[atombender]

A good start would be to require that claimants must verify their real identity. The claim in this case was made by an apparent pseudonym and their address is fictional. Both should themselves be reason to reject the claim. The fact that anyone apparently can submit claims to Google under false names seems insane to me.

[pibaker]

This is another problem with letting private entities be the arbitrator. How is Google supposed to know if Ellie Piee is a real person? It can ask for ID verification of course, but these can be faked, and when that happens there is little Google can do to hold the claimant accountable. A court will certainly have an easier time verifying the identity of the claimant and take action when fraud occurs.

[buran77]

> How is Google supposed to know if Ellie Piee is a real person?

That doesn't really matter. Anyway it's silly to question whether Google, a multi-trillion dollar company, can validate someone's ID when they already do it in many other aspects of their business.

But is Google treating some claims different from others? Are Ellie Piee's claim against Gergely Orosz's article, and the latter's appeal treated exactly the same as any other? In other words, if I use an obviously bogus identity to make DMCA claims against Google content on their own platforms, will they immediately take it down and then go through the same standard appeal process? If not, then the system isn't "abused" it's used exactly as it was designed to be used. In an asymmetrical manner to the benefit of some.

So the real question isn't "how can Google validate an identity", it's "why is Google treating some different from others"? It sure isn't an accident.

[FireBeyond]

Google has no problems "verifying" me with mapping to my phone number, etc. (Actually, it does, after a long and storied startup career, I can no longer create a new Google account because my phone number "has been used too often").

There's also the asymmetry of "you don't need to supply ID to make a DMCA claim, but you will to appeal it", which people can and have used to discover identities for more harassment.

[tanseydavid]

There should be verification that:

* the reporter actually exists * and is in fact who claim to be * and ALSO that they have control of the copyright in question

If any of these is not required then asymmetry is far too much.

[Geezus_42]

We already have private entities checking IDs everyday for all kinds of things. That is a solved problem.

[nextaccountic]

How are banks supposed to know if Ellie Piee is a real person?

Actually

How is Google supposed to know if Ellie Piee is a real person when Ellie Piee pays for a Google product? Or otherwise uses a Google service that requires identity

[ajross]

> A good start would be to require that claimants must verify their real identity.

I GUARANTEE that if this were tried, "YOU CAN'T FILE A DMCA COMPLAINT WITHOUT A GOOGLE ACCOUNT!" would rocket to the front page here and cause a(nother) general freakout about privacy concerns.

Content hosts can't win here.

[atombender]

Nobody mentioned requiring a Google account. That would be an absurd solution, since Google accounts are not real identities, either.

[ajross]

So... your solution is that Google implements authentication for DMCA takedowns using an authentication system that isn't Google's? Whose, then? Same headline, different villain. Probably still Google's fault somehow.

No, this is dumb and won't happen, for all the reasons that we yell about in other threads.

[wizzwizz4]

Who decides what counts as a "real identity"?

Fictional address, sure: that would, as I understand, be some kind of fraud, and can reasonably be prohibited if there's a mechanism to do so… but then you run into the problem that not everyone has an address.

[chrisweekly]

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who is sympathetic to the plight of the homeless / unhoused. But in practical terms, when it comes to aligning a system with justice, IMHO requiring DMCA plaintiffs to have a legal address seems preferable to the status quo.

[atombender]

The onus is on the DMCA processor to verify the legitimacy of the claim. I don't have a real solution, but Congress created the problem and should solve it.

There's of course a whole legal system that has been dealing with this since for ever.

If I were to implement it myself, I'd use a third party service like those that can verify passports and driver's licenses and so on.

[kevin_thibedeau]

No they don't. The onus on them is to comply with the takedown request and provide for immediate restoration with a counter-notice. If the initiator is acting in bad faith it will be exposed if they attempt to litigate.

The friction free restoration flow is what Google is missing because they don't actually follow the DMCA process. Amend the law to strip safe harbor immunity in this scenario and suddenly we'd see abuse effectively combated.

[ryantgtg]

Etsy seems to operate in the same way as google. I had a DMCA against a listing of mine that should have been protected as parody. Etsy immediately complied with the takedown, and then I emailed the complainant and they agreed it was a mistake from their system/consultant. But they never took the next step of contacting Etsy to say they were wrong. So I could never restore the listing.

[mindMonitor]

+1 on the implementation. Passport chip validation really is the way to go …if…we must go that way.

We’re bending over backwards to accommodate a need to validate identities in a system (the internet) which in many ways started as an open/anonymous idea. I’m sceptical about most of all this. Google as a platform clearly have a responsibility for content, but are not allocating enough time/money to truely fix the problem. It’s like they have this MASSIVE problem at the very core of their product, and the only solution is spending tons of resources to truely moderate/investigate and proactively avoid incidents. But they should. SoMe/Big Tech are all cheating and their margins should be lower (and more sensible, compared to other industries..) if they had to follow common sense rules that forever applied to market places, news papers, public space - I mean, if you own a wall facing a crowded street, and someone paints a nazi symbol on your wall, then you have a problem.

[skeeter2020]

from another perspective - who is better resourced than Google to determine if a person and place are real or fictitious? They make these decisions all the time when it suits them. And explain to me this population who is filing DMCA take-down requests that doesn't have an address? the Venn diagram seems shockingly small.

[criddell]

> Who decides what counts as a "real identity"?

Notaries do this all the time often for free or for a fairly minimal fee.

The solution doesn't have to be perfect to be better.

[nkrisc]

Establish the identities of people is something the courts have long had to deal with and is nothing new for them.

[wizzwizz4]

Indeed. But it's not something that Google can do, so bolting on an identity verification requirement to the DMCA process isn't helpful. Re-routing DMCA requests through the bureaucracy of the courts might work.

If counterclaims require doxxing yourself under penalty of perjury, then I would assume that's still perjury even if the other guy started it, so just making the counterclaim process easier doesn't fix the problem.

[seanhunter]

You don’t have to make the quick takedown path available to everyone necessarily. If you don’t have an address it’s going to be harder to show standing to make the takedown request. The fact that makes life harder for homeless people sucks but that’s a feature not a bug. I would venture to suggest that the number of valid dmca takedowns by homeless people is close to zero whereas the number of fallacious dmca takedowns that would be prevented by insisting on identity or at least address validation would be pretty high.