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Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

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Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#101

Post by dylanpyle »

pentagrama wrote: post #98

A bit of topic, considering my English isn't good at all, the article title isn't missing an "if" here? I had a hard time reading that. > A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it’s not clear [if] YouTube can stop him

Interesting question. This "feels" valid (as a native speaker) - the "that" or "if" is implicit - but not a rule I had ever identified before.

Looks like this may be called an "empty complementizer"; some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementizer#Empty_complemen...

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#102

Post by jedberg »

The DMCA is totally broken, and has been from the beginning. There are no consequences for anyone making a fake claim. However there are severe consequences for someone who receives one and doesn't take action. There are counter-claims processes, but that puts a heavy burden on both the creator and the platform.

I myself am guilty of abusing the DMCA. When I was fighting fraud for eBay and PayPal, if we found someone hosting a phishing site, we would use the DMCA to get them to take it down, claiming they were violating the copyright of the logo. We would send DMCA notices to any host in any country. Most would just oblige. A few would reply and inform us they weren't in the USA.

But it worked because the platforms feared the consequences of not following it, and there was no risk to us.

The DMCA needs fixing by adding severe consequences for incorrect use.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#103

Post by FireBeyond »

Vampiero wrote: post #99
mulmen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has a right to an audience. > Also, I'm from Europe. Which court should I go to when I infringe on an american dub copyright for a japanese cartoon, exactly? Well the copyright and the site are American so probably America.

> Nobody has a right to an audience. That's literally what copyright is

No, it's literally not. Copyright is that you have the right to potentially benefit from your work.

You can broadcast it. You don't have any kind of right to an audience to watch it. I don't even know what that would look like.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#104

Post by jacobgkau »

pentagrama wrote: post #98

A bit of topic, considering my English isn't good at all, the article title isn't missing an "if" here? I had a hard time reading that. > A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it’s not clear [if] YouTube can stop him

As the other reply mentioned, another valid inference would be "it's not clear [that] YouTube can stop him." And as a general rule of thumb, you almost never actually need a grammatical "that"-- it's best to leave it out for brevity unless it's useful to distinguish the meaning of the sentence (typically when the parts before and after it are longer and the demarcation point could be interpreted several ways without it).

It's definitely valid as-is. It's debatable whether it's unclear (what would the alternative meaning be if you think it's unclear?)

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#105

Post by FireBeyond »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #20
gorby91 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For larger and more litigious companies like Nintendo one would think YouTube wouldn't continue to accept takedown requests from random unverified users

The problem with that is, the law absolutely demands that the platform comply with any valid takedown notice, so YouTube isn't going to risk having any false negatives (due to internal miscommunications on Nintendo's side, etc.). It's made the responsibility of the uploader to challenge it with a counter-notice, but YouTube makes the process for those far more difficult than what the law says. (YouTube opens itself u…

In this case, the notice wasn't even quoting the right section of law! Is it still considered a valid takedown notice, then?

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#106

Post by asddubs »

malfist wrote: post #96
hysan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat is if you file the counter within 5 days. From listening to a few creators describe the counter filing process, you need to gather a lot of evidence to prove that you are not infringing. It apparently takes a lot of time and what happens is that targeted harassment very easily turns into a DOS-like attack. So 5 days is an unreasonably short time window that puts an extreme burden on the content creator. Edit t…

There's a guy on YouTube that does discussions about star wars, and has an into music that he got the rights to use from the author. Someone who didn't have the rights resampled the original song and submitted it to a label (not sure that's the right term), and the label proceeded to DMCA every single video the guy had posted. Over a thousand videos, having to gather all that info for all of them, go through the appe…

There was also the example of family guy copy-pasting a 10 year old youtube video of an exploit of an old NES game into an episode, and that video which predates the episode by 10 years (or something) then got taken down because it infringed on the family guy episode that copied the video.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#107

Post by speak_plainly »

pentagrama wrote: post #98

A bit of topic, considering my English isn't good at all, the article title isn't missing an "if" here? I had a hard time reading that. > A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it’s not clear [if] YouTube can stop him

This is an example of ellipsis, a common feature in informal English and news headlines.

It's also an example of pragmatics, specifically a conversational implicature, where the omission is forcing the reader to rely on the context of the sentence to fill in the blank or derive the meaning.

So while you are correct about the grammar, language use is often more complicated in practice.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#108

Post by pavel_lishin »

IgorPartola wrote: post #11
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a sufficiently large company would still pay - it'd likely be a drop in the bucket compared to hiring a legal team. (A troll like the one in the article? Still, depends on the price.) I think it should switch to the strike system that YouTube, at least, favors: if you issue three fraudulent DMCA notices, you lose the ability to do so again in the future.

Not a lawyer but isn’t it your rights to protect your copyright? As in, if you file fraudulent notices, YT removes you ability to file more, then you have a legitimate notice to file, now you presumably can sue YT for denying you the right to defend your copyright.

> isn’t it your rights to protect your copyright?

Sure. But you don't have the right to harass people who haven't done so. I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I would imagine that at some point, vexatious litigation protections ought to kick in.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#109

Post by juped »

JohnMakin wrote: post #53

The DMCA has absolutely ruined a decade+ long hobby of mine, which was streaming/content creation. I used to have really fun streams not that long ago that featured a variety of relaxing/cool music set to the backdrop of me messing around on the computer, or in some game. Everyone was fine with this arrangement for a long time. Then, things suddenly changed a few years ago. First your VODs would get yanked and you'd…

That's not the DMCA (a 90s law), though.

Re: Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

#110

Post by pavel_lishin »

rcarmo wrote: post #4
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a sufficiently large company would still pay - it'd likely be a drop in the bucket compared to hiring a legal team. (A troll like the one in the article? Still, depends on the price.) I think it should switch to the strike system that YouTube, at least, favors: if you issue three fraudulent DMCA notices, you lose the ability to do so again in the future.

...until you spoof a new e-mail address. That won't scale well.

Require registered law firms to file these.

Yes, it'll cost money. But these fraudulent claims cost money, too.

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