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Google's Information On DMCA Takedown Abuse
Binestar writes "According to a PC World article, Google has submitted a brief to New Zealand about its proposed copyright law (section 92A). "In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.""
In a world where executives of companies that lose money expect as a matter of course to be paid millions of dollars of bonuses, it is a given that a tool such as the DMCA **WILL** be abused to silence opposition or competition...
There was a time when music was sold as sheet music. Somehow Joplin was making a $100,000 a week in the 1920's, even though it's fairly trivial to simply hand-copy someone-else's work.
Sheet music is cheaper than the cost of copying by hand. This doesn't mean that copyright laws were useless though -- without them, someone else could have set up their own printing press and started (cheaply) printing their own copies of Joplin's work.
Until recently, the only marginally profitable (in the economic sense) form of copyright violation was mass reproduction, requiring extensive capital costs. This made it easy to enforce copyright laws: You can't sell many thousands of copies of anything without attracting attention.
Everything changed when it became possible to make a profit by making a single illegal copy of something.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Hoist by thine own petard. By the way it's "ought to". See, we can all be pedantic grammar nazis too.
It's easy. And yet... so pointless. Language is a means of communication. For millennia, it had no agreed, defined structure. Then along comes Dr Johnson, the world's first grammar nazi, and spoiled things for everyone by stifling creativity. Shakespeare, a man who -- you know -- was and is, widely renowned for being quite good at English, used to make words up all the time, and bend others to his will. You'd have him shot, no doubt. Or his books burned for grammar crimes.
Did you understand what the summary meant? Yes, you did. So... shut up.
The perjury clause is so useless as to be limited. I could send a DMCA request to anyone's provider, claiming that file X on their website infringed my copyright on work Y, and as long as I actually owned work Y, I would not have committed perjury -- even if I knew damn well file X had nothing to do with it.
Congratulations, your organization is a DMCA abuser. DMCA takedowns are for copyright violation, not trademark violation.
Indeed, it is helpful -- for abusers. The people abused, on the other hand, are shut down with no recourse other than to involve lawyers at substantial cost; the counternotice basically says "Meet me at high noon in Federal Court". Furthermore, if the abuser does sue, the DMCA provides the equivalent of an automatic restraining order, which, given the length of court cases, means the abuser essentially wins regardless of the outcome.