In an ideal world. They might even be legally liable in this one. But you still have to sue them to get the money, which is an expensive gamble for a very small pay off.
You know you can just read the linked articles, right?
Edit: parent has edited their post, it used to say something like "google has never notified anyone about such things".
Because there is no law that requires a penalty. It's very common on YT, if you are big enough of a company you can file them willy nilly and never get any consequence
This has been known for years. Copyright has been abused for many many years in this sense.
And Google is very well known for their completely absent human-in-the-loop support, so that doesn’t help either.
I have seen that posh double-barreled surname before: Charles and Cathy Negus-Fancey were the managers of the reclusive cult musician Scott Walker and his interface to the world. Any close relation?
This also demonstrates why it is bad for a law to mandate private entities to do moderation, in this case taking down copyright infringement materials when reported. Google, like basically all big platforms, doesn't care if a claim is fraudulent because the parties impacted cannot hold it accountable — google will just tell you they are themselves victims of the fraudulent claim. And to be fair, they are. But it has to enforce the claims or else lose its safe harbor exemption. This practically allows bad actors to use platforms as their shields, and in the end no one but the victim suffers any consequences for their abuse of the copyright laws.
I think a more sane approach would to require every copyright takedown to require a court order. Granted, the legal system is not perfect, but judges are not incentivized to always side with the supposed copyright holder like online platforms do. They will not be letting someone claiming to be living on a deserted island to file a claim and even when fraud does occur, they will at least know where the claim is actually coming from and be able to punish the fraudster accordingly.
Requiring verification through government ID for takedown notices should be a minimum requirement.
this is the most infuriating part, you don't even have to be a person to do this?
The thing that stands out to me isn't even the fake identity or the fake country. It's that the incentives are completely backwards.
Submitting a bogus DMCA is basically free. Google's cheapest option is to comply first and sort it out later. Meanwhile the person who did nothing wrong has to spend hours (or money) fixing it.
That's a system where every incentive points toward abuse...without knowing what and how this system works behind the scenes, makes me wonder...if it's one of those "delegated to Accenture" processes; like the Google Drive file moderation...
A_D_E_P_T•1h ago
It seems obvious that there should be a review process for takedown requests, with penalties for frivolous requests. (Up to and perhaps including lawsuits to cover costs and for the sake of deterrence.) But it's not at all obvious to Google.
RobotToaster•1h ago