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Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

So one could file a bogus takedown for a competitor's website, etc. Ugh.

It's very unlikely that Google would follow through on an obviously wrong takedown unless if the competitor was actually infringing copyright.

EDIT: Well, yes, they did do that here. My bad. My original point was that Competitor A submitting a wanton DMCA takedown against Competitor B wouldn't fly past Google's radar.

Unfortunately not every company has Google's ability to manually sift through every bogus takedown request thrown their way.

Very true. We probably have to have blind faith that the companies that are important (like Google) are the same ones that take the validity of DMCA takedown requests seriously.

> Unfortunately not every company has Google's ability to manually sift through every bogus takedown request thrown their way.

Is there any evidence at all that Google actually manually sifts through every takedown (or even any takedown), or is everyone just speculating that they must because they Google?

I have no idea, but if we actually have evidence or public statement from Google to that effect, I'd be interested. And I definitely wouldn't assume it without that. But lots of people in these comment threads seem to be doing so (unless there's some widely known reports or evidence I don't know about?)

Google cannot afford the legal liability of taking decisions on whether a DMCA notice is valid or invalid.

They will take down everything specified in every DMCA notice even if it is obviously bogus, because not doing so opens them up to a lawsuit. (a lawsuit alleging malafide intentions or a lawsuit for harm if they should make a mistake in deciding which part of the DMCA notice to honor and which to ignore.)

It is up to the harmed party (the owner of whatever was taken down) to challenge the DMCA takedown in a court. Once you win in court, Google will restore whatever was removed.

I just put a few of those "Adam" URLs into Google Search and they show up in the results. The usual "some results have been removed due to DMCA" notice is not there either, so I think they haven't removed them - or did, and then put them back.

It is up to the harmed party (the owner of whatever was taken down) to challenge the DMCA takedown in a court. Once you win in court, Google will restore whatever was removed.

I doubt anyone has gone to court over the Adam URLs either. Some of those are personal pages (ironically enough, including a law professor: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/levitin-adam-j.cfm ) and it doesn't seem like whoever is responsible for them would even know that they were listed in a DMCA notice.

You only have to send a counternotice and the content is restored after 10 business days. With most companies, you can just send a properly worded e-mail. Others, like Google, have a web form you fill in. The DMCA never forces content in dispute to remain offline indefinitely even if you have zero resources; the complaining party has to go to court to make that happen.

Or they just send a takedown notice again (yes it's against the law but they won't have anything happen to them)

10 business days could be a long time if your company is in the middle of a launch or other time sensitive period, and that is 10 days after you notice: I assume they won't contact you (how would thy know who to contact and how with any reliability?) to say "we've de-listed these sites, you might want to look into if you need to respond". This could be used to damage competitors, or in this case to accidentally damage random unrelated people/companies.

YouTube got an interesting DMCA takedown request back in the day: it was issued by the Chinese government at the time of the Beijing Olympics. The details escape me but the title of the video was something like "Olympic Gymnastics Beijing" or some other searchbait/clickbait, with a plausible-looking thumbnail, but the video itself was a super-critical video directed at the Chinese government. China issued a bad-faith DMCA takedown on the grounds that they are the only authorized distributors of what the video claimed it was.

IIRC YouTube refused to block the site for this very reason; the "10 days later" would have ruined the clickbait purpose of the video as the event would have been well over and actual legitimate outlets for its content would have sprouted up.

Well, they just took down rust's package manager on Github. That's an obviously wrong takedown. If I understand the system correctly, it actually is designed for "shoot first, ask questions later".

> Well, they just took down rust's package manager on Github.

Just in case anyone skims this far and panics by misreading jkrems' post, I should clarify that they took down the Google search results for Cargo, rather than the Github repo [1]. Unfortunately, for the average user, removing something from Google may as well be a complete takedown...

This implications of this are troubling.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo

Yeah, sorry. I took a lazy shortcut there. What I meant was "they targeted the URL of rust's package manager and took a link to it down". It was less about the impact and more about how they couldn't claim that they honestly thought ("good faith") they had any claim on that page. But from all I can find that doesn't matter since there don't seem to be any repercussions for these kinds of takedowns.

I figured. Even in spite of my checking, there was a kernel of panic in my stomach when I read your statement, so I had to double check. ;)

I'd imagine anyone quickly perusing the comments might've had a similar thought!

You're absolutely right, though. It really doesn't matter: The DMCA protects content owners to the detriment of innocent parties.

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