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City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

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Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#61

Post by thfuran »

Symbiote wrote: post #51
thfuran wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking, I think the only bit that's perjury would be falsely claiming to be the copyright holder (which probably applies in this case, though I suppose the argument could be made that they were just wrong, not lying), which still leaves plenty of room for falsely claiming that something infringes a copyright.

To file a DMCA complaint you must be the copyright holder, or authorized to act on their behalf.

Yes, and it's only that assertion that is made under penalty of perjury, not the assertion that the targeted work actually infringes on that copyright.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#62

Post by Oxidation »

SideQuark wrote: post #40
Oxidation wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal requirement to act instantly on the automatic presumption of the claimants being both right and acting in good faith with no evidence required isn't required to avoid liability. They could have required some higher standard of proof of ownership and as long as they followed the process, YouTube would have the same protection. The system is specifically designed to be gamed by claimants.

It works the other way: it let's a site post user content without the user having to prove legal clearance for the content. Without this, there would be no sites allowing users to post nearly anything. In exchange for this freedom, the sites have to agree to some resolution format for when a copyright complaint is triggered. So the system is not designed to be gamed by claimants. It's designed to give legal protectio…

It's not necessarily true that a system that requires a claimant to demonstrate ownership also requires a user to pre-emptively prove it.

You could have a law that provides a safe harbor provision but also requires claims to be honest and backed-up to "some" level of confidence.

The law as it stands does appear to have the possibility of the penalty of perjury for intentional misuse, but, apparently, a comma means that apparently this is actually only applicable to a small part of the claim[1], and as far as I know has never done so. I do not know if this is because the law doesn't make definitions clear enough to demonstrate bad-faith in court (including that comma), or the legal system in general simply doesn't care to enforce the law.

[1]: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#63

Post by cld8483 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
speeder wrote: post #2

DMCA is such an epically shitty law. Only worse is that other countries are happily copying the law too.

Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness? Basically if you are hit with a copyright or any other sort of terms of service violation, you are stuck spending time and energy trying to communicate with a black box. Platformists say…

If the default most common way of complying with a law is shitty behavior, then the law itself is shitty. Good laws don't incentivize bad behavior.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#64

Post by cld8483 »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #56
Adraghast wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the open internet existed before DMCA did, I suspect “essential” is an exaggeration.

Internet wasn't that fast, consumers weren't informed, legislators weren't informed.

The internet was more than fast enough for copyright infringement. Copywritten books, images, and even music were commonly shared online before the DMCA was passed.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#65

Post by Zak »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
speeder wrote: post #2

DMCA is such an epically shitty law. Only worse is that other countries are happily copying the law too.

Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness? Basically if you are hit with a copyright or any other sort of terms of service violation, you are stuck spending time and energy trying to communicate with a black box. Platformists say…

The broken part of the notice/takedown/counter-notice process is that a takedown requires prompt action, but a counter-notice requires a waiting period. Removing the waiting period and relying on damages to make the copyright holder whole seems like a more fair process.

I think the anticircumvention part of the DMCA is what's really shitty, but that's a tangent.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#66

Post by fivre »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
speeder wrote: post #2

DMCA is such an epically shitty law. Only worse is that other countries are happily copying the law too.

Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness? Basically if you are hit with a copyright or any other sort of terms of service violation, you are stuck spending time and energy trying to communicate with a black box. Platformists say…

Yes. In general, DMCA was written by rightsholder lawyers early in the internet's lifetime to maximize their power and minimize their responsibilities or damages if they abuse it. The prevalence of systems like Youtube's contentID allowing (often real, but also often flimsily alleged) rightsholders to nigh-unilaterally capture all value on the barest suggestion of unlicensed use is abysmal and calls for a compulsory license system more akin to radio, but rightsholders don't want that because compulsory licenses don't let them negotiate megaprofit deals on their own terms.

The anti-circumvention provsions are also a trash fire. DRM regimes are some hot consumer-hostile bullshit that have no (legal) alternative because the law is behind them and heavily weighted towards the needs and wants of major IP holders. Modern US copyright law is designed primarily to maximize profits and enforcement mechanisms for entrenched interests with little regard for anything that isn't, idk, Beyonce tier of actually needing that much licensing cruft.

There's some joke somewhere about ours being the first few generations to systematically deny ourselves access to our own culture because biglaw is more than happy to cut off its cultural nose to spite its face so long as the money train keeps flowing for the few elites that really benefit from the current system. We have a walled garden that will likely never fall because life is peachy if you're inside the garden already, and anyone outside can't compete with the financial and lobbying muscle of those inside it without operating in legal gray areas at best.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#67

Post by kube-system »

derefr wrote: post #47
kube-system wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone who makes a legal claim of copyright infringement The answer is right there, my emphasis added. YouTube’s internal mechanisms, a la ContentID, are not processes which are a part of the legal system. They’re corporate policies. It is worth noting that this distinction is irrelevant to this article, however. As this article says this was a DMCA claim. So any potential false claims in this case do carry this po…

> The answer is right there, my emphasis added. YouTube’s internal mechanisms, a la ContentID, are not processes which are a part of the legal system. They’re corporate policies. No, that's not what I meant. I meant, "any claim that can be interpreted in a court of law as being equivalent to saying you intend to sue for copyright infringement and have a legal basis to do so." In the same sense that a handshake contra…

Yes, generally speaking legal threats which are not made in good faith can cross the line into being illegal, e.g. extortion. But that isn’t because they violate DMCA 512(f). And I think it a a bit of a stretch to say that abusing ContentID is a legal threat. The number of ContentID claims that result in legal action rounds to zero.

Had anyone ever successfully sued in response to a false non-DMCA copyright claim?

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#68

Post by noxvilleza »

Ekaros wrote: post #53
speeder wrote: post #2

DMCA is such an epically shitty law. Only worse is that other countries are happily copying the law too.

To me it isn't that horrible process. You are own a small forum or site. You get DMCA takedown, you take content down and are safe. Send notification to uploader. They disagree. You can put stuff back up. You are not liable for damages after this. And really shouldn't be expected to fight. Now it is up to the two other parties to fight it out. This is where the system fails, because whole process is long and expensiv…

The safe-harbor part isn't bad. What's bad is that people can file an obviously bogus DMCA takedown request with zero repercussions.

Companies that host content do basically nothing to actually verify that the takedown request is even from a real person (nevermind the original copyright holder).

A better system would be one that allows the uploader to take the takedown issuer to court, and if the takedown request was clearly malicious and bogus then the takedown issuer would get a penalty. This approach would still allow a legitimate takedown request, but not be forced the issuer into taking a contested case to court.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

noxvilleza wrote: post #68
Ekaros wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it isn't that horrible process. You are own a small forum or site. You get DMCA takedown, you take content down and are safe. Send notification to uploader. They disagree. You can put stuff back up. You are not liable for damages after this. And really shouldn't be expected to fight. Now it is up to the two other parties to fight it out. This is where the system fails, because whole process is long and expensiv…

The safe-harbor part isn't bad. What's bad is that people can file an obviously bogus DMCA takedown request with zero repercussions. Companies that host content do basically nothing to actually verify that the takedown request is even from a real person (nevermind the original copyright holder). A better system would be one that allows the uploader to take the takedown issuer to court, and if the takedown request was…

> The safe-harbor part isn't bad. What's bad is that people can file an obviously bogus DMCA takedown request with zero repercussions.

The takedown process is part of, and only relevant to, the safe-harbor provision.

> Companies that host content do basically nothing to actually verify that the takedown request is even from a real person (nevermind the original copyright holder).

Because not complying with a correct-in-form takedown puts them outside of the dafe harbor. The uploader can, of course, challenge the false takedown (and the host can decide they don't care about safe harbor, but they won't in practice, nor will they normally care as much about safe harbor against claims by the uploader, so counternotice compliance may be less enthusiastic than takedown compliance.)

> A better system would be one that allows the uploader to take the takedown issuer to court

You can do this. A false takedown is false, damaging statement of fact and actionable as such, it may also be actionable as tortious interference, and a number of other things.

Re: City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue

#70

Post by flangola7 »

fivre wrote: post #66
anigbrowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness? Basically if you are hit with a copyright or any other sort of terms of service violation, you are stuck spending time and energy trying to communicate with a black box. Platformists say…

Yes. In general, DMCA was written by rightsholder lawyers early in the internet's lifetime to maximize their power and minimize their responsibilities or damages if they abuse it. The prevalence of systems like Youtube's contentID allowing (often real, but also often flimsily alleged) rightsholders to nigh-unilaterally capture all value on the barest suggestion of unlicensed use is abysmal and calls for a compulsory…

One single change could have made the DMCA better: Only allow copy "rights" to be assigned to real persons, and grant the original artist a permanent ownership (if I take a photograph I can sell or give you a license to use it, but not in a way that prevents me from continuing to use it). This prevents wealthy classes from financially bulling regular artists out of their own works.

For a large production like a film, that may mean splitting the rights up fractionally to thousands of different people. This would prevent the kind of unilateral rent seeking that squashes artistic creativity - getting a thousand regular actual artists and normal people to agree to sue a harmless fan project is much less likely than an executive suite.

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