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Comment by dublin | Hacker News Reader

And maybe this is one of the best reasons why we need to reign in ridiculous copyright laws. First of all, by going back to reasonable terms. In today's world, that should be probably no more than the length of patent terms - about 20 years. (And patent terms should be much shorter, especially in categories where there are a lot of patent applications.) Also, platforms falsely pulling someone's non-infringing works on grounds of false copyright claims (even if provided by the "owner") should be liable for fraud-like (treble) damages. This will make sure nothing gets banished/silienced/deplatformed unless it is a well-proven copyright violation.

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You're proposing creating an affirmative obligation on private parties to carry products or content they have no contractual obligation to. Why? What's the compelling reason we should allow YouTube to delete videos they don't like, but not allow them to delete videos that received a copyright complaint?

Personally I think the liability should be on the party submitting the complaint, not the platform. As long as the platform is permitted to reinstate the content after an appeal (which is what the DMCA counternotice safe harbor is about), that's enough. The DMCA framework works well [0], and I would like if it was extended to patents and trademark/counterfeit accusations as well.

[0] with the caveat that the standard for liability for false claims should be lowered, and they should be treated as per se antitrust violations.

The platform knows perfectly well what it's doing.

Google has been trying to hide behind the "Oh dear our algorithm is experimental and fallible and sometimes it gets things wrong and that's very sad" defence, and it's obviously nonsense. You don't even need explicit evidence of collusion to understand why.

The "failure" of the algorithm has been happening for years now, and Google appears to have made no effort to correct the failure. But the real tell is that these "failures" disproportionately benefit large corporations which Google will have some relationship with - as opposed to small content creators who are disposable.

Ultimately, these actions are not mandated by law. So what's the legal - never mind moral - justification for them?

Google has an at-will contract with users. They have no legal obligation to host their content, and can take it down for any reason.

This is why online consumer platforms should be treated as public utilities once they reach a certain size. Amazon’s online shopping arm, youtube, facebook, and gmail are products that clearly meet the bar. Search engines probably do too, at least with respect to web site owners.

Do you intend to ban ranking algorithms?

I think making them optional or auditable would be a start.

I've seen some plausible proposals along those lines. I don't actually think there's sufficient demand for that. The vast majority of people wouldn't want to roll their own spam detection algorithms. And there's only so much an outside source can do to filter spam without giving the enough info that spammers can reverse engineer.

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