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

DKIM and SPF are supposed to prevent email sender spoofing, but that requires the domain owner to set it up correctly age the receiver to verify the records and actually distrust or discard the email if they don't match.

Both steps aren't trivial, and configuration errors are more common than actual spoofing. DMARC is supposed to fix everything, but only if the domain owner cares enough to do more than the bare minimum setup

> This is justified because in overwhelming majority of cases the streamer does not have a license for the audio

I guess my point is that this arrangement was fine for a very, very long time. Why is it suddenly not fine in the last handful of years? Who is standing to gain here? In my view, it hurts the very platforms and industries this is trying to "protect." Twitch/YT/etc. are harmed because the content will be inherently worse, and copyright audio IP is hurt because it will spread to fewer listeners. Not only this, but if it were available to me, I actually would pay to license the audio I use, but there is no mechanism to do that!

A similar dumb thing happened a few years ago with the PGA tour - they decided that anyone re-posting PGA clips without their permission, even if it was for commentary/parody/etc., was all of a sudden not permissible. So, all the golf content on IG/TikTok/etc got catastrophically worse overnight, and PGA (which struggles with viewership, especially young viewers) gets less free exposure. There's absolutely no way this was a positive outcome for anyone involved, so why?

As things stand, there's a difference between purchasing for personal consumption, and for publishing. That's been standing, for a very long time. It might be as old as copyright itself.

Just because you own the game, doesn't mean you have the rights to use it in more than a personal setting. That's basically always been the case. You bought a personal license, not a broadcasting one.

The main reason for not attacking such things in the past was that it was a wasted effort at control. Too small a target, requiring too much effort. Automation, through things like audio recognition, changes that.

Is YouTube playing a bit loose with the DMCA's requirements here?

* YouTube has no liability for incorrect take-downs (17 USC § 512 (g) (1))

* That limitation on liability only exists if they restore access to the disabled material within 10-14 business days of receipt of a counter-notice (17 USC § 512 (g) (2) (C))

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

YouTube doesn't have to host any content they don't want to. However, it seems likely that a court would say "that doesn't absolve you of complying with the counter notice provisions of the DMCA. You can't just say that you don't want to host any content that goes through a counter notice." There are always limitations on the whole "we don't have to host things we don't want to." I doubt a court would let them use that as an excuse to ignore an explicit mandate of the DMCA, but IANAL.

I think the problem is more likely that creators don't want to sue YouTube or have the resources to go up against Google.

I have a forum that receives a high number of DMCA claims. They link to pages on my forum where they claim I'm violating their copyright. However, when I review the pages, the content only mentions the name of a product or service. Imagine I write something here, like how I watched the movie "Inception" last week. A third party then sends me a DMCA request on behalf of Warner Bros, and Google removes this page from their search results. That's what I get, but thousands of them.

It's fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don't have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.

It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I'm either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?