Google Sues Men Who Weaponized DMCA Notices To Crush Competition (torrentfreak.com) 50
An anonymous reader writes: Two men who allegedly used 65 Google accounts to bombard Google with fraudulent DMCA takedown notices targeting up to 620,000 URLs, have been named in a Google lawsuit filed in California on Monday. Google says the men weaponized copyright law's notice-and-takedown system to sabotage competitors' trade, while damaging the search engine's business and those of its customers.
Red title (Score:2)
Why is the title of this article Red on the /. home page?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You happened to catch it when it was brand new on the page.
Re:Red title (Score:4, Funny)
You won the powerball lottery.
Re: (Score:2)
Does everybody win? How do I cash in?
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Great move, Google, do movie studios doing this to YouTubers next.
Huh?
Why not?
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Because unless you're a lunatic, you don't sue people you can't win against.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Not in the US, that's pretty much correct. That country has the best justice system money can buy.
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Re:Nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Not gonna happen. For the same reasons two countries that both have nukes will not go to war with each other.
MAD.
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Not gonna happen. For the same reasons two countries that both have nukes will not go to war with each other.
MAD.
That's a very odd way to spell "collusion". It's also not why countries won't go to war with each other. China, India and Pakistan have had wars whilst being armed with Nuclear weapons, so MAD really doesn't work for that. There's currently an on-again, off-again skirmish on the China/India border.
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There's an upper limit on how well a large bank account can aid in litigation. If both sides can keep attorneys going for years on end, it's kind of irrelevant. Unless you're suggesting Google has more capacity to bribe judges, which would be a high risk strategy to say the least, then the combined might of the studios on one side and Alphabet on the other is close enough that they'd probably fight to a draw.
Besides, another branch of Alphabet is all about getting licensing agreements to sell studio product
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Re: Nice (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s one of the cases where if you win you lose. Winning against the movie studies could hurt content streaming agreements they have, and thus a revenue source.
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I recall Youtube/Google/Alphabet winning cases about copyright issues in the past against the likes of Viacom, which is an acceptable facsimile of "movie studios" in general.
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They're suing people who are attacking their revenue. They're not going to sue people who're generating them revenue.
You appear to think that corporations are about morality over survival. Fun part: you're not that either. And neither am I, or anyone else. We're all programmed to survive at all costs, and it's critical for google to not allow the sort of shenanigans they're suing these people for. But it's either neutral or counter-productive to break relations with movie studios over relationship with a ti
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Learn to spot sarcasm.
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I tried zooming in really hard, and didn't find any sings of /s
How small of a font did you make it in?
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I tend to expect people to be able to understand what they read.
But I start to understand why US sitcoms need to tell their viewers when to laugh by adding laugh tracks. It seems to be necessary.
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Superpowers you see on TV aren't real. No, not even the power of mind reading. I don't have it, and neither do you.
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I knew that, what I didn't know is that characters like Sheldon Cooper who require me to hold up a sarcasm sign do exist.
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Superpower of sight over internet also isn't real. Even if you held up such a sign, it wouldn't help any.
Google blaming others for its own business model. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google blaming others for its own business mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, it pretty much does if they want to keep their copyright liability protections intact (which would be ruinous if they didn't have them).
but yet google lets this happen on youtube and if (Score:2)
but yet google lets this happen on youtube and if you are not an big channel they really don't give an shit about junk DMCA's
Re:Google blaming others for its own business mode (Score:5, Informative)
DMCA does not force them to take down everything anyone says is their property.
This is pretty much exactly what the DMCA does. If Google doesn't, they are instantly liable for all the infringing content they host.
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Which is another way of saying their business model finds it convenient, so they blame others for their own decisions. You talk about liability as if they have no choice in the matter. They absolutely do.
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Google is a data company, (one of) the biggest publisher on the internet. Removing content from their websites, be it their search engine, youtube or anything else is probably not their primary goal.
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The choice is between them having broad immunity to copyright suits for user uploaded content by taking things down according to the DMCA versus being liable for $750-30,000 per work infringed by not. No company that hosts even a fraction of the user uploaded content that they do is going to make any choice other than the one that gives them that safe harbor.
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DMCA does not force them to take down everything anyone says is their property.
Actually, it does if they want to maintain their Section 230 shield against liability. If they fail to take down offending content in a timely manner in response to a DMCA Takedown Notice, they put themselves on the hook for that content.
Re:Google blaming others for its own business mode (Score:5, Interesting)
IIUC, they could maintain their immunity if they required the poster to validate that it was not a copyright violation. But it would be a LOT more work.
youtube ? (Score:3)
time to do the same on youtube with bogus claims...
Good (Score:2)
But given the defendants are in Viet Nam it's not clear what the California courts are going to be able to do about it.
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Hey, we've bombed Hanoi on weaker justification...
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Didn't work out though
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I didn't even claim that it served a purpose.
Doing shit because you're pissed rarely does.
Get to the root cause ... (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
Uhm. Isn't the whole premise of the DMCA to be weaponized?
3 strikes you're out (Score:5, Interesting)
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That won't help, as very often the offenders don't even have the rights to the IP (if there is any at all to speak of). One of the most outrageous examples was taking down NASAs transmission from Mars from their own official YouTube channel.
Just give them the penalty for perjury or similar, and actually follow through with real, serious, jail time. And no, it won't be a denial of service on the criminal justice system, it would literally take one case and little publicity to make sure this is radioactive en
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The trouble is the only part that's under pain of perjury is that you are authorised to represent the copyright holder of the work you allege is being infringed. Not that the work is actually being infringed, or even that your reasonably believe it's being infringed. It's effectively useless.
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If the strikes are false, then nobody's intellectual property was being infringed in the first place.
Weaponized (Score:5, Interesting)
The DMCA exists only to be weaponized. It has no other purpose and doesn't even serve the greater good in the long run. It's also why DMCA is extremely weak. Because anyone can file a DMCA request. It doesn't have to be the copyright holder, representative, or an affiliate and there is no real punishment for filing a false DMCA.
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I'm not sure why people seem to forget the other parts of the DMCA, one of which is the safe harbors that protect sites from being liable for content by users that infringes on someone else's copyright as long as they take it down. Without it, sites would just be sued directly for the copyright infringement and they'd go away or stop allowing people to post anything. Giving a clear process for takedowns (including counter-notifications) is better than the alternative, even if there is some abuse.
In order to
Vexatious litigation (Score:2)
Vexatious litigation is legal action which is brought solely to harass or subdue an adversary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]