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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

It looks like he's the "too smart for his own good" kind of smart.

The only thing this lawsuit will do is instigate a careful review of every DMCA complaint he ever filed to make sure they were handled correctly. Those are the only "state-secured rights" he actually has. The whole point of the DMCA is the safe-harbor clause that indemnifies Google/Youtube from the claimed liabilities as long as they followed the DMCA process correctly.

From a legal perspective, it doesn't matter one whit that the DMCA process is so broken that it's basically useless.

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Some relevant discussion in the piece:

> “Once a pirated movie was found, Mr. Vasallo and Plaintiff would send YouTube a takedown notice. YouTube would then remove the pirated video movie in its entirety. However, YouTube would not remove all matching videos, as YouTube would specifically only remove the one video from the one infringer related to the single infringing upload identified in the takedown notice.

> “The same infringer would be free to upload the video again until three takedown notices were filed against him within a ninety-day period. Then and only then, would YouTube cancel the infringer’s username. The same infringer could then create a new username and begin the process of posting the pirated videos all over again,” the complaint notes.

> Over the past several years, the law firm sent over 10,000 takedown notices for pirated films that were viewed more than 500 million times on YouTube. The video service maintains that this is how the DMCA works, but the movie tycoon argued that the company should do more.

This (that is, uselessly) is also how YouTube used to handle domestic copyright claims. It is the process the law specifies. But they moved to their ContentID system despite not having to. Why?

Whatever reasons applied there may also apply here.

Assuming YouTube does dedup on their backend then this is the same issue that megaupload has to deal with before they were taken offline. Namely, if an infringing file has multiple links pointing to it, is the platform obliged to take down all of them when presented with a DMCA notice? If so, is the platform then obliged to take down every slightly different version of the same infringing content? Where do their duties end?

As much as we malign content it is still more workable than having YouTube manually purging all videos that appears to be infringing based on very little information. And most content creators who sample copyrighted media under fair use have learned to cope. The more egregious issues are more concentrated around misattributed licenses and musical performance.

> Assuming YouTube does dedup on their backend then this is the same issue that megaupload has to deal with before they were taken offline.

This is not an assumption I would make. MegaUpload was a file transfer site. Videos on YouTube do not tend to be duplicates of other videos on YouTube.

I agree. I'll occasionally come across full episodes of TV shows on YouTube. Uploaders will try to get around copyright detection by doing things like flipping video or inserting black frames. I'm assuming a simple dedupe based block could easily be bypassed.

Publishers sometime elect to leave full episodes on YouTube either to collect passive ad revenue or just to entice people into watching more on a paid platform. For example, the 1st season of Man vs. Food can be found on YouTube in its entirety. However all the later seasons are heavily cracked down by contentID to the point that the handful of surviving episodes all had serious visual or audio distortions rendering them unwatchable - some episodes were literally uploaded with a badly tuned anaglyph 3D filter that will probably need its own algorithm (or a pair of specially purposed 3D glasses) to unscramble.

If so, is the platform then obliged to take down every slightly different version of the same infringing content?

Well, no, because the platform doesn't know which of those links were published with permission of the copyright holder and which weren't.

Why not? Why isn't there a box for "copyrighy owner" on the upload form, and YT can check when the same content has different claimed owners?

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