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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

> It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Isn't it under penalty of purjury?

Oh no, the only part under penalty of perjury is the complaining party misrepresenting their authorisation by the rights holder (17 USC § 512(c)(3)(A)(iv)).

So if you DMCA HN, claiming that this thread infringes on Moana the possible perjury would be for claiming to represent Disney.

Now in theory the content claims are made under the good faith standard (17 USC § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)), and in theory the complaining party could be held for damages, but in practice getting ahold of the complainant is very hard, and suing them for damage is often worse than the actual damage.

What if I think I own the rights to Moana?

if you're willing to claim that's the case under threat of perjury a.k.a. you will sit in jail for a couple of days, then go right ahead! The problem is there's roughly zero repercussion for false claims under the current regime.

Depends on the jurisdiction. In the United States, being wrong is not perjurious.

Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.

> 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.

DMCA Section 3.A v) - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

It is only the part about being authorized that is under the penalty of the perjury. You can be as malicious as you want as long as you don't falsely claim to own or represent someone who owns the rights to something.

Penalty of perjury in what jurisdiction?

Even wholly within the US, perjury appears to be low cost: businesses make a tradeoff between legal risks and profits.

It's impossible for a victim to enforce this penalty, even if they hire a lawyer, in my experience.

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