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Comment by jaysonqpt | Hacker News Reader

Many people doesn't seem to understand what pain individuals undergo when their content is taken offline by Google or Github due to a fake DMCA notice.

They would have built something over years and one morning entire thing is taken offline due to a fake DMCA notice. Then they have to issue a counter notice with all its legal implications and it also exposes all your private information including full address, name and phone number(in a wrong country, you become target of thieves as well). Then it takes almost a month before content is restored.

How can an individual fight this? How can you make companies misusing DMCA pay for it?

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You could fight them by counter claims and following the DMCA processes which on paper have stiff penalties for abuse. Practically I have never heard of major abuses being punished, so wouldn’t count on it.

As a technologist perhaps solve it with tech, the first step would be to host your own content instead of using a third party app based in U.S. There is not a lot of deep tech to what GitHub gives as a githost, a self hosted gitlab serves just as well . Similarly for video photos etc, it is very hard and expensive to deliver video for millions/billions delivering video to few thousands is trivial. same thing for sub stack, medium etc

Generally these take down notices don’t go after your DC/ISP domain host provider that easily unless you are in the cross hairs of powerful lobbies like how Libgen or PirateBay are , so self hosting helps a lot.

If they do then there is distributed systems like IPFS etc can be resilient to notices.

In theory, self hosting works. I have my content self hosted. In this case, they sent a DMCA request to Google and they delisted my webpage from Google. 99% of my traffic simply dropped.

In addition, all Google properties picked up the DMCA action on Google index and started sending me warning and suspension of ads etc.

I have sent a detailed counter notice. But even after 12 days, I am yet to hear back from Google.

So self-hosting may work for Github, but not if you want presence in Google index.

Google could de-index you for arbitrary reasons too. The key is you didn’t loose your content itself as many YouTube channels had found the hard way, and YouTube doesn’t use actual DMCA to circumvent liability clauses .

If you are running a business using your content, then google deindexing can be bad, as can many other U.S. laws and other conventions, like how they how banks generally treat adult businesses even though they are legal or weed companies etc .

For non professionals , google or any other third party actions shouldn’t have any impact on be able to create and share their content.

That phase is now over. It's time to flood every company with malicious dmca notices that are automatically created from random snippets of publicly available content. You will see an attitude change overnight on the treatment of the dmca notices they receive. The only way to normalise a biased system is to increase the bias to the other side.

Self host all your code

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