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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged consumer was report to an authority that Company X is doing business dishonestly.

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You are probably not wrong, however take note that this is exactly the line of thinking that led to the DMCA. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

To misquote you.

"I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged copyright holder was report to an authority(the hosting service) that Company X is infringing on your copyright."

Point to you there, but also I would never in a thousand years trust a company, especially a publicly traded one, with that kind of power.

It also led to things like easy small claims court, consumer protection agencies and DPOs which protect consumers against corporations here in Europe without them having to shell out thousands of euros for lawyers and court cases.

Do all the upsides outweigh all the downsides, such as DMCA?

> I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged consumer was report to an authority that Company X is doing business dishonestly.

They can still appeal the decisions of the authority in the courts of law. They will just get the authority disbanded altogether. Previously, on hn `Amazon argues that national labor board is unconstitutional (apnews.com)` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411829

In Germany, we have the Verbraucherschutz as a low-level institution to handle such claims. They can and do consolidate such reports and can file lawsuits if there is evidence of systemic misbehavior.

You can file in small claims without a lawyer.

I think I could price for a few tens of thousands of dollars a service that creates a bunch of such wronged consumers. There are a bunch of homeless people in San Francisco we will represent. To make it easy for someone on the streets to be able to complain, we actually operate as a non-profit that advocates on their behalf for having wronged the company. You could use my service to attack another company on demand, but I advise that you do it at critical moments. Ideally, two weeks before a big launch or so should do it so that we have enough time to stagger out sufficient number of complaints.

This isn't a new business idea. There are law firms that specialize in consumer class action suits, and part of their skillset is finding lots of wronged consumers to represent.

Signing up homeless people by the hundred isn't exactly the gold standard of what these firms do, but it's not a million miles removed.

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