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Comment by agilord | Hacker News Reader

I start to wonder: what can we do to actively prevent such things to happen? E.g. someone can copy a blog content, set the date back by a few months, publish it, and submit the DMCA takedown. Even if it reaches the court, who and how will decide who the original author was?

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The original author will submit a counternotice and their content will be put back online. If the copier wants to take their bogus case to court, a judge will decide based on the evidence presented. Google cache, Archive.org, server access logs, code repository commit histories, e-mails or whatever else you can find could be presented as evidence of the publication date. In the meantime, the service provider must assume the content is published legally if they want safe harbor protection from bogus lawsuits of their own. I can't think of a better system, honestly.

> The original author will submit a counternotice and their content will be put back online.

With a statutorily mandated 10 day delay. Such are the DMCA's take-down procedures.

Yes, as has been mentioned several times. The act balances the interests of all the parties -- the delay may hurt, but it provides actual victims of copyright infringement the time to go to court and get a preliminary injunction to prevent further damages. If the notice was fraudulent and there was no infringement, the filer is liable for damages and attorneys fees of the accused should they wish to sue and recover them. Whatever loss those 10 days offline caused are recoverable damages.

A digital timestamping service http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm

The long term plan would be to make a usable technical solution for permanent publishing. Maybe it's time to give Freenet another serious go.

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