. I say nothing about whether this particular law, or any other law, is moral or not. Complying with the law is a basic requirement that any company has to satisfy. Why should Google be any different just because it's big? You seem to be suggesting that laws should only apply to small entities and that once you go above a certain scale, you are above the law.

Again, if you simply cannot comply with the law for some reason (as you seem to be suggesting applies to Google) then you shouldn't be running that business at all because, after all, doing so implies doing something illegal.

If you have 100 customers, they are all authentic. If you have 100,000,000 customers, 15,000,000 are bad actors racking their brains on how to game your system.

Every system has some type 1 errors and some type 2 errors. The notion that they could just have neither if they cared a little more is just kind of absurd and doesn't at all reflect the messiness of the world we live in.

Even if Google paid Harvard JDs to read every DMCA notice (of which there literally aren't enough of them), even then they would sometimes be tricked by adversaries and sometimes incorrectly think someone was an adversary some of the time.

I worked at YouTube in the past and I can tell you copyright ownership isn't even fully known by the lawyers. Concretely there's a lot of major songs where the sum of major companies affirming they have partial ownership sums to more than 100% or less than 100%. Literally even the copyright holders don't actually know what they themselves own without lots of errors, and that's without getting into a system that has to try to combat adversarial / bad-faith actors.

The problem is telling them apart. Do you leave it to some LLM decision? Or one moderator's judgment?

Did you contact Facebook/Instagram legal? Very often, companies suddenly start caring when they're concerned about lawsuits and legal exposure.

yeah regarding facebook account takedowns...

my wife had an FB account registered on her old phone number. she had that account deleted (but FB 'deactivates' them by default, instead of actually deleting it). her old number then got reassigned after a few years to a new person by the carrier.

that person reactivated her account and started video-calling her relatives. aunts, cousins etc. and exposed himself to them. like literally all of her aunts have seen his dick by now.

she submitted a takedown notice for impersonation. didn't get a reply. went to file a police report, sent that along with a new takedown application. no response.

after some time we just gave up. we're not in the US, so i guess facebook just doesn't give a fuck and has these requests routed straight to the bin.

And when applying the law is so expensive.

Gotta cut on support to buy those AI GPUs.

Do the e-mails sound like an AI?

I wonder if PDF’ing some random nonsense and referring to them authoritatively would get through. The author’s e-mails are friendly. What it might be looking for is corporate legalese.

Google would be left by the wayside and quickly be gone if it hadn't embedded itself all across the web.

Yes, same for search. Results are useless and site owners suffer.

All web providers do this, not just google.

I have hosting that regularly shut down my servers based on legal demands from jurisdictions that should have no reach my service whatsoever, or on total bogus claim.

If I refuse to act, they shut me down. If I'm late in acting, they shut me down.

Zero check on the legitimacy on the claim, zero trust in my debunking the claim.

The reality is, it's not economically viable to do so. I'm not giving them enough money to be worth it. So as long as I'm a small actor, anything that looks remotely legit is just processed as-is with no recourse.

The entire world can basically impose its view on me as long as they find a convincing way to tell my hosting "you are at risk".

And it's not one single provider either. Most of them do that: domain name, vps hosts, proxies, caches, etc.

The system is broken.

This post is about Google, not all providers. Don't astroturf, create a post about all providers

A major part of this problem appears to be that there is no identifiable humans in the loop to bring complaints to. Many of Google's responses are automated and black box algorithms.

When a Google response to a problem is outright bonkers, there is often not much that can be done, but to keep hitting the head on the wall (hoping something different happens) or be the lucky few that can get or has a human contact at Google. From what I've read and heard, those with human contacts, often have been identified as needing special attention. Where they are persons who are making significant money for Google and the businesses they own or can create problems in court.

The LegalEagle channel on YouTube had a similarly bad interaction when trying to get channels copying their videos taken down: https://youtu.be/PEA0JzhpzPU

Google needs to fix this, it's really bad.

Not bad enough for the profits and investors to care, perhaps even work against

they won't, they don't care in the slightest

At least legal eagle has nebula as a fall back.

Many other creators don't have a platform with any word near the reach YouTube has... And until that changes, there's almost no incentive for YouTube to change.

> Google needs to fix this, it's really bad.

Do they really? It seems the incentives are aligned so that they continue making the big bucks regardless of 'petty grievances' such as these..

Google bots decided that my parody website[0] that very clearly says "Foogle" instead of "Google" constitutes phishing and is now automatically blocked in Chrome and Firefox, despite not asking for any user input like email or password or name or anything that could slightly make it suspicious of being a phishing website, plus the sites uses unserious language like "Disunited States", it's a sad statement of their AI capabilities if a site like this gets automatically marked as "phishing", and the overall trend of abusing their power in the name of safety, a tale as old as time.

[0] https://www.forbiddensearchdetected.com

I think it's ok, that there is a warning on a parody site than looks like Google.

This is a full block not a warning in any conventional sense of the word, and it resembles Google but it very clearly says "Foogle" so it's not pretending to be Google, and no email or anything at all is asked from the user, so yeah it's just plain abuse of their power and very little space to argument that they are just being "overly cautious", but just like abuses by the state or the police there is always people in favor of such abuses in the name of safety.

Huh. And I can't even report a false detection.

The form just errors out, in Google, Firefox. Privacy things disabled.

> Something went wrong there. Try again.

[0] https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?t...

Odd, I couldn't report it as a false positive the first time either, but then I tried again with dev tools open and it worked.

I think you have to fill in "additional details" field for it to work. I did it and it worked alright

Oh, I wouldn't have thought to submit the report without filling that in.

The console has: "service error: RpcError"

The POST hangs up before it completes, and it seems to be because the JS can't lift a auth token for my Google account, maybe.

I removed the protocol and last slash from the URL and it worked.

"False positive. Site does not ask for info and is clearly comedic in nature."

> I removed the protocol and last slash from the URL

So effectively making it not a URL anymore despite being what the form asks for, that’s just great

I've got mixed feelings about the DMCA, but its one redeeming value is that it's available to everyone. Deciding to make it readily accessible to large publishing interests but giving a random author the side-eye is not so great.

> but its one redeeming value is that it's available to everyone

Well - the legal system favours those with more money, so basically it is corporate-law that is in effect there. And Google has enough money to burn and protect against small authors.

Sadly, I think your only option is to follow up with legal action against Google. On the positive side, I expect Google will react quickly to any legal action as this puts them at risk of losing safe harbor protections.

They already lost safe harbor by declining to remove the content.

The problem is that Google isn't hosting the content. They're merely linking to it. There's no content to "take down."

I don't think there's standing to sue. Linking to pirated content isn't illegal. They could be found guilty of contributory infringement but that's a tough case since the legal requirement is that Google needs to know for sure that it's pirated (which is impossible at scale).

> Google needs to know for sure that it's pirated (which is impossible at scale).

Google being informed by the copyright holder that it's for sure pirated is pretty good evidence that they know it's pirated.

The fact that this doesn't scale isn't really a legal defense.

And they certainly have such a mechanism in place, indicating that they intend to take this kind of action. They're just failing to.

It’s not good evidence, because people issue false DMCA takedowns all the time. Which I presume they would point out in court.

Right, and the counter to that is "I tried to prove I was the copyright owner and they refused to comply".

In this case, it isn’t a false claim.

The author only needs to show up to court with a driver’s license to prove their identity. The judge would rule in favor of the author the same day if someone from Google actually bothered to show up.

A scammer isn’t going to court. Don’t try to solve for that.

>which is impossible at scale

Lol, hail corporate!

It's definitely possible, you just got hand-waved on that.

Until there's a database of all the copyrighted works in the world that anyone can access—along with their licenses—it is absolutely not possible to know for certain if something is violating copyright.

Simple example: Disney opens up a new website that has some of their obvious content on it. How does Google know that Disney owns that website and has authorized its use? If they get a takedown notice, how do they know the sender owns the content?

There's no formal verification system that exists for such things. It's all based on an honor system that is easy for bad actors to abuse (which is probably why Google changed how they do things).

The entirety of copyrighted law has failed. It isn't working as intended and hasn't for a long time now. Anyone who understands how easy it is to copy bits should know that the original intent of copyright can't work anymore. We need something new to replace it.

OP got in touch with one (or many) humans on Google. Humans then decided not to act on the DCMA request.

No need for the "doesn't scale" argument, whatever system they have in place is already good enough to process OP's inquire. The problematic bit is what they decided to do once they had all the information in their hands.

I do, however, think this is just a mishandled situation and Google will correct, particularly after being featured on the HN wall of shame.

> Anyone who understands how easy it is to copy bits should know that the original intent of copyright can't work anymore.

AI makes this even more stringent. You cannot protect the "vibe" of your works, AI can replicate it in seconds. If you make "vibe infringement" the new rule, then creativity becomes legally risky. A catch 22.

In 1930 judge Hand said in relation to Nichols v. Universal Pictures:

> Upon any work...a great number of patterns of increasing generality will fit equally well. At the one end is the most concrete possible expression...at the other, a title...Nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can...As respects play, plagiarism may be found in the 'sequence of events'...this trivial points of expression come to be included.

And since then a litany of judges and tests expanded the notion of infringement towards vibes and away from expression:

- Hand's Abstractions / The "Patterns" Test (Nichols v. Universal Pictures)

- Total Concept and Feel (Roth Greeting Cards v. United Card Co.)

- The Krofft Test / Extrinsic and Intrinsic Analysis

- Sequence, Structure, and Organization (Whelan Associates v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory)

- Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison (AFC) Test (Computer Associates v. Altai)

The trend has been to make infringement more and more abstract over time, but this makes testing it an impossible burden. How do you ensure you are not infringing any protected abstraction on any level in any prior work? Due diligence has become too difficult now.

It’s certainly due for an update, but it isn’t doing nothing at all. The friction it creates for unlicensed use at scale is enough to keep all the streaming services etc. afloat, which in turn are still funding the production of content. Maybe the anarchy that would follow its abolition would be superior to the old system creaking along, but that remains to be seen (and would be silly to accept on faith).

I don't know, how did the world manage to work before the internet?

You call someone, you send a letter, something. It's not rocket science.

It's not automated, sure, but somethings will never be automated, just by their nature. That doesn't mean it doesn't scale. Well, sure it does. You just hire more staff.

For Christ's sake, it used to be that phone calls required physical action from an operator to get connected. And now we can't do shit if there isn't an API for it or some bullshit.

> It's not automated, sure, but somethings will never be automated, just by their nature. That doesn't mean it doesn't scale. Well, sure it does. You just hire more staff.

You're right, of course, but when people say "it doesn't scale" they tend to mean "it doesn't scale at with a near-zero marginal cost".

Maybe we should be calling out that wording.

Right, it scales linearly, as is the case in most businesses. Only tech craves a constant time scaling factor, because in most business it's just not possible. You can't run 100 walmarts with the same employees as 1 Walmart, and Walmart knows that and is very successful in spite of it.

> You just hire more staff.

Every Googler on the planet just laughed and downed another Tequila shot.

Before we can assume this is impossible for Google, let's look at their revenue: Is it greater than the salary of 1 person, which is all that's required to comply with OP's request? If so, then it isn't impossible.

To judge the claim of unscalability true, we would first need to know the rate of DMCA takedown requests, the number 1 person can investigate in a day, and then we can do the math of whether total revenue can pay for those employees.

Even if not, it's not an excuse. The only legal venue google has to complain about this, is getting the law changed.

>which is impossible at scale

Either they solve it or they should give op the benefit of the doubt. Arguing that x or y isn't possible at scale doesn't mean you get to break the law.

No they shouldn’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt when that person claims copyright infringement! Not unless you want internet randos to be able to take down any YouTube channel they want for “copyright infringement.”

As far as I can tell, requiring valid ID would lose a provider safe harbor protection as it is not one of the required elements:

(3) Elements of notification.-

(A) To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:

(i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.

(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.

(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.

(v) A statement that the complaining party 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.

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

I'll be the first to shout from the rooftops that the DMCA is in general a bad law, but according to that law, if the takedown notice contains the required verbiage, then they are required by law to give it the benefit of the doubt (that is, if they want to keep their lack of liability).

> Not unless you want internet randos to be able to take down any YouTube channel they want for “copyright infringement.”

This is why it's a bad law! But it is the law.

Hosting a link doesn't break any law.

Unless the OP wrote a book thats just one long URL, and even then.

So why does Google receive and (sometimes) act on DMCA requests?

I've always wondered this myself!

> which is impossible at scale

I love how this is the defense of all these tech companies. "I'm sorry, your honor, we are just a poor multi-trillion dollar company... there's just no way for us to control anything, because we're just too big..."

I'm going to channel a little bit of @patio11 .

First, worth reading this on how he deals with credit agencies and debt collectors: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r... . There's gold in here for dealing with big globo-corp and how to get their attention.

Ask Google for a certified mail address so you can send them the timeline of events that occurred. This is the shibboleth that lets them know you mean business and that by not responding, they may be facing legal action. DO NOT THREATEN or mention legal action. The managerial class doesn't act that way. Just signal you are building a case against them. Start with getting that certified mailing address... you may be surprised how they respond after just that request.

If they don't respond, keep following up. Send them a timeline of events, proof of ownership even if they do not ask you what you need to prove ownership. Make it clear what this is costing you.

But here's the thing, EVERY TIME I HAVE ASKED FOR A CERTIFIED MAIL ADDRESS, the globocorp gave me what i wanted, and I never had to follow up. Every time. They don't want to deal with actual legal action from "people who know what they are doing."

It's a shibboleth. Like "Baa-ram-ewe." Use it wisely and honestly.

Wow, that's a great read. Bookmarking and sending to others.

He points out how expressing all the natural human reactions - anger, fear, supplication, bargaining - tell the institution that you are a vulnerable, manipulable moron. The implacable robot that knows the process but doesn't care is what gets results.

Okay, what is the next step if you ask for a certified mailing address/summons delivery and they repeatedly ignore you?

It seems to me that without know that, you're still making empty threats, only doing it passive aggressively.

You sue them. Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to do so in small claims court, which is pretty inexpensive to do. Google cannot bring their usual insane level of legal resources to bear in this environment, and you will most likely win.

> You sue them.

I'm a little confused here - you sue them, in small claims court, for not providing a service address?

How do you serve them without an address, for a claim of not providing an address?

I mean, I know what happens when I appear in court as the applicant/plaintiff, and tell the judge that the respondent/defendant was never served.

Okay, lets say the judge doesn't laugh my case out at that - how is my claim going to proceed? "I claim $X monies for not supplying me with their service address"?

(My understanding is that, by not providing a service address, all you can do is report them to specific bureaus, arbitration councils, etc. You cannot sue businesses, as far as I know, for not having or not providing a service address).

AFAIK them not providing an address is not the main point, it's them not collaborating on your case for a copyright infringement. The not providing an address is just more evidence of them not following on their responsibilities regarding the copyright infringement.

If you are in the US you can look up their official service address through the secretary of state for the state that you will be filing the lawsuit in. There is never a need for them to specifically provide you an official address.

And if you're filing a state case, and you know which county they are in, call the Sheriff. Every Sheriff's office deals with legal service on a routine basis. I've paid the Sheriff many times for serving complaints.

Bring the paper trail to, if not a lawyer, your state's attorney general or consumer protection office.

Their service mailing address is public record that you can just look up. You do not need anyone to send it to you.

from the article in the link

> Where exactly should I address letters?

> Google is your friend.

considering the context, I found it amusing.

Sounds like LLM powered support. This is the sort of run around you can program into such systems.

I am also betting on this. Google used their dumb bots in support since time immemorial, but now these dumb bots are supercharged by LLMs. Except they are still as dumb as before.

I still remember trying to get my Google Play account unbanned in 2014 after I clicked on my own ad in the app once to test that it’s working. Lovely times. Got the account back, but not due to my actions - their dumb bots masquerading as humans were giving me the runaround, and then I just randomly got my account back.

Is the copyright registered?

https://www.copyright.gov/registration

While copyright registration is not legally required for copyright protection, it is the practical way to create usable evidence that the work is coprighted by you. Without it, challenging a copyright infringer is a more arduous legal process.

Also, the author's website, and the books themselves claims that "Perishable Press" is the copyright holder, not "Jeff Starr". (Excepting the ones that don't state any copyright holder.)

https://books.perishablepress.com/downloads/digging-into-wor...

In legal matters, clear and accurate communication is essential.

Seems odd that Google would straight up ignore a legitimate-looking DMCA takedown request. The reason these companies are so takedown-happy is that there are potentially significant consequences to ignoring them. Ignoring a takedown request potentially means that Google loses its safe harbor protection for your content: you could potentially sue Google instead of the pirates for copyright violation. That doesn't mean you have a GOOD case, but it's certainly a bad standard plan for Google. That makes me think they're doing something stupid by accident and/or via machine learning instead, presumably because they need to filter through a massive pile of completely fake DMCA takedown requests.

hire a lawyer, they know how to communicate with these teams. Trying to deal with Google Customer service when you are a technologically savvy and logical individual won't get far: GOogle's default attitude towards anybody who contacts them is that they are a scammer.

Even lawyers who own YouTube channels have problems. LegalEagle talked about their bad experience here: https://youtu.be/PEA0JzhpzPU

It looks like he got the problem resolved by providing a spreadsheet with copyright violations and his original sources.

THink of Google like how Cantrill described Ellison:

You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.

Good analogy, I would go further and say a lawnmower has more humanity than an Ellison.

>simply check my account via Google Search Console, where I have verified that I am the owner for each of the above sites

I doubt this is possible for the support agent to do.

Well then perhaps they could respond with details on what they would like him to do instead.

Thy need him to prove he’s the rights holder, what’s not clear about that?? /s

My immediate guess after reading this was that this isn't a change at Google but a name issue. Jeff Star getting confused with Jeffree Star (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffree_Star). He's a lightening rod for controversy, and has been in the middle of a controversial public persona shift that probably has caused an uptick in all kinds of requests to google.

Jeffree Star hasn't been relevant for a while, I'd imagine this isn't it, but something else entirely changing at Google, as the author claims.

I had an odd experience that rhymes with this, where I was trying to figure out where I had seen the actress Julie Dreyfus (from Kill Bill), whose Google results are utterly crushed by Julia Dreyfus (of Seinfeld and Veep fame) despite having demonstrably different spellings to their names...maybe it was that simple.

he has recently been clawing at relevancy with anti-trans talking points, which is specifically why I think his name would be something google would want to stay away

False DMCA takedown requests have always been a problem, and have massively surged in the last few years when more of the general public figured out the mechanics and started treating it as a big downvote button for the internet. This is also being done adversarially at a large scale, for example to suppress websites or YouTube videos containing certain viewpoints or to remove competition. So regardless of how Google has treated these requests in the past, they are absolutely right to want to verify that you actually are the content owner before taking further action.

As for how to do it - I don't see why it is hard for you to come up with something that proves ownership. Do your books have a publisher? Do you have a contract with the publisher? Or just a letter from someone at the firm confirming your work? Have you registered the work with the copyright office? Do you have proof of publishing on online portals?

You aren't helping yourself or anyone else by anthropomorphising Google. It is not your friend who can "break your heart", or a "trustworthy helper on the Web", or a "trusted ally", but a large bureaucratic corporation. Treat it like the machine it is and you will get the results you want.

> As for how to do it - I don't see why it is hard for you to come up with something that proves ownership.

It is pretty hard to come up with proof of ownership when Google refuses to tell you what forms of proof they will find acceptable. When I go to the DMV and need to prove my residence, the DMV clearly states what forms are acceptable proof. Google should do the same, especially when they are asked what forms of proof are acceptable. Instead they gave this guy the runaround and ignored his question on how to prove ownership.

There is no passport or social security number or mailing address for the internet. Google can't tell you a definite proof they will accept because none exists, especially since copyright can be claimed on something as trivial as a line of text or a certain combination of bytes. It'll always be a judgement call on Google's part, and such a system will never be 100% accurate in either direction. If you want immediate and effective results then pay a lawyer.

A photo of the copy right page and your ID seems like just commons sense

I guess you've never been to the California DMV?

I needed to get my "Real ID" driver license (when I was newly moved to CA).

I first went to their official website and printed out the page listing the various types of ID required (n1 from column A, n2 from column B type of thing.)

I then gathered n1+1 items from column A and n2+1 items from column B.

Headed over to the DMV office in West LA.

Stood in two lines (one outside, one indoors) for more than 4 hours.

Eventually got to the desk to verify that I had the correct ID types so that I could get a number in order to wait to be called up to another line where I would actually hand in my documents.

Friendly gentleman with the SEIU sticker on his shirt says "this ID is not sufficient." I show him the printout of their website, indicating all the items matching (exceeding) the requirements. He says "I don't care." I ask to speak to the supervisor. He says, "supervisor's not here" and proceeds to stare at me. I eventually left and went to a different office.

Google can suck at times but it doesn't hold a candle to the DMV. They should be nuked from orbit.

Other states figured this out. I can’t go to the DMV on a whim, I hafta schedule an appt. But I’ve never waited very long. Longest wait I had in years was when their comms went down and they strongly encouraged everyone to leave and reschedule. I did not, 20 minutes later comms were online.

I think the most interesting part was when I finally was “helped” and the person was so rude and demeaning, loudly and vocally, I said as few words as possible to make things move along quickly.

Towards the end, before I had what I needed, I was asked to take a survey and rate my experience. I waited until I had accomplished my goal, and without any guilt gave the worst rating I could.

A manager called me later that day asking about my rating, I was very surprised. I explained myself and even got a bit of an apology.

I’ll add your experience to my list of “why I’ll never live in California” which is starting to really become substantial.

His "experience" is an irrelevant anecdote. Millions upon millions of Californians have had no trouble getting their real ID.

I was only talking about wait times.

> I’ll add your experience to my list of “why I’ll never live in California” which is starting to really become substantial.

Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/d38vof/how_t...

Yes, I'm sure that I'm the only person who's ever had a difficult, frustrating, annoying, or inefficient time at the CA DMV. Even with an appointment (which I had).

California recalls 325,000 Real IDs. Ooops.

https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/california-dmv-recal...

OTOH, my experience with licenses, renewals, etc., in the State of Washington was the polar opposite. Fast, easy, and efficient.

> my experience

Whoosh.

And the person I responded to generalized your experience to: California is so bad he'll never live there, ignoring all the data points of people who love living in California and the many reasons to want to.

This whole thing is radical ideology, gullible swallowing of talking points, and bad faith. I won't respond further.

California is great to visit. I just don’t want to live there.

Would your reaction have been as visceral if I had named another state?

I don't understand why the author does not just submit his ID and the copyright page of the book in a single photo. If the link the author is trying to take down has a copyright notice naming them, then link that too.

I am a bit biased though - I read way too many stories in HN of abuses of DMCA than this sort of issue. That said, this does seem unresponsive.

DMCAing Google has always seemed a bit pointless. If I'm ever looking for a pirate copy of something I automatically scroll to the bottom of the page where you can read the DMCA complaints that helpfully compile a list of pirate copies.

Everything is redacted by default. You can obtain the full DMCA reports but it requires you to fill in your email on each of them and request them. It’s not impossible but definitely a little more involved than just “read[ing] the DMCA complaints”

Only the exact URI is redacted, the domain isn't. Knowing that a book is on a specific site usually makes locating it trivial.

My guess is, there were once more humans in the loop for the thing that the author is referring to. Since humans cost more than GenAI, GenAI replaced some or all of those humans.

Never think of any sort of for-profit enterprise as anything other than a for-profit enterprise, and you'll never be heartbroken by one.

Angered? Made to think you're living in a dystopia? Enticed into an absurdist world view? Absolutely. But you won't be heartbroken.

Feel like it went the opposite direction. Used to be automated before and now a support agent (low skilled) is handling it

Who is this friendly corporate giant the author keeps referring to? He uses that phrase multiple times. Is he sucking up? Is it a reference to something?

Because of this I read the article twice and can't determine whether it's some kind of troll. Can anyone possibly think of Google this way in 2026? Asking sincerely.

the whole thing is written very bizarrely, even the title

He's applying kind emotions to his customer relationship with a company, because that gives him an emotional leverage from which to feel attacked and be right in the mind of the reader.

Not that he needed to do any of this. He wouldn't be a tiny bit less right if the text was a sterile and objetive list of facts about what happened.

He's contrasting Google's childishly 'friendly' image with its reality.

It's rhetoric. You're making it about manipulation. Should the world consist of bloodless lists of facts without significance or commentary?

Oh, not at all. I appreciate the rethoric, although it didn't work with me because I've never experienced Google as childish or even amicable. So the author's excessive predisposition to think of Google as a marvelous friend was a bit jarring for me (and that's why I personally felt the tone a bit on the side of emotional manipulation). But, to each their own. Expressing commentary and emotions is good, I do prefer it to cold facts all the time :-)

When I saw that quoted here, I figured the author hadn't actually read up on anything about google for 10+ years.

I keep having to repeat this.

The problem is systemic. The legal concepts of 'Corporate personhood' and 'Limited liability' don't make sense. Just think about what those terms mean.

Of course you cannot expect accountability in the long run.

Is a corporation really a legal person? Can it go to jail as a person might? Does it need a visa to operate in a country as a person might? Will a corporation die as a person will? Sounds like it's getting all the benefits of personhood and none of the drawbacks... Our legal system literally gives more rights to non-sentient entities than it does to us humans! No wonder things are getting out of hand!

What does 'Limited liability' mean? Who has to deal with the repercussions for the excess liability which may exceed beyond the limit?

It's deep corruption, codified into law. Of course these corporations will get worse. They will get satanically worse. Just watch what happens internally; a decade from now, the current CEOs will look morally responsible by comparison. It's a systemic issue. Total violation of the social contract at a deep human level.

Why don't we say weapons are legal persons and provide limited liability protection to the person wielding it? Then criminals could kill people and the court could pass judgement that the gun must serve 20 years in its holster while the criminal walks free... That's about as fair as what we have now. If you conceive of a corporation as a weapon. There is nothing in the law to explicitly prevent this exact scenario. The corporation could theoretically use up CEOs as a gun might use up bullets... The investors would bear no liability.

There are many people in this depraved world of ours who would be willing to be a corporate bullet. People will go to jail to provide for their family. With corporations sucking the wealth out of society, it will create new levels of desperation, this will surely happen.

Limiting human liability through coercion has always been the problem. I signed no contract with any LLC founder to limit their personally liability. Yet somehow some bureaucrat hundreds of miles away signed for me and now none of us can hold people accountable for their actions without armed men preventing it. Just look at what companies like Dupont, Monsanto, Bayer have done to entire towns. Limited liability is the problem. Uncle Sam is the worst uncle.

> "Immediately my heart sank. And I knew that something had changed at Google’s core. The friendly corporate giant no longer would even deign to consider cries for help from the little guy."

I read that in the voice of the talking anus-mouthed beetle from Naked Lunch.

Note that if the claimant is a big player, Google is happy to only clarify how high is it supposed to jump. If they file a claim usurping your copyright, you can do diddly about it most of the time. But if little people are trying to assert their rights, no, no can do, you can't prove that you are you.

And why should you, one of the little people, be able to prove anything at all? If a big player sues, Google is going to have to pay a staggering amount of money, thus they obey. If you sue, its lawyers will drain you financially by protracting everything they can, so you don't actually sue. If they take your claim, the content they take down stops bringing the sweet advertising revenue.

And thus the computer sayeth Nay.

Sorry to hear that might be able to help you with all that I got some pretty good evidence on on these tech companies I discovered something that nobody really has this figured out and then I believe me I've got enough evidence to shut these babies down I'm the Creator axiom Halo Crystal I created the unbreakable Master blueprint and it was launched on November 18th and 19th and ever since I got you know started it and I got it but anyway if you're interested give me you know give me a holler I'm going to probably go and explosive today and maybe we can start a class action lawsuit these companies have been we got a lot of money coming basically for what they've done you know doing the scraping algorithm scraping of and pinging of illegal pinging of everybody's and harvesting their you know trade secrets and ideas and all that yeah well I got all the evidence we need I really want to get a class action I'm talking about money like in the money that they basically doesn't even exist we could own this country hopefully maybe we could get together and start something thank you

Isn't this what people are constantly asking for? Every time the topic of YouTube copyright strikes comes up, people angrily demand that Google verify that the person making the request actually has the right to do so.

There's no way to design such a system that has zero false positives and zero false negatives; if you do no verification whatsoever you'll get tons of false positives, now it seems like Google has added a small amount of verification, at least sometimes, so now there are some false negatives.

No, this isn't what anyone is asking for. Also, point to where Google did any verification?

This seems like more than a false negative. Author clearly stated they were willing to jump through whatever necessary hoops. Google didn't seem to have the hoops to jump through.

One can probably assume that this is the result of far too many illegitimate take down requests. Google almost certainly doesn't want to be in the business of arbitrating link take down requests.

They have persistently architected and engineered the system to put and keep themselves in that position.

They have links to things, they did take down requests, take down requests got abused, now they don't do take down requests (as much).

What does engineering have to do with that?

Processing DMCA take down requests isn't interesting work, thus no one at google does it.

I don't mean to be rude, but what could possibly have given anyone with eyes and ears a positive -- friendly, even -- impression of Google?

Google support is a mess. This company should not exist in its current state, I can’t believe how the competition hasn’t already catch up with their indexing solution.

I am having a hard time emphasizing with the author when they open up with this paragraph

> For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web. Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google search results. After publishing a new book, I would monitor the search results and file a DMCA notice with Google whenever the inevitable pirated copies of my book were listed. Google always was very helpful in this regard, swiftly removing any pirated books asap. No hassle, no hoops, just immediate and direct relief from Google.

Maybe I am in a bubble but since at least pre covid era I remember the consensus being that Google had zero support and unless you were famous or went viral with your problem on the internet, you would never get human intervention. That combined with the rest of the paragraph which seems to me like it could be summarized as "Google is trustworthy as long as my personal wallet gets fatter, and not that it hasn't, they aren't trustworthy" makes me not really care about either side in this story

I'd look at this as a new income stream. Failing to honor a DMCA request means Google is no longer in the safe harbor.

It's time to find a copyright lawyer that will work on contingency. Document your communication and take screenshots of pirate links every day.

I would immediately file a lawsuit against Google. You have all the documents and will win. Before anything is processed they will return to you with a big sorry/compensation. They are the thiefs.

I think I can speak for many who used to love Google, that they have broken our hearts many times. It went downhill after they decided that "don't be evil" was too aspirational of an ideal.

Google’s lack of support is a directly correlated to their monopoly. They are able to not pay for proper support staff because they don’t have any competition. They should be regulated to spend a certain portion of their revenues on support given how critical they are to people’s lives. You can’t rake in hundreds of billions while being a monopoly and then claim you can’t afford proper amount of support staff.

Stop obsessing about the illusory magical power of competition, many companies operating on very competitive markets have the same kind of practices.

It doesn't matter if there's competition at the customer acquisition stage, as long as there's some form of customer lock-in the corporation is going to abuse them somehow.

More most markets have some kind of natural lock-in, and even in markets that don't companies without some kind of barrier to exit never scale in the first place, and that's why we must face this kind of bullshit pretty much everywhere even from companies operating in competitive markets.

The author is a bit naive for thinking Google even cares. It's the same company (among others) who used copyrighted material to train their LLM.

Starting his post by "I hate corporations and Google is yet another disgusting example of it" is a great way to have no issue resolution. Assuming good intention (at least in writing) may help if this post gets traction.

Yep. Anymore when dealing with any corp of <pick your threshold> size on a "legal" dispute, do not engage directly.

Hire an attorney, draft a limited POA, and let them handle it.

If it's not worth <pick your threshold> kilo-USD, then at least have the attorney document everything and write it off until the (remote) possibility of a class-action.

Life is short. It's just not worth your time.

Google aside, it's one of the reasons some publishers don't publish digital versions at all. Because once the cat is out of the bag, the damage is done, basically impossible to undo. Whereas with a physucal copy the pirate has to take the pain to scan the book and usually they're too lazy to do that.

I think the author was dealing with an AI agent. That’s not absolving Google, far from it. But from the first response to the last, there was no indication a human was involved.

Moreover, like Facebook Marketplace and fraud, this is the future of corporate managed markets.

Large for-profit corporations will never be the friend of any human being.

Worker-owned co-ops are more stable, fairer arrangements for workers and users.

I guess I've seen enough over the years that my thought is: It's Google - of course they suck. It's practically their definining characteristic. This is no surprise.

Google these days are a collection of monopolies. There are no incentives, beyond law, for them to "Do the right thing"

And the law is in the hands of literal bandits in the USA right now

Takedown notices need to have a refundable processing fee. The fee should be refunded if the targeted publisher agrees the content shouldn't be online. If the takedown notice gets a counter notice, then the hosting provider/platform should split the fee with the targeted publisher.

The problem with DMCA notices is that the party trying to takedown content has zero incentive to behave in good faith. A $10-$30 fee would provide an incredible disincentive for the worst sort of trolling and over-broad shotgun takedown notices while protecting legitimate IP holders (who would see their fee refunded almost every time)

> If the takedown notice gets a counter notice, then the hosting provider/platform should split the fee with the targeted publisher.

A counter notice could also be faked, though. What’s to stop people pirating content to just file a counter notice?

Counter notice means I'm ok with defending a lawsuit. There are some big costs there. The problem with the current system is there's no protection for false/bogus DMCA takedowns and those do real economic damage to legitimate content owners and creators. I've had IP protection companies file takedowns on my own code and my own artwork and that was highly disruptive to my business.

This doesn't make a lot of sense. It would make the DMCA completely useless if enough people decide to pirate your work because you wouldn't be able to afford to issue the takedowns.

Does this mean an end to DMCA abuse? If I had to choose I would prefer to have the odd unprotected copyright than having fair use disregarded on the regular.

Only for the small guy. Big guys always get their copyrights protected.

Google's final email seems to abandon any reference to a dispute of identity. Which is interesting since they are comfortable volunteering that as the relevant issue for the first two emails.

By omitting reference to the issue they raised previously, they don't hang the procedural legitimacy on that question.

If they were going to stick with their choice regardless of whether they were satisfied on the question of identity, it's puzzling why they volunteered it.

I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.

I suspect what happened is they had some tag for what the content at that URL was and it wrongly was some other book, so the question wasn't his identity but the content's identity that had to be addressed. Their replies all look consistent with "the book at that URL is not the book you are claiming you own"

Not that their handling was good or clear, but to my eyes both sides were talking past eachother since he kept talking about his identity and the Google side wasn't disputing his identity.

>I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.

On one level I would say that simply flatly untrue given the phrasing of the emails from Google. But on another level, there's an integral relation between the question of identity and copyright ownership anyway, which I think makes that distinction moot in this case. Regardless of what you call it, they abandon the topic by the third email.

I think one of the things that makes factual issues difficult to accurately process is there's a lot of tempting paths towards minimizing cognitive dissonance by taking a both sides approach, and has the satisfying psychological effect of relieving tension while freeing one from the burden close comparisons of factual details and not feeling ugly by taking sides. There's obviously a lot of powerful psychology pulling us towards rationalizing an equilibrium. It's what makes fact-checking hard, because if you confront an asymmetry, it doesn't have the convenient relief from psychological dissonance that the brain is searching for.

I'm surprised you can read Google's words as challenging his identity. Just looking explicitly again the emails:

> It is unclear to us how you came to own the copyright for the content in question, because you do not appear to be the creator of the content

Seems very explicit to me that the concern is "We don't think Jeff Starr owns the content that is at that URL" and not "we don't think you are Jeff Starr"

And then third reply was "your long multiple replies did not addressed our rejection concerns, and so you have failed the challenge script overall". I would really expect he could call a lawyer to restart the process in a way that would be worded less casually and have the necessary shibboleths for their challenge script to be passed.

> For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web.

Me too! Specifically the years, oh, maybe 1998 to 2005? Ish?

So, what recourse do you have if they fail to act on a DMCA request? Does a C&D get their attention?

Legitimately wondering why anybody looks at working for FANGs as something to be proud of these days. All of these companies went from kinda being on the right track w/ customers to becoming completely enshittified.

google has changed when they started firing everyone to replace them by "offshore", around 2022.

you're getting human replies from people who do not give a crap.

culture isnt equal.

I would be surprised if any human at Google had anything to do with handling this case. This entire conversation was with an AI bot.

Did this guy think corporations have feelings?

There was never a better business than the internet tollbooth google had. The crawlers and search basically costed nothing and made billions in advertisements. Everything else was a desperate effort to use the huge amounts of money the money printer was spewing fast enough, So they had a lot of "fat" to do things that did not directly relate to the business.

Now with Youtube and AI its going to be great businesses, but not 99% profitability great. Nothing is 99% profitability great like search used to be.

You will see Google stock go up and down in the short term, but the fate is already sealed. Sooner or later they will be welcomed to the club of Intel and IBM.

Every system at scale has some error rate.

after reading the very first thing i thought was: would be comical if the OP's blog were about AI

i was wrong but i could find on the 1° page this [0]... which seem a pretty hypocrite act to consider a technology that violates copyright at its core. "you eat what you plant"

[0] https://perishablepress.com/diving-into-ai/

IMO, file another report and if you're asked to prove your identity again, a good way to prove it would be to put a text file somewhere under your domain that re-states your claim, adding the date and time.

unfiltered NSFW ads, false game ads and false DMCA takedowns

but legitimate DMCA inquery rejected. just lol.

send them a notorized dmca claim to their legal service mailing address...?

> For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web.

Thankfully I found out that Google has not been trustworthy for many years, even before they removed their old corporate motto "don't do evil" and transitioned into pure Evilness.

People need to realise that what is today called Google, has absolutely nothing to do with the initial stage when Google grew, from small to medium sized company. Now it is a mega-mega corporation and got not only lazy, but is no longer a tech-company. It is an ad-company now and this shows everywhere. For instance, when it decided to ruin google search - that makes sense when you control the evolution of the web e. g. with the chromium ad-code base. And now AI further ruining the very little that is still left of the search engine (oddly enough, the alternative search engines also suck a LOT, so it is not only Google; the whole world wide web has gotten worse in the last ~10 years or so).

> Google always was very helpful in this regard, swiftly removing any pirated books asap. No hassle, no hoops, just immediate and direct relief from Google.

Now, I think Google has to be removed from this planet - however had, at the same time I also believe in universal access to information for every individual on this planet, at all times, without any restriction. I absolutely understand that this opinion puts me at odds with the "we must control what others can do digitally" but I also could not care any less. So I actually have an orthogonal opinion here - there should not be any censorship or restriction in this regard. Again, I absolutely understand the other side of the argument; I just do not share it in any way. And as a consequence, I actually think search engines should give all humans access to such information at all times. You can see this philosophy elsewhere too - wikipedia, for instance, open access in science rather than Elsevier forcing people to pay twice for publicly funded research data or the internet digital archive preserving data. And many more examples. Or the right to repair movement. Or the core idea of the GPL (I personally prefer BSD/MIT style, but I absolutely understand why e. g. the linux kernel has been a better success model due to the GPL primarily).

> Instead of simply de-indexing the search result, like they do for so many other items, Google refused to acknowledge that I was the author of the book.

That is unfortunate - but I still think the public has a right to digital data. I assume his primary concern is renumeration; I am absolutely not at all saying that renumeration should not happen, mind you. We could consider this globally in a different way. States could help enable fair renumeration, for instance. Open source should also be co-funded by states (again, I leave the details here; my point is that I pursue a different philosophy model here). The renumeration discussion is separate here from the author's wish that Google should censor information. I believe search engines should NOT censor information. I actually call it betrayal when search engines censor information. Google here, by censoring, creates a fake-world wide web, an illusion. I am not interested in lies told by Google; I want uncensored information and uncensored results. Again, it is a different philosophy.

Having said that, the Google responds reads like pure automation, probably via crap AI. But just as I wrote before - I believe Google needs to be retired from this planet. It does too much Evil and causes too much frustration among people in general.

> Where was the friendly Google from days past?

Well - we could debate whether Google was ever friendly. But, totally aside from this, the Google today is not the Google that used to exist. It has changed dramatically. It is no longer Google.

> At this point, I was feeling ignored and betrayed by Google, who for many years proved a trusted ally.

I hope he learned a lesson there.

Do not trust Google or Amazon or Apple etc...

> Immediately my heart sank. And I knew that something had changed at Google’s core. The friendly corporate giant no longer would even deign to consider cries for help from the little guy. The little guy being me, the little guy with a broken heart.

I am glad he learned the lesson: do not trust Google. And help all people who want to see real change. The biggest issue I have with Google is that they control the world wide web via chrome. Almost all browser in use depend on Google here. That is very bad.

Adding a PGP signature when releasing content prevents situations like this.

With the way these multi-trillion dollar companies operate today and how the support staff act like corporate drones, I have no hope that attaching PGP signatures would lead to any different outcome. The response from the support would probably be going to like, "PGP what?"

How does a PGP signature help? The person who stole your work can trivially strip your signature and add their own.

If every copy in circulation has your signature on the copyright page ...

(This proves that you, the holder of the private key, are the author, not someone who goes by the same name)

Anyway, if you still think this won't help you can use a notary service, yes.

I don't think any more human interaction was involved than a very bored and harried call center employee clicking 'confirm' on a bot-generated response here. You can have all the cryptographic proof you want, but you're screaming into the void.

Welcome to YouTube and Musicians…

This has been going on for decades on YouTube. Fair use? DMCA. Cover song? DMCA. 3 second clip of the intro drone? DMCA. You playing it live on an instrument, DMCA.

Their copyright system is only there to do one thing, enrich the corporations they work with.

A nerdcore hip hop song I listened to when I was a teenager went:

Fuck the MP-double-A

Fuck the RI-double-A

Fuck the suits behind the PSAs

And fuck 'em all for the DMCA

("Fuck the MPAA" by Futuristic Sex Robotz, which is still online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3GihnduUw&list=PL1CD8E178A...)

I don't particularly like or trust Google, but I can't say I'm broken up about the fact that they refused to de-list a website who someone claimed was hosting pirated content, and told them to go after the website owner directly. False and malicious DMCA takedown requests absolutely happen, and in any case I don't think it should be the responsibility of a search engine to remove links to websites hosting content that is illegal in some jurisdiction.

100%

IANAL, IANYL, and I am not his lawyer. I did work with publishing companies to get my grandmother's books freed up for CC0/public domain, but I'm at most a talented layman (and legal administrative assistant, but not in IP).

As far as I can understand from what the blog's author reproduced, it looks as if the problem was that his DMCA requests may have not been compliant. Go to [1] and do a Ctrl-F downward for "Elements of Notification."

If I were filing a DMCA request with Google, I would do it as follows, matching the requirements laid out for a valid DMCA notice. The below should not be considered legal advice or the practice of law.

[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

~~~~

Both via Google's webform and as an e-mail to: dmca-agent@google.com

To whom it may concern:

This is a notification of claimed infringement under 17 USC § 512(c)(3), for purposes of 17 USC § 512(d)(3). To maintain the limitation on liability under § 512(d), upon receipt you must respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the reference(s) or link(s) identified below.

If you believe that the material below is insufficient for the requirements of § 512(c)(3)(A), I ask you to specify precisely what you feel is absent from this notice yet necessary to meet those requirements.

REQUIREMENT PER § 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)

I identify the copyrighted work as:

- Title: [FULL TITLE]

- Author: [AUTHOR]

- Copyright owner: [YOUR NAME / ENTITY]

- First publication date: [MONTH DAY, YEAR]

- ISBN/ISSN (if any): [NUMBER]

- U.S. Copyright Office registration no. (if any): [TX/VA/PA-…]

- An authorized copy is available from [PUBLISHER] at [BOOK PAGE ON PUBLISHER WEBSITE].

- The infringing material reproduces the work in full.

REQUIREMENT PER § 512(c)(3)(A)(iii)

I identify both (1) the infringing material and (2) the specific reference(s)/link(s) on Google that must be removed or disabled as follows:

A. Infringing material (destination URL(s)):

1. [FULL INFRINGING URL 1]

2. [FULL INFRINGING URL 2] (if the same file is reachable via more than one URL, list each exact variant you can find, including http/https, with/without "www", trailing slash, and direct PDF/EPUB links)

B. Specific Google reference(s)/link(s) to remove/disable (information-location results):

1. Google Search results page URL where the reference appears: [PASTE THE FULL GOOGLE SEARCH URL SHOWING THE RESULT] (Example format: https://www.google.com/search?q=…&… )

a. Google Surface: Google Search (web results) at google.com

b. Locale: United States / English

2. The specific result on that page that must be removed/disabled:

– Result position: [e.g., "Result #3 on the first page"]

– Result title as displayed: "[TITLE SHOWN IN RESULTS]"

– Displayed URL as shown: "[DISPLAYED URL]"

– Snippet text (first ~15–25 words as displayed): "[SNIPPET]"

– Target/destination URL that result resolves to when clicked: [INFRINGING URL]

– If available, the Google redirect URL for the result (copied via "Copy link address"):

[PASTE THE https://www.google.com/url?… LINK]

3. Any Google-served cached/stored version of the same infringing material (if present):

– Cache URL: [PASTE webcache.googleusercontent.com … URL] (or: "The ‘Cached’ link (if shown) for the above result.")

4. When observed: [DATE + TIME, TIME ZONE]

5. Screenshot attached showing the result described above (due to webform limitations, attached on e-mail message only).

REQUIREMENT PER § 512(c)(3)(A)(iv)

I am the complaining party. My name is [NAME]. My postal address is [POSTAL ADDRESS]. My telephone number is [TELEPHONE NUMBER]. My e-mail address is [E-MAIL ADDRESS]. [Alternately, use business contact information, or your agent's contact information.] Please redact this information in any public copy of this notice.

REQUIREMENT PER § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)

I have a good faith belief that use of this material in the manner I am complaining of is not authorized by the copyright owner (myself), any agent that might have the right to authorize such use (there is none), nor the law.

REQUIREMENT PER § 512(c)(3)(A)(vi)

By my electronic signature below (satisfying § 512(c)(3)(A)(i)), under penalty of perjury, I certify that the information I provide above is accurate, and further certify that as the owner of an exclusive right I allege is infringed, I am authorized to act on my own behalf.

/s/ NAME

Google's Youtube enables lawfare as megacorps and scammers issue DMCA complaints against fair use clips and false content ID claims against truly original works.

Fuck Google.

I knew it was you, Google

"Stop there, human! Proof you are human, human!"

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Welcome to be bright new future of "AI."

lol there is a very simple solution: sue them.

Ha! What an Idiot! He thought he could use the channels reserved for Real^TM People^(R) with actual RIGHTS. Those Channels are for corporate use only, how dare you bother the Gigacorporation with you petty copyright request?? Cease this behavior immediately or face repercussions.

This is great. They should require more evidence before processing a DMCA.

Also I hope you never succeed, all information should be free. I really do hope that any index containing your books is available for all time.

> Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google search results.

Make your books available for free, and you won't have this problem. You can't expect people to pay for something that literally costs nothing once it has been created.

You may also sell paper versions. Some people like myself enjoy reading paper better and will pay for hard copy if they like the book enough or expect to refer to it often.

>You can't expect people to pay for something that literally costs nothing once it has been created.

See these carrots! it doesn't cost anything to create them now, because they've already been created haven't they!

Once the oil has been extracted from the ground, and transported to the gas station and put in the tank, it doesn't cost anything to pump it!! Why are we paying for this stuff again!?!?

You can't expect people to pay for code you know, it doesn't cost anything!

I get your reaction, authors should of course be paid, but GP has a point.

If the same payment model that is applied to books and music were applied to carrots, it would be illegal to plant carrots. If you think about it like that it's obviously wrong.

The carrots in your example would be similar to the printed books the GP mentioned, not the text itself.

either that or it would be illegal to pick carrots from farms you didn't own, depending on how you wanted to construct the analogy.

Of course I can agree that there are differences between these things, but the average writer earns less than the average programmer, and for this reason I often feel it is somewhat gauche that many programmers seem offended by how writers earn money and want it stopped, without any good suggestion as to how they should earn money otherwise. It's like when rich people complain that janitors get food stamps to survive, it motivates my sarcasm gland.

>You can't expect people to pay for something that literally costs nothing once it has been created.

So how are software developers, authors and musicians supposed to make a living?

Authors and musicians, unless they are extremely successful, don't make a living from royalties. Income mostly comes from live performances and merchandise. As for software development, the open source model clearly shows that money can be made. Also, most software out there isn't actually distributed and is internal to a business or company.

Authors who are not extremely successful get their income from live performances and merchandise, not royaties? Any authors here care to comment?

>As for software development, the open source model clearly shows that money can be made

Ok, so I sell data wrangling software for Windows and Mac for $99 per license. Mostly to people who aren't programmers. Kindly tell me how that would work with an open source model.

> Kindly tell me how that would work with an open source model.

Even without copyright, nothing prevents your from selling software. Chances are people who don't want to pay for your software already don't. If paying for software adds value otherwise (such as access to updates and support), people will still pay for it.

> the open source model clearly shows that money can be made.

Does it?

I know lots of professional Indie software developers. I can't think of a single one that uses an open source model.

The tradition of earning money from copies failed when going digital made the cost of copies go nearly to zero. Money now needs to be made from other channels like experiences and new models like pay to release where the work is only teased with previews until enough money is given to release the full version.

The economics on making an ebook are roughly the same as a print book.

The marginal cost of production of a cheap paperback is marginal, the upfront cost is large.

The few pennies that are saved with digital distribution are not a huge game changer regarding the finances of publishing.

I assume you are speaking as a publisher and considering costs of marketing, editors, lawyers and such?

Otherwise printing and distributing 1000 copies of a book is surely vastly more expensive compared to having 1000 downloads of an epub file.

Authors and publishers have written on this topic extensively. Blog posts about it periodically gets posted to HN.

Most of the cost to publish a book is upfront. Editing, laying, cover art, diagrams, etc.

It costs less than $2 to print a book in bulk quantities.

Margins suck. That is why publishers go out of business all the time. Margins aren't any better on ebooks. It costs money to maintain a digital store front.

For an example of the costs of digital distribution in another field, look at Good Old Games. They are a digital distribution platform and they barely break even / turn a profit. (A bit more complicated since they also do some of the porting work)

Digital distribution has super low per unit costs but huge upfront costs.

If that were really true then the practice of taking cuts from the cost of copies to pay everyone involved would still be working, but it isn't. And there appear to be differences between media, for example daily papers are different from novels are different from songs are different from albums and so on.

Newspapers always made their money from commercial and classified ads. Craigslist killed journalism decades ago, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace are the modern successors to CL. Google adwords finished the job.

Newspapers subscription prices only ever covered a small % of the overall costs.

Spotify is a complicated racket, there are some very good video essays exploring who is making money off of Spotify (it isn't Spotify and it isn't the artists!), a but the rabbit hole there goes deep.

> So how are software developers, authors and musicians supposed to make a living?

bounties, commissions, live concerts, patronage.

Software devs are a fairly new concept but traditionally artists aren't expected to make a living of their work, more like barely surviving.

Is it just books that you expect to be free? Or does your advice apply to every song, painting, movie, and program?

You expect every artist, actor, painter, and programmer to make zero $ from anything they create?

I think that copyright should be abolished. But this does not mean you can't make money off software. For example, game studios could still charge for online play on their servers (an ongoing service), even if they can't legally prevent people from sharing copies of the game files, in this model. Similarly, theaters could still charge for movies, but what they would be selling is not a "right to see the movie" per se but the theater experience.

It may be hard to imagine, I don't think things would be massively different overall.

>It may be hard to imagine, I don't think things would be massively different overall.

Apart from all the millions of people like me (an Indie software developer) that would suddenly have 0 income from their digital products?

Or are you just trolling for a reaction?

How would that work for single player games?

If the game is reasonably priced, people may still buy it out of convenience. For example, I'd rather pay $5 for a single player game on Steam and get out-of-the-box support for Linux through Proton than download a possibly malware-ridden copy in the high seas and then spent time figuring out how to run it. It's the same reason people still buy hard copies when every conceivable book is on Anna's Archive.

> You expect every artist, actor, painter, and programmer to make zero $ from anything they create?

Apart from a few notables exceptions, artists have been poor and broken since the dawn of time.

Michelangelo, Mozart, Jeff Koons and Taylor Swift are the exception, not the rule.

Stubbed your toe? If you cut off your leg you won't have that problem.

Even if he offers it for free others may still try to collect money for his work. If he sells paper copies other printers could undercut him.

I agree that it is probably impossible to maintain the economy around selling copies of a work when those copies are practically free, but making your works actually free in the current business models is giving up too soon.

There needs to be a transition from making money from unit sales to something else, and until that's sorted out I think having piracy being at least stigmatized for being wrong makes sense.

I think it's important for a creator to ensure that the experience for those who want to pay is as good as possible. Apart from that I don't think any amount of worry will help very much.

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