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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.

Ironically, the article points out that the original authors publisher actually put out two DMCA notices to google last year, apparently with no effect.

I guess DMCA takedowns are only for the big fish fighting the good fight against car pirates.

Why aren't they suing Google in court? Now is the best time to do this politically, the site doesn't mention what state they live in but I'd doubt that you wouldn't be able to get a state AG to listen to you if you reached out.

edit to add: Google has ignored all safe harbor protections, they would lose this protection and be held liable for all damages. This seems like a pretty solid win for the author here if they're telling the truth.

There are a lot of really solid reasons someone might choose not to sue one of the world’s most powerful corporations over their core business practices, even being completely in the right. Pretty similar to reasons someone might not call the cops on some mafiosos that are blocking your driveway while fencing a truckload of stolen electronics.

I disagree, state AGs are taking any opportunity to attack big tech for easy political points. If you want justice, now is the best time to try and get it.

Filling a complaint with the civil division of your AG so they can take legal action vs suing a giant powerful corporation and hoping the AG’s civil division steps in are very different things. I’ve also known numerous people who’ve filed multiple complaints with the MA AG with easily provable and well documented cases of repeated, ongoing wage theft as restaurant workers, at a time where service industry labor abuses were a popular hot button issue, and they didn’t even get a callback. Not exactly what you’d call a slam dunk. Not having support from the AG would be one of the very solid reasons I was referring to.

then DMCA the entirety of google and alphabet, and tender class action for direct and contributory violation, with the option to back it off to the literary work in question when goog takes a seat at the table and takes it seriously

That costs money

so does loosing a business.

Losing*

both spellings, while having differing implications, tend to be true.

Simon & Schuster is a small fish?

Eventually almost every other regulation turns out to be one that benefits big players and doesn’t help smaller ones.

Usually it’s easy enough to see who’s pushing for the regulation to figure out who will benefit from it.

Eg https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/06/16/congress/me...

The entire purpose of the DMCA is that it’s a bludgeon that the rich and powerful can use to beat the poor and powerless. It was never meant for individual copyright owners to use against giant infringing corporations.

DMCA is no longer valid as the courts ruled that stealing literally everything on the internet was OK and a valid business practice.

Speaking from experience, neither apple nor Google will enforce dmca takedown requests unless they come from the courts. Even when provided clear and direct evidence. Their position is "we do not arbitrate". I sort of get it but also the cost barrier to copyright infringement is headed to zero while the ability to protect your IP and enforce your copyright remains expensive. Wild times ahead.

And in this case, they didn't work. Perhaps Qontour, as a web-native dev firm, has figured out a blind spot in Google's DMCA takedown process?

The blind spot is the same one that's always there. Takedown notices from partners are fast tracked, takedown notices from Joe Bob require a court filing.

(It makes some degree of sense - I shouldn't be able to use a burner identity to get Google to take down (even temporarily) a million-subscriber channel. The big problem with the DMCA is the impossibility of proving that a grey-area filer is acting in bad faith, but that's in the wheelhouse of the courts, not the platforms.)

DMCA to take down AI slop? I feel that is twice the mistake. DMCA should not exist in the first place. Neither should AI slop. Here we have AI stealing from people. AI is a thief.

So you're against copyright protection, but also against AI using copyrighted work? I can understand both of those positions separately, but how can you combine them in the same statement?

>So you're against copyright protection

Yes, I am. Copyright is legalized plunder of anyone who does not pay a protection fee for a "license" to not be plundered. Going after torrenters and people trying to regain functionality on their thermostats and 3D printers is legalized plunder.

there are two different things — one can be against the idea of copyright property, or just copyright laws as written into the legal system, while holding the expectation these should apply to everyone equally

I mean one can be for copyright protection but against the DMCA as a bad way to implement copyright protection.

Sure, there are plenty of things to dislike about DMCA or any other modern copyright law, but in this context the discussion was specifically about using DMCA to take down an unauthorized republishing of a copyrighted book online, which is a pretty normal application of copyright law. So I don't really understand how "AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work" but also "it's bad to take legal action against people distributing your work".

There seem to be people who believe that the DMCA is a morally compromised instrument.

There are people that believe that using a morally compromised instrument to do a moral end is always bad.

"AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work therefore we must never use AI, even if our ends are good" is such a belief that many people seem to have, and there seems to be some likelihood that the original poster might be such a person.

Therefore it seems to me reasonable to believe that a person who maybe believes that you must never use AI because it is trained on stolen work, could also believe that you must never use the DMCA because it is based on bad and corrupted law.

I myself do not exactly believe these things, although I consider they may have some arguments for them, albeit not arguments likely to persuade me in all instances, nonetheless I do not find any difficulty in believing someone could hold both opinions at the same time and I think, in fact, it is a reasonably consistent pair of opinions, especially given the apparent ability of people to believe all sorts of inconsistent things day to day.

Lehman (a lobbyist) did an end-run around congress to the WIPO, to use treaty law to force the passage of the DMCA.

How do you suggest Qontour be held accountable for this blatant theft of Koenig's work and name if the DMCA is a mistake?

And don't pass the blame off onto "AI" from the people who said "let's make a web site that totally steals this book we like". AI is a tool of thieves, founded upon thievery. Qontour is an agency made up of thieves who are using AI to perform their thievery.

In fact let's go down their about page (https://www.qontour.com/about) and point some fingers:

Gala Aranaga, Founder & CEO of Qontour, is a thief.

Jason Chandler, Founder & Creative Director of Qontour, is a thief.

Atif Fazil, Technical Director of Qontour, is a thief.

Pemi Ogunkeye, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.

Daniela Aranaga, Head of Content & Marketing at Qontour, is a thief.

Ahmed Qayyum, Solutions Architect at Qontour, is a thief.

Bukunmi Ogunmodede, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.

Hassaan Rasul, Senior UX Designer at Qontour, is a thief.

They used ChatGPT, a copyrightwashing tool developed in a massive act of thievery by the employees of OpenAI, all of whom are thieves. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, all of whom are thieves.

What exactly did AI steal? The concept of clocks?

AI is not involved in the actual copyrighted content at all.

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