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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

> GitHub's brand of DMCA compliance is much like YouTube's: lazy to the point of unequivocally benefiting copyright owners, not content producers.

I believe the text of the DMCA is written to cause this. If you are an ISP, and you don't want to be liable for infringments, you have to take things down after receiving a DMCA takedown notice. The end.

You can put it back up after the user has followed the right procedure to challenge and assume liability themselves. I admit I'm not sure exactly what procedure the DMCA outlines for this.

I think what ISP's _could_ do is facilitate user's filing challenges more easily. But they've got to take it down after receiving a takedown request, that's pretty much what the law says (or else the ISP can be sued for the copyright infringement too).

Theoretically you can sue someone for issuing a takedown request in bad faith. Perhaps ISP's could help their users do this too, but it could get sticky for them.

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And now we live in this wonderful world where companies don't actually file DMCA takedowns at all, but rather have gentleman's agreements to take down content in a manner indistinguishable from the DMCA except the part that actually gives the uploader any legal recourse to challenge it. :-/

The hope is that this sort of shit hastens the hardening of the Internet to the point where anyone can host whatever the hell they want, anonymously, with no possible recourse for any old asshole to do anything about it, DMCA and laws be damned, and supported by default by all major browsers and operating systems.

Do you think you could start a class action lawsuit on this basis? If companies aren't going to bother to stand up to this, and individuals don't have the money to do so, then short of actually fixing the law, class action suits seem the only (legal) way forward. But proving that a significant enough portion of takedowns are illegal might be difficult.

There's an EFF fair use test case involving a YouTube takedown of a toddler bouncing around to a 29 second clip of a Prince song playing in the background: Lenz v. Universal. It was filed in 2007 and has yet to be resolved.

The fact is that while section 512(f) of the DMCA provides consequences to misrepresentations by those making takedown requests, it is damned impossible to actually enforce that.

Now, I guess, if an ISP ignores a DMCA takedown request, all that happens is that they too can be sued for copyright infringement of the content.

Now, I guess an ISP _could_ individually evaluate each DCMA takedown request, decide that some of them are completely illegitimate and there was in fact no infringing material, and thus that they have little legal risk to leaving it up, and probably nobody's going to take them to court over it, and if someone does, the ISP will probably still win and they're willing to deal with it.

I think it's pretty obvious that it's not really reasonable to expect a business to do this (by assigning an actual lawyer to evaluate every request? By trusting less trained/certified people to make the determination? Even paying them minimum wage it's probably not affordable), although it would be pretty exciting if one decided to anyway.

You can't ignore a request. But you can make them work for it. For example:

http://www.diynetwork.com/about-us/dmca-digital-millennium-c...

You _can_ ignore a request. You'll just be liable for any potential copyright infringement on the content you ignored the request to takedown.

But yes, effectively, it is not reasonable for a company to ignore the takedown request.

"Theoretically you can sue someone for issuing a takedown request in bad faith. Perhaps ISP's could help their users do this too, but it could get sticky for them."

This needs to be done by larger companies. Right now all a person has to do is claim copyright infringement, and companies take down. There is a guy on Ebay who claimed he owned the copyright to a old watch making school workbook(Chicago School of Watch Repair). Well he didn't own the copyright, but Ebay wouldn't even bother to look into it. There should be clear penalties for falsely claiming ownership to a copyright? I understand small companies caving in, but larger companies should do a little due diligence?

> This needs to be done by larger companies. Right now all a person has to do is claim copyright infringement, and companies take down.

Yes, see, that's the law. That's the way the DMCA is written. If someone files a DMCA takedown, companies have to take it down (or risk liability themselves). Right.

To change it, Congress would need to change it, there's nothing larger companies can do.

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