[asgerhb]

Good of a platform to stand up for their users against DMCA abuse. Obviously Shopify relies on credibility if they are to handle the business transactions of their customers, so it is a smart move. Though it may be costly for them. Wish certain other platforms would do the same, if not for every bogus claim, then at least to set a precedent.

[oniony]

Let's not be too generous here. From the article it appears that:

• An account with unverified credentials was allowed to make a substantial number of DCMA takedown requests without any kinds of checks or limits

• Shopify had DMCA automation that either assumed guilt for each accusation or applied woefully inadequate heuristics in apllying them

• The accused have access to appeal process that leaves them suspended and thus unable to operate their businesses in the Shopify market for two weeks

• Shopify took legal action, not to protect their customers, but because reputational loss from the uproar their handling of this situation caused

From my perspective, there are two parties at fault here:

• The user that made this false takedown requests

• Shopify for:

    • not doing due-dilgience on the user making them,

    • for automating the process with poorly tested and/or inadequate algorithms/heuristics,
    • for not promptly following up on appeals, leaving businesses unable to trade for an unreasonably long period of time

If Shopify wish to aggressively automate to save costs (increase their own profits), then they should have a large enough team to handle appeals promptly, i.e. within 24 hours.

[friendzis]

The DMCA takedown process is broken as it misaligns incentives. It should be a challenge-response based, with statistics counted:

Rights holder claims IP violation -> content uploader challenges the claim -> IP owner challenges the counter-challenge -> governmental agency steps in -> elevated number of unfavorable judgements result in legal action.

The current process places very little disincentive to place bogus claims, because very few content uploaders gain enough from content distribution to challenge the claim in a court of law and put possible perjury to the test, especially in non-obvious situations.

The modified process still places incentives to file claims out of judicial system, however it places disincentive on submitting bogus claims. Claims can still be submitted by automated systems, but presence of counter-claim incentivizes detection quality as drop in automated detection quality is automatically balanced by increased manual review cost, which is in turn balanced by risk of losing access to the quick process itself. Such system still incentivizes finding mutual agreement out of judicial system while protecting those willing to challenge on both ends.

[master-lincoln]

agree, it's unfathomable to me how an unauthenticated user can just make shops go offline with a false claim. This should send a strong signal to shopify users to change to a provider that cares about all users, not just the aggregate numbers.

[mcherm]

> it's unfathomable to me how an unauthenticated user can just make shops go offline with a false claim

That behavior is strongly incentivized by US law (the DMCA), which holds Shopify liable for any copyright infringement by the shops on its site unless it performs takedowns in exactly this fashion.

To be sure, the law does require the person or entity filing the complaint to attest "under penalty of perjury" that the accusation of copyright infringement is true. But I am not aware of any cases ever where someone was prosecuted for filing false DMCA claims.

If this Shopify lawsuit were to hold the person submitting false claims liable for Shopify's expenses in handling the false claims, that might set a useful president.

[M2Ys4U]

>To be sure, the law does require the person or entity filing the complaint to attest "under penalty of perjury" that the accusation of copyright infringement is true.

It doesn't. It requires them to attest under penalty of perjury that they are authorised to act on behalf the copyright holder, but not to the accuracy of the take-down claim.

[singleshot_]

I’m flummoxed by the fact that anyone would understand “under penalty of perjury” to include an anonymous guy who is under no risk of being prosecuted for perjury. I would have interpreted this (maybe with the aid of a declaratory judgment?) as a defective notice.

[j-bos]

> To be sure, the law does require the person or entity filing the complaint to attest "under penalty of perjury"

Yet another case where powerful legal actions are taken onlime with a single mouse click. Some (FEW) things really would benefit from a physical world friction, like notarization.

[SSLy]

Is there no governmental IdP they could connect to for matching the DMCA's with real entities?

[Uvix]

No, there is not.

[bryanrasmussen]

Is shopify membership free?

If not, you definitely can't require companies pay you to be able to make DMCA takedown notices.

Oops, went and looked - it's not free. So that's why.

Obviously a bug in the system there needs to be another tier for companies to make DMCA takedowns somehow, I bet someone there is working on that now. Bet it's not easy though.

on edit: what I don't understand though, do other companies pay for shopify just to make takedown notices? Their pricing model and the wording of the article implies they do - that's weird. If I was a lawyer doing shopify takedown notices for my clients I'd get pissed.

[tjoff]

So Shopify does the same as youtube?

Except youtube has not taken legal action on behalf of their users.

[madeofpalk]

See also, the time someone pretended to represent Bungie to get a bunch of videos taken down

https://torrentfreak.com/bungie-files-lawsuit-to-punish-send...

https://torrentfreak.com/bungie-vs-fake-dmca-notices-google-...

https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-identifie...

https://torrentfreak.com/bungies-7-7m-lawsuit-vs-dmca-frauds...

[ryanjshaw]

Alternatively, the same law that created the takedown process should be amended to handle the requestor authentication process. It doesn't make sense that every company needs to duplicate these efforts.

[yladiz]

Isn't the onus on the provider (Shopify) to quickly respond to DMCA requests lest they are legally liable for the content on the platform? Let's say they completely manually responded to DMCA requests, for example, what is the amount of time they're allowed to take before responding - 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days?

[oniony]

I'm not suggesting they manually respond to DMCA requests. I'm saying that should they wish to automate the process, they should have a large enough team to handle the appeals from such an automated process promptly.

A business being taken offline for two weeks without notice or recourse is unacceptable in my opinion. How many small businesses have the reserves to weather that? And even if they did, the stress of it happening again a week later, or the week after that?

[paulgb]

The DMCA requires that the material be restored “no less than ten days”[1] after receiving the counter-notice, to allow the person who filed the original takedown to file a suit to keep it down if they are serious.

The penalty for the platform is that they lose their safe harbor; if a takedown has merit and they restore it before 10 days they could be sued too. I do wish platforms would go to bat for their users when a takedown was obviously fraudulent and restore the content immediately, but getting it wrong would be expensive.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/documents/text-digital-millennium-copyr...