I hope instead of accepting a settlement when lawyer boy starts to cry uncle they take it all the way to the end and bankrupt and disbar him.
City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#12It baffles me that there are no legal repercussions for abuse of DMCA / IP / copyright instruments. People who do this without grounds should be punished/fines for abusing the system proportionate to what they claim.
I mean, there is. It's perjury. And the target of a false claim can sue the party who made the claim for damages and attorney's fees.
So if you're rich and have the time there may be consequences, but ultimately since anyone can file a false DMCA notice, there's really no assurance that you will ever get your own lawyer's fees back let alone damages (even if they were awarded).
Perjury is a pretty terrible mechanism, frankly. The whole law was and is poorly conceived.
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#13If this attorney is filing BS DMCA claims, hopefully they'll give a gentle heads-up to his local bar association
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#14It baffles me that there are no legal repercussions for abuse of DMCA / IP / copyright instruments. People who do this without grounds should be punished/fines for abusing the system proportionate to what they claim.
There are but it requires the victim to have the time, energy, and of course, money to pursue it. It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system. Only real bad faith DMCA requests need apply. Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled b…
> It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system.
Why not? By my reading of the section you quoted, it stands independently from its parent sections; anyone who makes a legal claim of copyright infringement, or pursues action under the principle that such a claim exists, would seemingly be liable for damages if they're "knowingly materially misrepresenting" the facts of that infringement, whether or not in the context of a DMCA takedown claim.
Which, I mean, obviously; that's already the law, without the DMCA having to say anything additionally about it. If someone threatens legal action against you unless you do X, and you do X, and it costs you money, and then you find out it was a lie and they had no basis for their legal action — then you can totally sue them for damages, and you'll probably win. The DMCA just provides a very explicit basis for evaluating that particular situation without referring to any other bodies of potentially-conflicting case-law, so as to turn that "probably" into a "definitely."
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#15It baffles me that there are no legal repercussions for abuse of DMCA / IP / copyright instruments. People who do this without grounds should be punished/fines for abusing the system proportionate to what they claim.
There are but it requires the victim to have the time, energy, and of course, money to pursue it. It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system. Only real bad faith DMCA requests need apply. Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled b…
Yep! It isn't very hard to get someone punished for abusing the system if you have the resources.
YouTube did it a few years ago [1] to a popular creator in the Minecraft community who was threatening creator's with Community Guideline Strikes in order to extort them for money.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/man-agrees-to-pa...
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are but it requires the victim to have the time, energy, and of course, money to pursue it. It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system. Only real bad faith DMCA requests need apply. Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled b…
> It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system. Why not? By my reading of the section you quoted, it stands independently from its parent sections; anyone who makes a legal claim of copyright infringement, or pursues action under the principle that such a claim exists, would seemingly be liable for damages if they're "knowingly materially misrepresenting" the f…
[deleted]
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#17If this attorney is filing BS DMCA claims, hopefully they'll give a gentle heads-up to his local bar association
Youtube takedowns aren't DMCA requests. There is no legal penalty for perjury. It's just a good old fashioned mob shakedown. In this case neither party is even subject to US law so even more irrelevant.
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#18If this attorney is filing BS DMCA claims, hopefully they'll give a gentle heads-up to his local bar association
Youtube takedowns aren't DMCA requests. There is no legal penalty for perjury. It's just a good old fashioned mob shakedown. In this case neither party is even subject to US law so even more irrelevant.
FTA:
> Matters have now escalated to the point where the game itself has been taken off Steam due to a DMCA request, and the player is “now claiming that they own the rights to the [realistic] game mode”
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#19It baffles me that there are no legal repercussions for abuse of DMCA / IP / copyright instruments. People who do this without grounds should be punished/fines for abusing the system proportionate to what they claim.
[dead]
Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue
#20This is awful.
But it’s also why many “old media” producers and companies in the entertainment and music industry have careful policies around refusing to receive or acknowledge ideas and content from outside the organization.
It’s much harder for some fan-writer to pursue spurious legal credit for some plot idea or script content when you maintain an official policy to bin unsolicited submissions and to never acknowledge work shared in public.
That’s tricky for “new media” companies since consumers now expect direct engagement with publishers, especially for “indie” artists, but the old system was designed to guard against stuff like this.