Welcome to the DMCA. It's as broken as copyright and causing quite serious stifling of young creators. It sometimes feels like it's used more for evil than for its legitimate purpose.
More like "DMCA theoretically has protections against false accusations, but instances of people being held accountable are extremely rare."
Knowingly making a false DMCA claim is perjury, and IMO it should be treated as such. Instead companies send out automated claims in the thousands and then come back with "but we didn't know it was wrong, it was the bot!" and get away with it.
Hi there. Plaintiff here from OPG v Diebold, the first successful case enforcing 512f against knowingly false DMCA takedowns where the defendant was found guilty and owed several hundred thousand dollars in damages. It can and does happen and there is court precedent. Contact EFF if you're on the receiving end of an obviously bad DMCA takedown.
Yeah I don't know what people expect. YT is huge now, they are being watched by governments and corporations alike. The days were you could find entire movies on YT or Al qaida recruitment videos is long gone. If Google steps out of line everyone is immediately at their throat.
>It sometimes feels like it's used more for evil than for its legitimate purpose.
That's exactly what it is used for. It's a multibillion dollar industry that will always ask for more and more power to police their imaginary property. They even coerce other countries into adopting similar laws as part of trade agreements. I'm convinced that copyright infringement is moral and akin to civil disobedience.
Wonder if we can return the favour? If someone sends us an obvious unfair takedown (like in the article) we can name and shame them. And also do the same tactics, go to their content and report it as violation of your content. Even if it doesn't they still have to respond and go through the same hoops.
If a group of us formed and we did this to all of them and gunged up the system, google would be forced to improve it.
> And also do the same tactics, go to their content and report it as violation of your content.
This might work between rival game streamers or something but the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe likely do not have a YouTube channel for you to retaliate against.
But you could find out who is legitimately using that copyright on YT and retaliate against them. For instance, if you use a clip of a Prince song that is taken down, and you determine that BMG music owns the Prince catalog, you could send automated infringement requests against PrinceVEVO or any official BMG uploads.
Even better if you created a "burner" corporation. Ie P.O. box in Delaware and act on their behalf. They have to take you seriously because corporation, amirite?
YouTube is broken for anyone that isn’t a giant media corporation, or very heavy ad buyer. The biggest YouTuber on the platform regularly gets false copyright claims, DCMAs, etc.
It isn't perjury. In the DMCA, It is illegal for me to send copyright notices about you infringing a work I don't own, but it is not illegal for me to send a copyright notice about a work I do own - say a film - even if the page doesn't actually contain any of that film.
Apart from classical music, bird noises and ambient noises are common cases of inaccurate YouTube takedowns.
There's lots of them. The most notorious one I had to deal with was Adrev. There are reports of people getting notices from AdRev for videos that don't even have any music in them. [1]
Seems like this is a great way to do copyright trolling - it's highly scalable and exists within a walled garden which means it's a legal grey area for things like this, much like how free speech on YouTube/Reddit isn't really a thing.
YouTube partners can upload a collection of files they claim rights on, and a YouTube bot will check any newly published video against anything in that database.
It's all automated. They don't verify if the claimant actually has the rights, this is left to the "dispute" process.
Sometimes multiple companies upload the same files. Sometimes the algorithm has false positives because the section of audio used is too short.
