Actually, we should keep up the pitchforks, but redirect them towards the legal frameworks that give private, unaccountable entities the power to unilaterally disrupt infrastructure with almost zero legal recourse.
You can always do a DMCA counternotice. Then the onus is onto the one who sent the notice in the first place to gather evidence and take you to court. In theory, there's fines for false notices if they can't prove anything.
Of course, you better be sure that you are in the right if you're gonna do that though.
> Then the onus is onto the one who sent the notice in the first place to gather evidence and take you to court. In theory, there's fines for false notices if they can't prove anything.
The problem is, in the worst case Joe Random has to go to court over a snippet of music that randomly blasted from a passing car in a youtube video and risk going to battle with, say, Sony Music - a conglomerate with eight billion dollars yearly revenue. Many cannot take on that level of financial risk, not just the risk from the court verdict itself (punitive/damages) but also the cost of all the lawyers involved.
And at that point, we're in kangaroo court territory - when people have the theoretical right to due process but practically cannot use that right due to the risk involved, it's nothing short of the foundation of democracy being undermined. We need a cap on lawyer costs and damage awards so that the 99% can have their fair day in court against the 1% again without having to fear going bankrupt. At the moment, the only resource the 99% have is to go to the media and raise a stink, but the success chance for that route is probably on the same order as a lottery win.
[This is Julia, Eric’s cofounder] We have filled out multiple counter-notices. The first attempt was the recommended action in Google’s initial takedown notice: send an email to dmca-agent@google.com with specific reference to the ticket number (2-1881000033144). I wrote a lengthy response explaining why the claims were unfounded in most cases.
After a few days, they got back to us saying actually we needed to file a counter notice form, which involves pasting the URLs one by one into a web form with an explanation for why the page did not violate copyright. So Eric and I split up the URLs and did that, one by one, for 317 URLs
We filed the counter-notice on Thursday. As of the time of this comment (Monday afternoon), we have not heard back, and our pages have not been reinstated
Yes, but along with having to provide your own personal information to pursue a counternotice, you also have to risk going to court against an opponent significantly more powerful than you.
This! Other people wrote about counter DMCA takesdowns. This goes beyond DMCA notices.
The regulator should notice that serving sketchy DMCA notices is a form of denial of service. An consequently, if the DMCA is ruled to be unfounded, there should be heavy pubishment for the issuer as well as the enforcer (Google in this case).
FWIW the platform must respond to DMCA requests, by law, without it's own saying in the matter. They only can check if the request satisfies the minimum requirements of DMCA. Punishment for the enforcer wouldn't fly.
Platform must respond to valid DMCA requests. Valid DMCA requests are for copyright infringement - there is no such thing as a DMCA takedown request for circumvention tools, that still requires court involvement.
Of course, you better be sure that you are in the right if you're gonna do that though.