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All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

torrentfreak.com

31–40 of 71 posts

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK DMCA notices don't go through the courts. They're just sent to the site owner, who must comply or file a counter notice. I think you're mixing two things: * if a site owner receives a DMCA notice and believes the content is not infringing they can just do nothing and / or tell whoever sent it to get bent, sender may escalate to the courts * service providers which want to be protected under safe harbour must…

Lack of punishment for bad requests make me wonder if a valid business strategy is DMCAing competition at every turn. Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.

You could try. File a few DMCA notices for Disney's top content to their CDN and cloud/datacenter providers. I guess they won't take it down.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#32
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK DMCA notices don't go through the courts. They're just sent to the site owner, who must comply or file a counter notice. Also, AFAIK there haven't been any prosecutions for people abusing DMCA notices.

> AFAIK DMCA notices don't go through the courts. They're just sent to the site owner, who must comply or file a counter notice. I think you're mixing two things: * if a site owner receives a DMCA notice and believes the content is not infringing they can just do nothing and / or tell whoever sent it to get bent, sender may escalate to the courts * service providers which want to be protected under safe harbour must…

> if a site owner receives a DMCA notice and believes the content is not infringing they can just do nothing and / or tell whoever sent it to get bent, sender may escalate to the courts

The site owner in the case of TF receiving the request is Google, not TF. Google probably automatically acts on the DMCA request and TF has to go through the process of contesting it. So TF can't just sit around and do nothing.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK DMCA notices don't go through the courts. They're just sent to the site owner, who must comply or file a counter notice. I think you're mixing two things: * if a site owner receives a DMCA notice and believes the content is not infringing they can just do nothing and / or tell whoever sent it to get bent, sender may escalate to the courts * service providers which want to be protected under safe harbour must…

Lack of punishment for bad requests make me wonder if a valid business strategy is DMCAing competition at every turn. Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.

[flagged]

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#34
post #11

> Japanese company "유니콘미디어" That looks like Korean, to me (Unicorn Media) . DMCA seems to have been one of those things that we say "It seemed like such a good idea, at the time" after the fact. I'm certainly waiting to hear positive stories about it.

Perhaps not a "positive" story, but legit dmcas do happen from time to time and seem reasonable enough to me (or at least reasonable enough in a world with copyrights). For example look at this list of dmca notices against wikipedia that wmf actually thought were valid https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Office_actions/DM... most of them seem reasonable enough to me. (IANAL) The problem is no effective oversig…

And if you jail enough people at random, you'll eventually jail a percentage of lawbreakers that reflects the actual percentage of people who break the law in your country.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#35

> Japanese company "유니콘미디어" That looks like Korean, to me (Unicorn Media) . DMCA seems to have been one of those things that we say "It seemed like such a good idea, at the time" after the fact. I'm certainly waiting to hear positive stories about it.

Every time you use a website with third party content, that's a positive story. Without the DMCA safe harbor many of them would have been sued out of existence by now.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#36
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not a "positive" story, but legit dmcas do happen from time to time and seem reasonable enough to me (or at least reasonable enough in a world with copyrights). For example look at this list of dmca notices against wikipedia that wmf actually thought were valid https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Office_actions/DM... most of them seem reasonable enough to me. (IANAL) The problem is no effective oversig…

> The problem is no effective oversight. Laws without oversight are going to be obviously abused. Lots of laws are privately enforced. DMCA doesn't have to be different. If you file a false DMCA claim, even if unknowingly, you should be liable for damages. To the platform, for their cost in dealing with your B.S. An to the content owner, for their costs (including time and attorneys fees) and any lost or interrupted…

In theory, you are liable. It's just difficult to actually enforce that because most people won't actually spend a fortune in legal fees hoping they'll win it back down the road.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#37
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of punishment for bad requests make me wonder if a valid business strategy is DMCAing competition at every turn. Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.

> Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests. Fastest way to make change will probably be using their own game against them and have them lobby on your behalf

I'm sure that if normal people try to do this they will be charged with something generic as fraud.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK DMCA notices don't go through the courts. They're just sent to the site owner, who must comply or file a counter notice. I think you're mixing two things: * if a site owner receives a DMCA notice and believes the content is not infringing they can just do nothing and / or tell whoever sent it to get bent, sender may escalate to the courts * service providers which want to be protected under safe harbour must…

Lack of punishment for bad requests make me wonder if a valid business strategy is DMCAing competition at every turn. Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.

For a specific example, you can definitely take a company's products off the Chrome Web Store for multiple weeks with a forged DMCA request. Of course, if your company relies on Google to make money you should be expecting this to happen already... Whether you could effectively do this against other marketplaces like the iOS or Android app stores is an interesting question. I suspect those are run better but they'd still have to honor the takedown.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is no effective oversight. Laws without oversight are going to be obviously abused. Lots of laws are privately enforced. DMCA doesn't have to be different. If you file a false DMCA claim, even if unknowingly, you should be liable for damages. To the platform, for their cost in dealing with your B.S. An to the content owner, for their costs (including time and attorneys fees) and any lost or interrupted…

In theory, you are liable. It's just difficult to actually enforce that because most people won't actually spend a fortune in legal fees hoping they'll win it back down the road.

Platform holders (Google for example) also generally refuse to give you information on the submitter, which means you can't chase them down in court even if you want to.

Re: All DMCA notices filed against TorrentFreak in 2019 were bogus

#40
post #12

> Japanese company "유니콘미디어" That looks like Korean, to me (Unicorn Media) . DMCA seems to have been one of those things that we say "It seemed like such a good idea, at the time" after the fact. I'm certainly waiting to hear positive stories about it.

We've used DMCA to request GitHub takedown repos containing our proprietary software.

Funny example, every time I've had to do this GitHub refused to take down forks based on a bullshit argument that it's impossible to do even though you can just look for matching SHA hashes. I wonder if someone will dismantle them in court for that someday...
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