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Comment by leros | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the problems is that content review requires human moderation, which takes some time to occur. So the question is what to do in the meantime? You can either default to leaving the content up or taking the content down. Both are problematic for different reasons.

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No, human review isn’t a solution to the DMCA. The DMCA is absurd in the lengths it goes to encourage/force automatic acceptance of a claim. If you don’t comply with a claim, and it is later found that the claim was correct then you can be held liable. At the same time there is no penalty for false claims.

Basically the legal penalty if you auto comply is 0, and the penalty if you don’t is atmospheric. At the same time you have no way to recover legal fees for a lawyer to audit the takedown requests even if they are clearly fraudulent.

Successful claims under 512(f) are rare, but that doesn't mean the section doesn't exist. There certainly is a penalty for false claims brought in bad faith.

Online Policy Grp. v. Diebold, Inc., 337 F. Supp. 2d 1195, 1205 (N.D. Cal. 2004). The defendant subsequently settled for $125,000.

Automattic Inc. v. Steiner, 2015 WL 1022655 (N.D. Cal. March 2, 2015). Court awarded ~$25,000 in damages.

*Btw, I think you meant "stratospheric." I'm pretty sure the atmosphere is everywhere.

Thanks for those citations.

Weirdly, another 512(f) case was just won:

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2021/12/a-512f-plainti...

Eric Goldman is the man! :)

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