This 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
Not as if it’s a unique name either. Artëm is common for men in Russia and Ukraine.
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...
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.
Dead Comment
Falsely accusing someone of bad behavior in an attempt to affect a business relationship seems like it would have some possible civil remedies?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Copyright reform advocates are and always were saying that the protection laws were doing more harm than good.
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.
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.