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 is broken to the very core.
This is what happens with a company that tries to minimize costs of support to zero.
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
Use your brain for once, or else don't (please) work for any FAANG companies
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.
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.
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.)
Either way, ignoring dcma is asking to be sued. And you can't just block or ignore a court summons.
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.
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.
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"
Too bad it’s working only for the powerful.
Marx was right about some things…
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something doesnt add up. 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
So it clearly cant be the case.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?"
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
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 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.
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
(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)
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.
My question is what mechanism proves the video is signed by the rightful owner?
This is not a "mistake", that is negligence.
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).
Piracy is more a moral and political statement than an economic one.
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.
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 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.
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