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by jeroenhd 282 days ago
They heard back from the company alright, they DMCA'd the post: https://infosec.exchange/@bobdahacker/115158347003096276

The screenshot of the email lacks detail so I don't know what part of the DMCA the author breached here, but this feels a lot like your standard DMCA abuse.

This AI generated takedown was funded in part by a Y-Combinator: https://cyble.com/press/cyble-recognized-among-ai-startups-f...

4 comments

Someone should see if YC will fund an ai-first company to help individuals and companies fight back against DMCA abuse and seek compensation
Interested to hear the financial model for this one.
We’ll use an influencer for example. A false dmca claim has costs for them. Immediate costs in time, demonetizing, and reputation. It also has longer term risks - e.g., copyright strikes become bans. They are incentivized to pushback but have limited tools to do so.

When dealing with a company whose business is filing dmca complaints using an automated system, the business model isn’t a lawsuit - it’s a settlement where the influencer is made whole and you get paid. The risk to the company is existential if you have enough clients using you to push back and risking them getting a platform ban or an injunction against them filing automated dmca complaints. Say they file a thousand complaints a day against a thousand YouTube channels. If even 50 of those channels file a counter claim it’s going to set off alarm bells.

All that being said the most toxic part of this is the company calling itself a cyber security company and trying to obfuscate seemingly pretty responsible disclosures using dmca.

Flat fee, plus percentage of the winnings from damage claims?
I did not know Cloudflare treats fake DMCAs the same way as Youtube. Since when!?
Can we start discussing 'you can run your own website/cloudflare/isp/backbone' conversation all over again instead of addressing some basic level of fair play?
cloudflare is a crappy company
DMCA penalties are so severe that all parties are incentivised to run/use a parallel scheme.
This fits with the complete lack of care for ethics and societal awareness from Gary and Paul on down. They just want companies that can succeed by the usual amoral metrics of Silicon Valley (money). Which is entirely their right, but here is one of the social cost in a form most “hacker” founders can maybe appreciate. (As opposed to a low income resident getting evicted to make way for an illegal Airbnb)
Just imagining the world without Gary Tan and his ilk...