Reckless DMCA Deindexing Pushes NASA's Artemis Towards Black Hole
torrentfreak.comThis would be a really good case to push the Department of Justice to investigate. There are criminal penalties for false claim of copyright infringement, but only the Attorney General can initiate a case. For knocking NASA PR out of search, that just might be possible. Complain to NASA's PR people. NASA still has some political clout. Enough to take on some Instagrammer.
Nah. It takes an act of God to prosecute anybody for perjury, and these wouldn't even be easy cases to win.
What NASA and anybody else harmed by this stuff (such as say Google) needs to do is to lobby for parity.
The statutory damages for pirating a single pop song in the US are $250,000, and any copyright holder can file a suit to get that amount, under a civil "preponderance of the evidence" standard, without having to involve the criminal justice system at all.
Therefore, the damages for knowingly or negligently filing a false DMCA notice should also be $250,000. Either the wrongly accused person or any service provider inconvenienced by the notice should be able to sue for that amount, under the same standard of evidence. If the preponderance of the evidence shows you didn't take proper care to verify a notice, that'll be $250k. For each notice.
It's rich that someone on Instagram picked the name of a Greek goddess and is able, through the insanity of the DMCA, squat on that name.
They aren't trying to squat on the name. They wanted to remove copies of their own photographs and picked the cheapest lawyer they could find, who proceeded to blast out bullshit notices in their clients' names. Likely because anyone more competent would be entirely outside their budget.
If there is anything to learn here, it's that...
- DMCA 512 is wholly inadequate for creators because there are zero protections for false claims (tell me what I don't already know), and,
- DMCA 512 is wholly inadequate for creators because the cost to actually find, takedown, and potentially prosecute infringements of your work is astronomical.
It is a law that makes everyone miserable, except Google, who gets to push papers around and wash their hands of everything.
The media cartels are pretty happy with it, being able to take down massive swaths of the Internet with no realistic consequences for false positives.
The thing is, even the media cartels hate this system, because it requires they go and manually hunt infringement. They don't want to pay that cost. They want something like YouTube's Content ID where they send one notice and all the platforms do what they say (or perish). That's why there was such a big push for yesterdecade's SOPA/PIPA and today's EUCD Article 17.
DMCA isn't the thing allowing this, its big companies taking dmca notices at face value and just acting on them without caring.
The DMCA forces them to act this way.
It somewhat encourages companies to act this way by making it the safest path, but it absolutely does not force them to. Service providers are not required to act on invalid dmca requests.
Consider wikipedia which regularly rejects most [1] of the dmca notices it gets because it cares enough to actually read them and ignore the ones that are bullshit.
[1] according to https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/transparency/2023-1/dm... in a 6 month period they got 29 dmca requests and ignored 27 of them.
It’s almost as if US legal systems actively facilitate cultural appropriation, particularly with DMCA generally being applied by brute force. Using US copyright law to protect an influencer’s appropriation of a 3000 year old name to market their narcissism is exactly a case of that.
Not as if it’s a unique name either. Artëm is common for men in Russia and Ukraine.
It facilitates the violation of human rights. It created a system that does more to harm speech than it does to protect it's proliferation. The large corporations who profit the most from this "law" are the least in need of it's protections and it's bizarre that they're entitled to raise the specter of FBI investigated criminal penalties for what should be a civil matter.
The cultural appropriation, to the extent that it does occur, is simply profitable within this framework. It's more like cultural maceration, the guts are thrown away, and the brightly colored chitin is all that remains.
This but for all of intellectual property. Outlawing humans doing whatever they want with ideas sounds like some Orwellian nightmare
Thats exactly the world we live in.
I'm painfully aware
> an influencer’s appropriation of a 3000 year old name
Most of the results for "artemis onlyfans/instagram" are Caucasian. Meaning it is overwhelmingly likely that the model in question is a descendant, at least in part, of literal Artemis worshiping pagans, and is thus not committing any appropriation.
Hans get the skull measurer
That is a good idea for a perception campaign against this kind of practice. Calling it "Cultural Appropriation" might trigger more people on the progressive side to get involved...
Also true of "Nike".
It'd be especially good for setting case law precedence since it isn't a multi-national megacorp with an army of lawyers. It's just a shady small company hired by a person. The case could probably get a fair hearing.
How would it change anything? You still need to challenge the false DMCA in court, and prove it is false. Bad actors will continue targeting people too poor to fight back.
A lot of these DMCA agents for hire come from the porn industry. Our company has been attacked by Eric Green [1] with baseless defective DMCA notices (including notices to the ISP), to which we have not responded. Our legal counsel (a renown copyright lawyer) advised not respond, because the notices were defective (baseless). He pointed out however, that his cowboy background comes from the porn industry, that he expanded into other areas. The problem is that the copyright law doesn't provide for an adequate punishment for unscrupulous DMCA notices.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Etsy/s/cQfDsf4nE2
https://www.reddit.com/r/Etsy/s/HEhayRGlG9
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/28023794/someone...
Unfortunately, DMCA abuse rarely has consequences for those behind it.
I think with this sort of carelessness, it's only a matter of time before they mess with the wrong people and incur some real-life consequences. As much as I'm against doxxing in general, there are certainly those who will take that route of revenge.
> DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name ‘Artemis’.
We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.
This is a very nice-sounding fantasy. Too many people profit from the status quo to do such a thing. Lawyers and judges would not dare issue a ruling or enact any law harming their and their friends' profession.
Cynicism like this is poison for changing the political system. Not only have you ceded all ground to the copyright industry - you also discourage others from trying to make a difference.
The public isn't as powerless to enact change as you make them out to be.
Yes the public is powerless. Nothing short of revolution will change the status quo. Until then, not a god damn thing will ever make a meaningful change away from the direction things are heading. The people have lost control of the government.
LARPing will not change things, no.
People here, if organized, could absolutely change things especially considering the resources at the financial disposal of those here.
No, I don't mean issues like what you see endlessly litigated on the news. There's countless other issues that barely get any attention in the news such as - Copyright! Not to abolish it - that will never happen, but changes are absolutely possible.
Also, the penalty against falsely claiming you represent a copyright holder can/will be weaponized against anyone trying to bring attention to abuse by issuing the "missing" DMCA takedown requests in a logically consistent manner.
In other words, it ends up making it easy for issuers to selectively bully small weak targets while carefully avoiding anyone who could fight back legally. The fact that one thing was removed/kept doesn't create precedent for another fundamentally identical thing posted by someone else.
I mean the lawyers behind Prenda Law were disbarred and sent to jail for their outrageous copyright trolling in large part because they abused the justice system. Judges don't like it when you do that. They can and do bust lawyers and law firms all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
I think the main issue here is, if you're a victim of DMCA fraud it's hard to get a case in front of a judge because of the way the law is written. But that doesn't mean it will never happen, and if it does I absolutely feel like a judge might set a precedent which curtails the practice, because judges by nature tend to take a dim view of abuse of process.
For the lawyers on HN, would you able to bring a lawsuit for defamation and tortuous interference?
Falsely accusing someone of bad behavior in an attempt to affect a business relationship seems like it would have some possible civil remedies?
Is there a tool that creates those visual previews of urls like the one in the article? Looks useful.
Web site that profits from widespread copyright violation-- decries the flawed legal mechanisms that widespread copyright violation enabled.
DMCA has serious problems in practice, and needs correcting. But the piracy community should not be the ones criticizing every time a merchant ship has a gunpowder accident from the cannons they're required to carry because of the pirates.
Digital piracy took off in part because copyright restrictions were so unreasonable and onerous to begin with. Copyright was last extended to its current absurd length in 1998, and its provisions were retroactive, which is arguably unconstitutional.
I agree that current copyright terms are too long, but for your causality argument to hold water, the bulk of piracy would have to occur for works older than 17 years (the initial copyright term), and I very much doubt that this is the case.
It took off because people don't want to pay for things if they don't have to, and the rest is mostly rationalization and retconning.
I think it took off because we finally saw behind the curtain.
By and large, people could ignore copyright for its first few centuries-- it simply wasn't in the face of most people.
In 1799, or 1899 you couldn't reasonably print a commercial-quality newspaper, novel, or sound recording at home. If there was anything resembling commercial-scale copyright infringement, it was a business-versus-business play, and usually the 'knock-off' product was an obvious inferior substitute, or a clear attempt to defraud buyers. You weren't just paying for the "legitimacy" of official works, you were paying for a product higher quality than you can generate yourself.
By 1999, a normal upper-middle-class consumer could buy some sub-$1000 printers and produce his own copies of documents and photographs that looked as good as anything you got from a publisher. He could get a spindle of CD-Rs in a neighbourhood shop and make audio CDs that played as well as commercial ones.
At that point, the obvious question is "this costs me 75 cents to make at home, what am I paying $15 for?" The answers-- "it's legitimate" or "the artist gets paid, blah, blah", did not prove satisfactory enough. The "artist gets paid" one especially rang hollow when we saw plenty of artists sell millions of $15 records and earn enough in royalties to get a Big Mac but not fries.
Only the fear of prosecution was remotely viable to force people to ignore the question and go back to buying "official" media.
The sad thing is that the 'legitimate' options we have now are arguably even worse - streaming services pay laughably tiny royalties, there's no transparency or consistency, ad supported platforms are markedly worse than broadcast radio/tv were.
TorrentFreak is a news site, not a site that enables torrenting per se. That said, your analogy is also flawed: this is not a gunpowder accident, it’s one merchant turning the cannons on the other, and the complaining party is the only one that has been anti-cannon the entire time.
Copyright reform advocates are and always were saying that the protection laws were doing more harm than good.
TorrentFreak is not a disinterested journalism site. Their sponsor ads are clearly targeted at pirates.
Can you name a non disinterested journalism site?
We need a good balance between pirates and merchants.
If the former get too strong, it would stifle innovation and disincentive people from investing into improvements, technology, slowing the humanity’s progress towards a better world.
If the latter become too strong, (as it is right now) all those benefits risk to fall in too few hands, making this world even more unbalanced and unjust.
Let’s not give for granted the freedom that we have had until right now, it’s more at peril than we think.
>We need a good balance between pirates and merchants.
I disagree.
We need sensible copyright terms of certainly no more than the patent terms (20 years) and probably a default of half-that.
We need to remove closed distribution if we want market forces to act -- by which I mean all distribution services can offer a work (maybe after 1 or 2 years of exclusive use) provided they pay the copyright holder the fee set.
No copyright unless a work can enter the public domain. So, creators need to deposit DRM free copies, or have no DRM. Sellers need to ensure games have server code available, or no copyright.
We don't need to support copyright infringement, we need to be serious about the public domain and ensure the system works for the demos.
These are of course my own views, independent of my employment.
I think we can go further. Copyright is a terrible hack. Creative works are not scarce, but they're subject to front-loaded costs. (Write the game/book/song once, and then every subsequent copy is essentially free).
Copyright said "let's force everyone to pretend this non-scarce item is scarce, so we have a way charge a non-zero price and recoup costs." It allowed us to continue to use market-economics tools, because we couldn't think of anything better. However, it also creates an ugly and immoral distortion of how we handle the precious commodity of knowledge, and ends up creating only a few winners at the expense of everyone else in society.
But it's by far not the only way to answer that question. Why not bail on using the market at all? Massively expand the public funding for creative works. Hire armies of software developers and artists to earn a decent wage creating, and we'd probably still spend less overall because we could eliminate the opportunity for a few short-tail bazillionaires and the parasitic industries parceling out "rights".
Disconnecting the economic rent from the value of a piece of cultural to each individual is a horrid idea.
Culture, like everything else, is subject to the pareto principle. A handful of works are so much better than the rest that they capture almost all of the money that the public is willing to part with. This is true regardless of economic system.
I question the ability of the market to measure quality. Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality. Even though they made bazillions, will students in the high schools of 2523 be reading through scripts of Friends and Breaking Bad the way we slogged through King Lear and Othello?
What makes it to market is already a constrained selection. It has to make it through a bunch of commercial filters (investors and publishers who'd rather do a predictably bankable franchise product over a new whole-cloth one), and then you have the issue of only hearing from those who are financially and physically stable enough to create cultural works in the first place. How many potential writers can't start their novel because they're working three jobs, or hiding for their lives in Gaza?
Copyright itself also produces a huge filter by discouraging iterative creativity. It silences people whose talent is building on or expanding existing work. See the guy who is being ordered by the courts to destroy his LOTR derivative product. Perhaps there's a chance to make better Tolkein than Tolkein himself, but we won't know for another 50 years or so.
I'd rather we tell artists "go crazy, you're guaranteed 70k per year, whether you make the next Iron Man, or something so avant-garde only six people actually get it, and four of them are just claiming they do to fit in." We'll at least get more diverse products, and let history decide what's meritorious.
>Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality.
Thanks for giving us your position; I think I'm generally in agreement with you.
Here though it's good to note that [at least] one type of historic importance develops over time.
Die Hard, to take an arbitrary example, might not have been an important film as far as its art or technical quality [I don't know, it's not important to my point] but its enduring nature and position as an icon -- as a sort of mainstream but somehow counter-cultural part of Christmas for those of us of a certain age and certain bent -- makes it important when otherwise it would not be. It's not intrinsic to the artwork but emerges out of the societal response to the work.
In the UK we've been paying for the BBC to make culturally responsive TV for decades, yet somehow it all got tied back up in copyright when really it should be publicly owned and free-libre to anyone who will pay the download costs [and, perhaps, has a "TV License"].
I agree. If the public domain was as important as copyright, the problem of piracy would largely go away. It's people, living in the midst of the public, that think they have a god given right to create works of art solely for profit. Art is meant to improve the public good. Making money from that work is only a byproduct of your contribution to society.
Since everything is ass backwards, its no wonder people pirate content.
That doesn't follow, online copyright infringement didn't require anyone to write the DMCA in its current form.
Piracy empowered crappy corporations and politicians to do DMCA.
No. Piracy always existed and the corporations didn't need DMCA 512 to sue people. In fact, before 512 you could sue platforms directly and get a huge judgement. 512 protects Google, not creators, plaintiffs, defendants, or copyright holders at large.
We would be better off without copyright enforcement at all than whatever we have now.