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Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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