Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Wait, Google cares about DMCA abuse!? Someone tell them about YouTube.
The trick is to make it so their product isn’t reliable enough to use. Then they care.
Unless it’s themselves making it less reliable to push more ads.
But they are doing that themselves already. I think they care because handling takedowns creates work for them and because they may be taking down search results that generate them ad revenue.
Can they stop the shit dmca takedowns on YouTube too?
While they could, that is also a different situation. YouTube copyright claims are generally done through YouTube’s own system, not through the actual DMCA process. That system is designed first and foremost to prevent YouTube from getting sued. It’s rigged in favor of the people claiming copyright because those are the ones doing the suing. Any attempt to fix it increases the chances of a lawsuit.
These trolls messing with Google are making actual DMCA claims, which is a formal legal process and opens the claimant up to potential liability. False claims are perjury. And by affecting Google search results on a large enough scale, they are hurting Google’s business. Those sites getting taken down abelong to current or potenti customers.
Nah, they don’t lose any money that way. They only potentially lose money when stuff gets taken down; when false DMCAs are submitted on YouTube videos, the videos usually stay up, the money just gets sent to a scammer instead of the YouTuber.
DMCA == guilty until proven innocent
And good luck proving your innocence to the automated systems that Google uses to respond to DMCA requests…
You can’t weaponize a law that was always intended to be a weapon.
The DMCA is one of the worst things to happen to the internet. But go figure, old people with zero understanding created the law.
NGL, this bullshit is rampant in the 3D printing space, with fake accounts declaring infringement on IP they don’t own (much less do the claims even mention anything remotely relevant to the allegedly infringed IP), and it frankly comes down to a deep-seated flaw in cost-cutting automation processes. Specifically, if the monitoring systems in place weren’t 99.99% trigger-happy bots and 0.01% exploited human labor, maybe this wouldn’t be a fucking issue… But, that would take Google, et al, deciding that profit wasn’t THE reason for existing. 🖕🏽
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results.
“To date, Defendants’ scheme has forced Google to investigate and respond to fraudulent takedown requests targeting more than 117,000 third-party website URLs, as well as takedown requests targeting more than half a million additional third-party URLs that are likely fraudulent based on preliminary investigation,” the lawsuit said.
But the lawsuit helps show how easy it is for fraudsters to game Google’s system for responding to DMCA notices.
The defendants provided fake names in their takedown requests and “falsely purported to represent large companies (e.g., Amazon, Twitter, NBC News), sports teams (e.g., Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Lakers, San Diego Padres), prominent individuals (e.g., Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, LeVar Burton, Kanye West), and famous bands (e.g., Blink 182),” the Google lawsuit said.
For example, “Defendants falsely claimed to represent Elon Musk, alleging infringement of a t-shirt with a logo with the text ‘Pharmacy Technician,’” the lawsuit said.
“Defendants signed and submitted their thousands of fraudulent takedown requests containing false information under penalty of perjury,” Google said.
The original article contains 642 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Is this irony, or just coincidence?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Well that’s rich.
Google sucks, fuck em. I have 34,858 Microsoft accounts that I use to submit DMCA claims to MS to remove Google products from Bing results.
