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Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

> I'm aware of that, but the reason YouTube has that process is because they don't want to get sued. If the law gave YouTube immunity by simply reporting copyright claims instead of taking them down, they would switch their process.

The DMCA already has a system that is much fairer to the average creator in the form of safe harbor provisions. YouTube doesn't like the DMCA process because it's expensive to handle and process individual claims, compared to letting their big partners just sling bogus claims across the entire site.

They'd prefer to be on the side of rightsholders over creators, simply because it's cheaper.

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Exactly. So put a penalty on them for getting it wrong so it's cheaper to not take videos down.

There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders. Though it's arguable whether it has been ineffective; most settle out of court before it gets that far.

YouTube and their partners intentionally sidestep the DMCA takedown rules in favor of their own system which doesn't have these rules. The point of Content ID is to remove the barriers the law and the DMCA have, in favor of an arbitration system which (mostly) sides with big rightsholders.

The problem is that the only thing the claimant is saying under penalty of perjury as that they are actually the rightsholder (or are authorized to act on their behalf), and they have a good-faith belief that their takedown reasoning is correct. Since it's essentially impossible to prove lack of a "belief", no one ever gets in trouble for filing a false or weak claim.

> There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders. Though it's arguable whether it has been ineffective; most settle out of court before it gets that far.

Most? To my knowledge in the history of the DMCA not a single person has been hit with a perjury claim, not even the most egregious vexatious claimant.

> There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders.

What about it? It only applies if it can be shown that you intentionally lied. There is absolutely zero penalty for negligence. Even a $20 fee for misfiling would lead to a drastically different environment around DMCA notices.

But that is exactly jedberg's point: To get them to stop doing this, there needs to be regulation that ensures that if you invent alternative systems like this, you get penalised if you wrongly take content down.

The "under penalty of perjury" is completely toothless and I don't believe has ever resulted in a judgement against a rightsholder.

Here is the exact text from the DMCA from https://www.aclu.org/other/text-digital-millennium-copyright...

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.

Note the particular phrasing. The requirement that the information in the notification be accurate is not under penalty of perjury. The only thing that is under penalty of perjury is that you can only DMCA claim things that you have copyright to (or are a lawyer representing that entity).

And it's worse than that, because you can claim something that is totally unrelated without this penalty as long as you own the copyright you claim to be enforcing.

> YouTube doesn't like the DMCA process because it's expensive to handle and process individual claims, compared to letting their big partners just sling bogus claims across the entire site.

It's unclear to me why it would be expensive. The hosting provider just has to check that a take down request includes all the statutorily required elements.

That should be pretty easy--they don't have to check that the claims are right. They just have to check that the claimant identified the infringed works, the infringing activity, and where it took place; check that contact information was provided; check that the claimant includes a statement they they have a good faith belief that this is infringement; and check that they have a statement that the information is accurate and they are authorized to make claims on behalf of the copyright owner.

Similar when responding to a counterclaim.

This seems like something that could be cheaply outsourced to some cheap forest digital sweatshop to handle.

Not even: a machine could likely handle the entire interaction, pretty trivially. DMCA notices are pretty close to form letters. In the rare occasion it can't grok the notice, it could be flagged for human review.

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