Should Bogus Copyright Takedown Senders Be Punished?

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This is an interesting question don't you think? Why shouldn't there be some sort of penalty for bogus copyright claims?

Just to give an idea of the scope of the issue, Google previously noted that 37% of all DMCA notices they receive are not valid copyright claims. One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other sites of infringements. They swear under penalty of perjury that their notices are correct, but this is often an outright lie.
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They swear under penalty of perjury that their notices are correct, but this is often an outright lie.
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then they need to be held liable for breaking laws..just like they are asking of others.
 
Yes. A fine. A big frickin' fine with a $ this long $$$$$$$$$$.
 
How about at a fair, just, and reasonable rate. $250,000 per false claim, equal to the fines that which they are attempting to squeeze out of their victims.
 
+1 on a big fine.

If a college kid can be held liable for millions of dollars in fines for infringing a few songs. then copyright holders should face similar penalties for bogus copyright claims.


while I don't condone piracy, I think the punishment should fit the crime, when fines are being assessed in copyright cases involving trivial copyright violations, that exceed serious criminal cases or "normal" civil cases by obscene amounts, the system is obviously broken

when a person loses access to content that belongs to them, they should receive the same legal consideration as the record industry.
 
How about we also reel in the RIAA.

If they make a false claim against a person, and lose, they have to pay ALL legal costs for that person plus reparations for lost work and slander. OH, and stress. Stress is VERY expensive.

Sounds fair to me.
 
Maybe they should use the system that the Olympics uses. They have to pay a big fee upfront to file the claim, and only get the money back if it is indeed a valid copyright claim.

Make that fee a good $1000-$10000 and I think we will be bogus claims (and claims that do not make sense to file) fall substantially.
 
I think repeat offenders should be hit with a $10,000 fine per bogus claim. Instead of making their material easily available on the internet, they put too much focus and money on trying to take things down.
 
atbnet said:
I think repeat offenders should be hit with a $10,000 fine per bogus claim. Instead of making their material easily available on the internet, they put too much focus and money on trying to take things down.
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But a compyright infringement case is normally like $67500000. There should be some parity (plus it would make youtube profitable and stop the stupid adverts :D).
 
Sure, they must pay the person or company that is being wrongly accused for the maximum fine that the accused would have paid if found guilty.

$6 mil fine for downloading 20 songs? ok, you accuse someone of downloading those 20 songs and they are found innocent, you must pay them the $6 mil + legal fees.
 
DeathPrincess said:
But a compyright infringement case is normally like $67500000. There should be some parity (plus it would make youtube profitable and stop the stupid adverts :D).
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I don't think fighting outrageous fines with more outrageous fines is going to solve anything. They will just fight the fines even more if YouTube tried to go after that much. I'd hope more reasonable fines would show them that they need to be serious about their claims instead of carpet bombing.
 
atbnet said:
I don't think fighting outrageous fines with more outrageous fines is going to solve anything. They will just fight the fines even more if YouTube tried to go after that much. I'd hope more reasonable fines would show them that they need to be serious about their claims instead of carpet bombing.
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Extreme fines would do a better job of convincing people to seriously reexamine copyright infringement penalties though...which would be a much greater accomplishment than simply preventing a few false claims or letting Google extract a few bucks from the RIAA/MPAA.
 
Nanan said:
$6 mil fine for downloading 20 songs? ok, you accuse someone of downloading those 20 songs and they are found innocent, you must pay them the $6 mil + legal fees.
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while i like the idea, that probably wouldnt work too well in practice, and thats not comparing apples to oranges. sending a DMCA takedown isnt exactly the same thing as being sued for copyright infringement. i also dont think charging a flat fee for every takedown request, valid or invalid, is fair. if someone has a valid claim, the law should not penalize them with a fee for sending valid requests. plenty of low-income copyright holders would be disadvantaged, and groups with huge budgets wouldnt be as nearly affected...

however- if someone claims that you have infringed on a specific copyright they hold, takes your youtube video or similar offline, and it is found that you actually have NOT infringed, you should be able to sue them for free use of, free license to, or possibly even ownership of that copyright.

if there was a possiblity of loosing your copyright if you were wrong, you would make damn sure that any claim of copyright was infact legitimate before you sent it.
 
(That is to say, extreme fines in this particular context would sound a wakeup call regarding how ridiculous they've become in the context of copyright infringement as well.)
 
ghost6303, I like that idea...but only it if extends to companies losing their copyright to a particular work ENTIRELY, across the board, rather than just having to license it to one more entity. ;)
 
No, they shouldn't be punished for making mistakes. Plus, there are already too many stupid videos out there. If a few million innocent ones get wiped out, what have we really lost?
 
How about instead of fines simply place them into another category whenever they make any future requests in that they take their sweet ass time to verify that in fact any future claims are valid. And if over a period of time (1 year maybe) if they show that none of their claims were invalid then they get to go back to the "premium" category of insta-complaint = takedown.

I do however think any invalid requests should be able to have the person who had it done potentially sue the person making the notice (not Youtube or Google or any of them) if there's an instance of irreparable harm, i.e. an individual has his youtube video of his snowboard escapades taken down probably no big deal, you cause thousands in potential lost sales (the movie/music/software industries should find that term understandable) then you're on the line for the damage you caused.
 
Should committing a felony be punished?

Only the imaginary property monopoly would suggest otherwise.
 
they will swear affidavits under fake names,etc - good luck finding them after the fact.

Or they "believed" it was actual infringements, and were "honestly" mistaken
 
They should be fined like 500$ per invalid claim. and if more than 200 invalid claims happen in 6 months or 300 in a year, it should fully invalidate the copyright making it free for the globe to use.
 
SkribbelKat said:
No, they shouldn't be punished for making mistakes. Plus, there are already too many stupid videos out there. If a few million innocent ones get wiped out, what have we really lost?
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If you commit acts by 'mistake' it doesn't excuse your responsibility. I can see it now.

"Yes we wired that gas tank in such a way that thousands of cars burst into flames traveling down the road. But it was a mistake your honor."

"Oh ok, I'll tell all the victim's families to go pound sand."

If its a mistake, it should affect the level of judgment against them. A mistake should probably require making reparations for the harm caused and possibly more if they've been fighting responsibility. If they know their system was making 'mistakes' at the time it happened or if can be proved they did it deliberately, then something above and beyond reparations are called for.
 
Yes. Abusing the law is just as bad as breaking it, plus it forces companies like Google to develop a system to handle false requests. Companies that abuse the system should be forced to shoulder the burden that they place on it... and then some
 
jpm100 said:
If you commit acts by 'mistake' it doesn't excuse your responsibility. I can see it now.

"Yes we wired that gas tank in such a way that thousands of cars burst into flames traveling down the road. But it was a mistake your honor."

"Oh ok, I'll tell all the victim's families to go pound sand."

If its a mistake, it should affect the level of judgment against them. A mistake should probably require making reparations for the harm caused and possibly more if they've been fighting responsibility. If they know their system was making 'mistakes' at the time it happened or if can be proved they did it deliberately, then something above and beyond reparations are called for.
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The possiblity that someone is gonna die from accidentally taking down a silly video they posted to YouTube is pretty low so I don't think the usual car comparisons are very useful.
 
Mini-Me said:
ghost6303, I like that idea...but only it if extends to companies losing their copyright to a particular work ENTIRELY, across the board, rather than just having to license it to one more entity. ;)
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i think it would still work with some range in severity; that is if you send one single erroneous takedown, which doesnt cause much damage (maybe some guys youtube video was down for 48 hours, and he missed alll of 26 page views; still that is 'damage' or 'censorship' but its relatively small), then the penalty might be that the copyright holder is forced to grant a free license to that content in question to that guy who owns the youtube channel, both as repayment for the trouble you caused him, and also to ensure that he then has a legal license to use that content in the future without reprisals.

if you are maybe the fourth largest content producer in the world, and you erroniously sensor, maybe (of course, completely hypothetically), a national presidential campaign... the damages and implications are relatively huge. i could see in instances like this, the copyright holder forefits their claim to that work entirely, and hands it over to the individual or group that was done harm. this ensures that it positively never happens again.
 
SkribbelKat said:
The possiblity that someone is gonna die from accidentally taking down a silly video they posted to YouTube is pretty low so I don't think the usual car comparisons are very useful.
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The analogy isn't comparable in terms of degree, but it made the general point about responsibility for harm pretty effectively I thought.

Still, you're right that there are better analogies to work with. Think of all the very real lost profits from Google's advertising revenue though (which Youtubers can share in), and the analogy to imaginary lost profits from filesharing will become very clear. :p
 
Mini-Me said:
The analogy isn't comparable in terms of degree, but it made the general point about responsibility for harm pretty effectively I thought.
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Burning cars have lots more degrees...probably as many as one of those "lifetime" college students that takes classes forever, but not as many as the Sun.

Still, you're right that there are better analogies to work with. Think of all the very real lost profits from Google's advertising revenue though (which Youtubers can share in), and the analogy to imaginary lost profits from filesharing will become very clear. :p
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Hey, that sounds familiar! Google should go all crazy anti-pirate because of lost profits! :D
 
ghost6303 said:
i think it would still work with some range in severity; that is if you send one single erroneous takedown, which doesnt cause much damage (maybe some guys youtube video was down for 48 hours, and he missed alll of 26 page views; still that is 'damage' or 'censorship' but its relatively small), then the penalty might be that the copyright holder is forced to grant a free license to that content in question to that guy who owns the youtube channel, both as repayment for the trouble you caused him, and also to ensure that he then has a legal license to use that content in the future without reprisals.

if you are maybe the fourth largest content producer in the world, and you erroniously sensor, maybe (of course, completely hypothetically), a national presidential campaign... the damages and implications are relatively huge. i could see in instances like this, the copyright holder forefits their claim to that work entirely, and hands it over to the individual or group that was done harm. this ensures that it positively never happens again.
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To be clear, I do agree that such fine-grained compensation would be equitable for fradululent DMCA takedown notices (well, in addition to criminal perjury charges...let's get some jail time here), if you assume up front that copyright is inherently just in the first place. However, I'm not so sure about the premise that anyone should be granted a government monopoly over the reproduction of a particular work, which colors my perceptions here. Even if I did fully accept copyright in the general sense, the copyright industry still abuses people in so many other extreme ways that go unpunished (e.g. extortion for thousands, and lawsuits for millions based on arbitrary assumptions regarding lost sales) that I'm to the point of jumping at any chance to punish those violations as well. This even includes indirect avenues, because the copyright industry has gotten so out-of-control that addressing each injustice head-on is a futile endeavor (ask Jammie Thomas).
 
They need to learn a lesson for damaging someone elses property, a fine of some sort, maybe a temporary ban on their materials.
 
I say just a scaled fine. Issue a false take down once in a years time, be fined a dollar. Twice 2 dollars. Thrice 4 dollars. So on and so forth. $8, $16, $32, $64,$128, $256, $512,$1024, $2048, $4096,$8192, $16348, $32768, etc. That will fix false take downs in a hurry, while not making it too expensive to make the occasional mistake. You keep making mistakes with faulty auto take down notice software you bankrupt yourself fast with the exponentially growing fines. If you bankrupt yourself like this in lue of money you can transfer your copy write into the public domain.
 
Of course they should be fined but how do you fine a copyright robot/algorithm? Hugo awards anyone?
 
night_2004 said:
Maybe they should use the system that the Olympics uses. They have to pay a big fee upfront to file the claim, and only get the money back if it is indeed a valid copyright claim.

Make that fee a good $1000-$10000 and I think we will be bogus claims (and claims that do not make sense to file) fall substantially.
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Terrible precedent to set. Courts should not EVER require fees up front to accept a tort. If they do an argument could be made that all cases should require fees up front and that limits the justice system to the wealthy right off. I am all for tort reform but not in that way.
 
JayteeBates said:
Terrible precedent to set. Courts should not EVER require fees up front to accept a tort. If they do an argument could be made that all cases should require fees up front and that limits the justice system to the wealthy right off. I am all for tort reform but not in that way.
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I think you misunderstood actually: His idea has nothing to do with courts requiring up-front fees for torts. Instead, his idea is to amend the DMCA so that copyright holders filing DMCA take-down notices with another company or individual (i.e. not a case in a court of law) must pay the recipient a fee before the recipient is forced to address it, and the fee is only refundable in the case of a legitimate claim.

I like that. I actually like any and every idea here, especially the ones the copyright lobby would hate the most...and we should do what they do and attempt ALL of them at once.
 
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