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Terrorists Used False DMCA Claims To Get Personal Data of Anti-Islamic Youtuber

An anonymous reader writes German newspaper FAZ reports (google translated version) that, after facing false DMCA claims by "FirstCrist, Copyright" and threatened by YouTube with takedown, a youtuber running the German version of Islam-critic Al Hayat TV had to disclose their identity in order to get the channel back online. Later, the channel staff got a mail containing a death threat by "FirstCrist, Copyright", containing: "thank you for your personal data. [...] take care your house gets police protection!" Employee names are now on Al Qaeda black lists.

22 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Yay, humans! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The species and its imaginary friends are full of entertainment.

  2. Re:Typical muslims by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You mean the freedom to violate other people's freedom through DMCA? Yes, that is truly something to nurse and be proud of... Don't let them take that from you!

  3. Re:Trying to wrap my head around this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Youtube and other service providers have to accept it whenever they don't have proof if they want to be safe. I am pretty sure youtube actually did everything they were required to do by law here and nothing more. Which just tells you how fucking awful the DMCA is.

  4. Re:Typical muslims by Wootery · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sure you get this all the time, but really: there's no call for the generalisation.

  5. Re:Typical muslims by janoc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank you for demonstrating your blatant racism and ignorance.

    You do realize that there is 1.6 billion of people that are muslims in the world, spread out over the most of the globe? Your comment is like saying that we should ban all Christians from having human rights, because they are Bible thumping bigots opposing gays and abortions.

    Please, do educate yourself before you open your mouth next time.

  6. Re:Trying to wrap my head around this by sosume · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd say YouTube faces a hefty compensation, a fine and a criminal investigation. For disclosing personal information, possibly leading to attempted murder, and breaching privacy laws. But. Somehow they cannot trace the accounts posting videos of atrocities.

  7. Re:Lol! by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There must be some massive cognitive dissonance going on in media circles at the moment..

    That's assuming that these laws weren't intended to be bad from the beginning. Never assume and all that, sure, but just look at 'em.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Re:Solution- DMCA Permit by l0n3s0m3phr34k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that makes way too much sense, therefor will never be allowed in either the US or the EU.

  9. Re:Typical muslims by Vinegar+Joe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Opposing gays and abortions isn't quite the same as selling them as sex slaves or beheading them, is it?

    --
    "The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
  10. Re: Typical muslims by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, but this isn't really an isolated incident now is it? This shit happens all the time, and it's always Muslims.
    http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/opinion-polls.htm

    It's a problem, and a big one. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?

  11. Re:Typical muslims by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    At what point to we accept that Islam poses problems and threats that no other major religions do?
    Sure there are secular and progressive muslims, but do these really represent the majority of muslims? It's not like there is a muslim state we can point to and say "Look at X, that's a muslim state with basic human rights and freedoms".

    We see this argument all the time. Just because 5% of some selection deviates from the rest of the 95% in some way ( numbers admittedly pulled out of my ass ) apparently means we are supposed to ignore the fact that 95% can be bucketed as such. That's like saying it's wrong to generalize that men are attracted to women, because a minority aren't.

    Can we please be just a little pragmatic about this.

    Nah, Islamic fundamentalists are as crazy and backwards thinking as Christian fundamentalists.

  12. Re:Solution- DMCA Permit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This will never happen. The DMCA was written specifically to allow fraudulent take-down notices to be issued. The perjury provisions in the law apply only to whether the filer is an authorized agent of the person he claims to represent.

    If I claim to be sony I would commit perjury. But if I work for sony, I can claim that any video violates sony's copyright without it being perjury.

  13. Remember what this tells us about the terrorists by Bruce66423 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They are so frightened of the truth, or the freedom to spread information, that they have to scare people into not doing it.

  14. Re:Solution- DMCA Permit by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The current law is broken, there is no need for the law to require YT to give away the personal info of either side to anyone other than a judge - but your answer is "fuck the little guy"?

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  15. Re:Trying to wrap my head around this by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That is actually how the DMCA is written to work.

    --
    The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  16. So DMCA has helped terrorists by Roodvlees · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder if there will be push back against the DMCA system now that it helped terrorists. Like there has been push back against encryption.

    --
    Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
  17. Re:I thought the DMCA is American Law by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does American Law apply to Europeans and people in Germany --- or do US companies carry the American flag with them when they provide services in Europe and such?

    By treaty.

  18. Re: Typical muslims by Transfinite · · Score: 4, Insightful

    need I go on?

    Yes please do, because if you want a numbers game I think you know that by far Islam is massively guilty here, So I'll be waiting.

    The crusades were a reaction to the atrocities that Islam was engaged with CENTURIES, not decades but centuries in the Mediterranean & middle east, just like we are seeing now with ISIS. You know murder, torture, slaving all the sorts of things that are considered in-human. Come on the battle of Tours was in 732 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... ]. We were trying to wipe them out and for good reason.

    The problem is that the issue IS with Islam, it is the problem, because you see Mohamed is meant to be the perfect man?! Really? How can a rapist, murdering, pedophile possibly be perfect? All muslims are taught to be like him. For example some of the great examples muslims follow Mohamed forces a 17 yr old Jewish girl called Safiyyah to marry him and rapes her on the same day her husband and family are killed in the battle of Khaibar (Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 59, Number 522, Volume 1, Book 8, Number 367).

    You know everything that is being done by these muslim terrorist (Al-nasura, ISIS, Boko haram, etc.....) All of it comes from the Quran, every bit of it. Try and do that with the new testament.

    Political? Islam is a political system you fool!

    So the issue fundamentally IS ISLAM, is Mohamed, his teachings and more importantly his behaviour. OK here's a snip for you to think about:

    http://www.raymondibrahim.com/...

    A Muslim state must [first] attack a Christian state—sorry, I mean any non-Muslim state—and they [the women, the future sex-slaves] must be captives of the raid. Is this forbidden? Not at all; according to Islam, sex slaves are not at all forbidden. Quite the contrary, the rules regulating sex-slaves differ from those for free women [i.e., Muslim women]: the latter’s body must be covered entirely, except for her face and hands, whereas the sex-slave is kept naked from the bellybutton on up—she is different from the free woman; the free woman has to be married properly to her husband, but the sex-slave—he just buys her and that’s that.

    Oh did you notice the freudian slip she made as well?

  19. the problem is elsewhere by v1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google isn't the problem here, they did exactly what was expected of them. The law itself ("safe harbor") isn't really a problem either. The problem is that there's no meaningfull check and balance. It's a very one-sided thing. The law wasn't written by all parties invoved, it was written singlehadedly with one side's interests in mind.

    If someone cries "rape!" and gets a man arrested, and then we find out that it was just a girl scorned that didn't like her BF had cheated on her, SHE is now up for legal charges "filing a false statement" as well as a target for a civil suit.

    No such balance exists with DMCA. Anyone can file a DMCA claim, and the recipient is legally obligated to take action. They're not [i]required[/i] to take action, but if they don't, they accept legal responsibility if the DMCA filing was lawful. So it's not really "optional" for them, even though it may appear so.

    Then, if the filing turns out to be iffy, inaccurate, or even deliberaly misleading, there are NO penalties or liabilities of any kind for the person that filed the fraudulent DMCA notice.

    This has several effects, and only some of them are really noticed. First, the victim has no recourse. They have no legal basis to sue the filer. No law has been broken, so law enforcement has no teeth either. But it doesn't stop there. The victim's only possible relief is a civil suit against the middleman tha received the notice. (google in this case) They have a pretty good defense since they can argue (as above) that although not legally obligated, they actually WERE obligated, indirectly. Also, google has no recourse against the filer. If they have to stage a legal defense against the victim, it's on their nickel, they can't recover any of the costs from the filer because google acted "voluntarily".

    The only way out of this for google is to do research before acting on the notice. This causes all sorts of problems because not promptly taking the material down forfeits their protection, and there will be a cost to this, which is unrecoverable, regardless of the outcome.

    Provisions for accountability need to be added to the law. Not so much to protect the victim, but to protect the intermediary, so they can act in the victim's best interst instead of as the filer's whipping dog. Do that, and it would (A) reduce the number of false claims, (B) make people think more carefully about filing a claim, (C) give the intermediaries some teeth to go after fraudulent filings. Once that's in place, the back end of the process will only be activated when there's a much better change it's necessary and appropriate.

    Looking to change the back end of this process just isn't productive. The changes need to be made in the middle.

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  20. Re:Lol! by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's assuming that these laws weren't intended to be bad from the beginning.

    They were intended to have a low burden of proof, and little penalty for claimants in order to facilitate copyright holders protecting their profits.

    By design, us little people are expected to obediently comply so that our corporate copyright overlords can protect their interests.

    In this case, " bad " is in the eye of the beholder ... so all of us who watched this crap happen to the world, thought it was bad at the time, because it was so badly written.

    The copyright cartel and politicians who did this on their behalf (and got generous bribes/'contributions') ... they were having none about how their badly written laws were one-sided, unfair, and required far too little proof. To them, they were 'good' laws, because they entrenched protection for corporate profits.

    Lawmakers no longer care about if a law is 'good' or 'bad', or even some of the bad consequences which can be envisioned. All they care about is keeping their corporate overlords happy.

    So, in that regard ... mission accomplished!

    Shitty laws, passed by incompetent people, written by industry lobbyists, and then foisted on the rest of the world by the US government in order to protect the interests of multi-national corporations, to the detriment of everyone else on the planet.

    Thanks, America ... this really is your fault.

    I really hope that this is a wake up call about just how terrible some of these laws actually are. Because most of them are so one sided as to be laughable (if it wasn't so draconian).

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  21. Re:Lol! by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, there's the whole US threatening trade retaliations to countries which didn't.

    Yes, those other countries passed the laws.

    But, yes, the US government applied pressure on those governments to more or less force them to pass into law things which had been written by industry representatives.

    So, yes, I do blame US foreign policy, and the fact that your government is so beholden to the copyright cartel that you more or less shoved this crap down the throat of the rest of the world.

    America has hitched their cart to IP, and has been trying to ensure the world does the same. The badly written, one-sided laws which favor corporations, and don't require proof or accountability ... that was pretty much the US.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  22. Re:I thought the DMCA is American Law by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm still blaming the US though, as they were the main party pushing for anti-circumvention and notice-and-takedown provisions to be included in the treaty.