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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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