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Comment by CKN23-ARIN | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but the DMCA requires them to wait at least 10 business days first. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#g_2_C

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Wtf? That’s insane. I can just randomly DDOS projects by submitting DMCA notices?

Edit: Just realized there’s nothing distributed about it.

False DMCA notices are, in theory, perjury, but in practice, yes.

Have we ever seen a media company prosecuted for perjury, despite copious evidence that they constantly misuse DMCA takedowns to do exactly that?

Nope.

Not once, no.

Not sure anyone ever gets prosecuted for perjury. It's the norm in divorce cases, for example.

Well there was the contempt of court and all with Bill Clinton…

And the amount of times I've seen a cop perjure themselves is unreal.

We know that our former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper perjured himself before congress with impunity as well. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clap...

Probably shouldn't drip gasoline on this smoldering dumpster fire, but pretty much anyone at a high political level that testifies "I can't remember" is probably committing perjury, yes. Oh well.

https://www.newsweek.com/ken-starr-says-he-almost-charged-hi...

I received bogus DMCA complaints (over Big Buck Bunny, lol, multiple times), and Google stonewalled me when I tried to find out the identity of the complainant so that I could litigate against them.

I expect situations like that contribute to the lack of response, along with the fact that providers often ignore DMCA complaints or put things back up without following the statutory takedown period.

> Google stonewalled me when I tried to find out the identity of the complainant so that I could litigate against them

Playing devil's advocate, that information may have been protected by NDA. In that case, you'd have to sue Google to divulge the complainant.

DMCA or Google's/YouTube's internal copyright dispute resolution process?

Google's form letter claimed it was a DMCA complaint, but it might have been confused.

Why do people say never? It has happened, albeit extremely rarely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

You seem to be conflating a civil countersuit and a criminal prosecution for the crime of perjury.

Negligence is not against the DMCA rules, and they can always claim they were being negligent, so no.

Out of touch politicians coming up with tech policy in the 90s. Tada!

Presumably, you'd have to succeed in that notice leading to a takedown. The 10 day waiting period only presumably kicked in when GitHub decided the DMCA was valid and actionable.

No, Github has no discretion in this process. Their only job is to follow the policy to the letter: provide the notice to the presumed offender and disable content, then forward the counter-notice to the original complainant and re-enable the content in 10 days.

GitHub can decide a takedown notice is facially invalid. Of course if it's later found that they're wrong by a court of competent jurisdiction, they'd be in trouble, so they're likely to be extremely conservative in making this determination.

I'm curious to know whether platforms ever even bother to evaluate takedowns, beyond the most basic fact-checking (e.g. the item to be taken down is spelled properly). It seems like one of those cases where the risk of getting it wrong outweighs the benefit of trying to discriminate between good and bad requests.

Doesn’t Google deny DMCA requests sometimes?

Sometimes. Not as often as they should, but they will at least reject keyword-based delisting requests for obviously innocent web properties like Wikipedia or IMDB (typically because they have an page about the movie that some overzealous "copyright defense" outfit is trying to protect).

"Perfect 10" is famous for filing obviously invalid DMCA takedowns and then suing. They've even won, e.g. Perfect 10 vs Yandex.

They are required to wait 10 days, or that's just their minimum timeframe?

The way I read it, they are required to wait 10 days. I think in part to give the complaining party time to go to court if they think there's a true infringement.

> Github has no discretion in this process

That is absolutely untrue. Github could ignore the notice or put the content back up immediately. If they do so, they may lose the DMCA safe harbor for this complaint-- but if there is no credible infringement, that isn't of much consequence.

To do that is to assume all legal risk themselves, such that should a suit be forthcoming, it's against them, and far less likely to be thrown out, even if it's not credible. They're more likely to have to pay legal fees, and have lost legal protections.

The issue isn't their actions, it's that the process requires a 10 day wait, regardless of whether the content is infringing or not.

You’d think so, but not. This part of the DMCA has repeatedly been used with the specific intent of censorship. You force content offline for a potentially important period. For example, though I’m unaware of a case, you could issue a DMCA takedown for the last ten days leading up to an election and there is nothing the victim can do.

This is why you should never host your open source project on a US server. You're one DMCA notice away from being destroyed, needing a lawyer to counter claim properly, etc. This is insanity.

Git hosted in Europe:

https://codeberg.org/

Anyone know other git hosts outside the US? pls reply

Perhaps you're right, but perhaps DMCA takedowns are a preferred alternative to what the MPAA does in other situations, like the Kim Dotcom raid in NZ.

Other areas that could be used would be like Tor and IPFS.

Tor is anti-censorship but can be a SPOF.

IPFS provides full identity of machine to the network (internal and external IPs), but is highly redundant and resistant to single attacks.

And IPFS refuses to mainline work for Tor/I2P... So it still spits out every adapter to the world. Yes, even your internal non-routable addresses.

> This is why you should never host your open source project on a US server. You're one DMCA notice away from being destroyed, needing a lawyer to counter claim properly, etc.

This is an excellent takeaway that should be upvoted.

Yes, you can, and there's nothing the victim can do about it. Many service providers won't even give you the details of the person who submitted the notice so you can sue them (Google, for example).

Require isn't exactly the right word. If they don't they lose the DMCA safe harbor. If it's really obviously not an infringement there isn't much harm in that.

This is the reason that you can't use weak (or even unambiguous!) copyright infringement to take down popular sites-- their hosts will just forego the safe harbor, perhaps in exchange for indemnification.

Private parties? No such luck.

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