There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist.

  • @General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    810 months ago

    I thought it was common knowledge that there are companies dedicated to suppressing information on the net by using (fraudulently or not) the DMCA, GDPR, and whatever else.

    I doubt anything can be done about this.

    • @catalog3115@lemmy.worldOP
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      310 months ago

      Google asks for tax records, passport, id card for there developer account & adword. They can certainly ask for more info to verify the sender before sending the DMCA

      • @General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        710 months ago

        I doubt they can. Once they learn about something infringing, they have to remove the link “expeditiously”. A proper DMCA notification is not even strictly necessary. Even so, the DMCA specifies what information a proper notification should contain. An email address is sufficient ID. ->DMCA

        Look at it from the perspective of the copyright industry. They want to be able to take down infringing material as quickly and easily as possible. If some small players get caught in the cross-fire, that doesn’t matter. In fact, it is still competition that was removed. The “official” outlets are safe. Everything else can go.

        And it’s not like Google would make any friends by lawyering this. If Google made this a little bit hard for the copyright industry, you’d get complaints about how they are ripping off those poor, starving artists. Everybody’s darlings, like Taylor Swift, would make noise. Lemmy would be up in arms against the evil corporation.

        Look at this thread. Crickets. Look at the threads on AI. What people here want is more takedowns*, more restrictive copyright. And people here are apparently the left-wing, traditionally opposed to that sort of thing. I always get gloomy when this comes up.

        • gian
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          110 months ago

          I doubt they can. Once they learn about something infringing, they have to remove the link “expeditiously”. A proper DMCA notification is not even strictly necessary. Even so, the DMCA specifies what information a proper notification should contain. An email address is sufficient ID. ->DMCA

          The point would be to ask that data before you could make a DMCA notification, but I agree that you could not fix this way a bad written law.