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.