Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. They have a legal responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its successors, from an era of... I don't want to say "copyright maximalism," but something closer to copyright maximalism than the balance is today. We need to reform the legal responsi…
> They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity. Even massive channels and companies…
Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have internal contacts for their equivalents in any other department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is supposed to be the machine's job.
As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though:
- There are public product discussion and bugs mailing lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The engineers working on these products monitor these lists.
- Some things you'd think Google develops in private, are actually developed in public. Examples: https://github.com/googleapis; https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform. You can file issues on these repos!
- When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers, put their public @google.com email addresses on conference presentations, they do that for a reason. They want you to reach out with questions/concerns about the thing they've built!