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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

So the underlying issue is really that it's "Google's" copyright enforcement system, Google's database. Not a public register of copyright works which could be treated as authoritative, and corrected where necessary. The problem goes back to copyright being assumed, not requiring registration.

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No, the underlying issue is the US DMCA assuming that a takedown claimant holds valid copyright until disputed by the alleged copyright infringer, and absolutely zero real risk of liability for invalid takedown claims by copyright holders.

Google is “complicit” (at least in the moral sense, not sure about the legal sense) by providing a broken service that appears to be unable to distinguish different performances of public domain works.

But the principal legal and moral burden is still on the takedown claimant to represent that a certain video is indeed copyright infringement and not another performance altogether or fair use of copyrighted works. They should not be able to get away with large-scale false statements. Even for claims that relate to actual copyright infringement, they could not have a “good faith belief” of copyright infringement because they are simply relying on a known broken system (of Google) without appropriately verifying their claims, even after many successful disputes relating to the same issue.

It seems like this case has nothing to do with the DMCA. Google’s content ID and claim system is not related to that at all.

Google's claim system is far more pro-takedown than DMCA requires.

If they were actually following the process in the DMCA, then as soon as the original poster made a counter-claim, Google could put it back up and the claimant's only recourse would be to take legal action against the poster.

Not sure a public register alone would solve the issues. There were already cases in the past where TV shows registered copyright on their episodes and it resulted in automated strikes against youtube videos featured in these episodes.

So for any registry to work you would have to go through every video and mark exactly what parts you claim copyright for, which parts you do not claim copyright for and who else might hold copyright. Basically you would end up killing the automation, which would most likely piss of the movie and music cartels/lobbyists.

With a public register, if a TV show registers copyright incorrectly, that could then be corrected once, rather than the current situation, which requires it to be corrected on every claim.

> So for any registry to work you would have to go through every video and mark exactly what parts you claim copyright for, which parts you do not claim copyright for and who else might hold copyright. Basically you would end up killing the automation, which would most likely piss of the movie and music cartels/lobbyists.

That would be a feature, not a bug.

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