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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's reasonable.

If you're a tiny rights holder, you may have produced a single song and are trying to make sure others pay you for use - but you may not be able to afford or understand what legal review you need.

If you're a major rights holder, you may have so much content to protect that is so wildly popular it is impossible to review manually. But automated review with 100% accuracy is not possible.

DMCA in many cases is not fair, but I don't think we as a global society have much of a shared view of how to handle digital creative content. Ease of digital replication doesn't match how much we generally value creative content.

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Major rights holders should take action in the cases where not taking action will cost them more money than manual review. Right now they are spamming garbage notices out and offloading all cost to the content sources receiving their notices (websites, content creators, etc.). They should have to do manual review and be more selective about when to take action. There /should/ be a penalty for fraudulent takedown notices. Using an automated process is not an excuse.

> If you're a major rights holder, you may have so much content to protect that is so wildly popular it is impossible to review manually

Maybe companies shouldn't own copyright to a million different IPs then? If you don't care enough about it to manually review it then you shouldn't get to take it down.

Somehow once you get to a certain scale it becomes its own defense. "Oh we can't police that, we're really just that big, don't you know". But the small guys better watch out, no excuses for them.

If manual review costs more than you're benefitting from sending out reviewed infringement notifications, then that's a pretty strong sign that the whole thing is just pointless busywork.

Automated review doesn't need to be 100% accurate. You don't actually need to automatically stop 12 year Olds from using your music in the background of their minecraft video to turn a profit.

Manually review cases where it's actually worthwhile.

> You don't actually need to automatically stop 12 year Olds from using your music in the background of their minecraft video to turn a profit.

To clarify, whether or not you can as an organization turn a profit, is whether or not you get to own a piece of IP? How much profit is an owner of IP allowed to have? How much should an artist get paid? I don't think I could ever limit/define that.

I think you are misunderstanding my comment. I'll add some context that may help.

The discussion centers around automated tools to detect infringing content. These tools are not 100% accurate and may cause false positives. I am of the opinion that issuing takedowns on false positives should come with consequences.

If an artist wants to enforce their copyright on every case of infringement, no matter how minor, they're welcome to do so. Where I take issues is issuing takedowns because an automated, unreviewed system flagged the content, and no manual review took place.

Automated review puts the onus on the secondary content creator to prove that their work is not infringing in response to bogus requests. They must take on the cost in time and energy to do so. The cost should be on the copyright holder, and if that means automated reviews are not economical, so be it.

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