City-Builder Taken Off Steam After Fan Goes Rogue (opens in new tab)

The person is claiming rights to a version of the game not yet released because they wrote a game guide about how to do it and the game creators agreed to credit him in the new IP. This has led to him filing the DMCA requests and initiating a claim against the new product. The DMCA requests appear to be retaliatory. That's my understanding from the minimal information provided in the article.

Note however we are getting one side of this story -- the developers. I have no idea what is going on and it is surprising how many times things swing around when both parties are heard (the Doom Eternal soundtrack issues come to mind)[0].

[0] https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...

But the reason the above commenter has a point is because it’s unclear if the claim is false. I know nothing about the game, but the article claims this 3rd party spent so much effort creating a new way of playing the game that the game studio meant to implement those changes and even mention this 3rd party in the credits.

So the commenter is right: this person (apparently) created a work (IP) and thinks they have a right to monopolize that work.

The fact that IP law exists in the first place gives this person ground to stand on and do a lot of damage, because the claim has some amount of truth. There is probably not enough truth to his IP claim that this will work for him, but there is enough truth that he’d be mentioned in the credits.

The fact that copyright law has evolved into a guilty-until-proven-innocent system so easily abused is, however, an indictment of the system of copyright.

Many people disagree with your statement. The ability to cause something to be removed from sale without due process (e.g. a court weighing in on whether there is a legitimate argument that a finding of infringement has occurred) is abhorrent IMHO. Yes, there is a legal process to reverse this, but the default should never be to act first.

Of course it is an indictment, because such a system needs to be enforcable without doing damage. Although some of that may extend to our system of justice and its huge monetary barriers as well.

Aside from this, false DMCA claims are even used as a vehicle for harassment. Of course that is broken as well...

What evidence do you have that the claim is false?

Yes. In general, DMCA was written by rightsholder lawyers early in the internet's lifetime to maximize their power and minimize their responsibilities or damages if they abuse it. The prevalence of systems like Youtube's contentID allowing (often real, but also often flimsily alleged) rightsholders to nigh-unilaterally capture all value on the barest suggestion of unlicensed use is abysmal and calls for a compulsory license system more akin to radio, but rightsholders don't want that because compulsory licenses don't let them negotiate megaprofit deals on their own terms.

The anti-circumvention provsions are also a trash fire. DRM regimes are some hot consumer-hostile bullshit that have no (legal) alternative because the law is behind them and heavily weighted towards the needs and wants of major IP holders. Modern US copyright law is designed primarily to maximize profits and enforcement mechanisms for entrenched interests with little regard for anything that isn't, idk, Beyonce tier of actually needing that much licensing cruft.

There's some joke somewhere about ours being the first few generations to systematically deny ourselves access to our own culture because biglaw is more than happy to cut off its cultural nose to spite its face so long as the money train keeps flowing for the few elites that really benefit from the current system. We have a walled garden that will likely never fall because life is peachy if you're inside the garden already, and anyone outside can't compete with the financial and lobbying muscle of those inside it without operating in legal gray areas at best.

If that's how companies generally operate under the legislation, then yes, it's the legislation that is shitty.

Them's the rules. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

It's a run-time error.

Law is not objective ideology sitting in context-free space. Law is ideology applied, and that very application made explicit. A law defines the very context it exists in.

So we can't just objectively ignore the failure of a law being applied, because a better application of that law must be defined in that law.

Even if a law defines a reasonable ideological mapping (expected behavior), it still needs to define a reasonable application of that mapping.

If, in practice, we see a law being abused, then the solution must be to change that law such that it isn't abusable anymore.

DMCA is an extreme failure, not in defining expected behavior per se, but in defining the domain for implementing behavior. The way DMCA is put into practice circumvents the very ideological behaviors it defined as its expectations, in nearly every case it is applied to.

A version of DMCA that "isn't shitty" would be incapable of such overt and widespread abuse. Clearly the version we have does not meet that criteria.

> Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness?

If the law enables said shitty automatic responses, then yes, the law is indeed shitty.

The broken part of the notice/takedown/counter-notice process is that a takedown requires prompt action, but a counter-notice requires a waiting period. Removing the waiting period and relying on damages to make the copyright holder whole seems like a more fair process.

I think the anticircumvention part of the DMCA is what's really shitty, but that's a tangent.

It's a crappy law. It was bought and paid for by the recording industry, which should tell you something.

If the default most common way of complying with a law is shitty behavior, then the law itself is shitty. Good laws don't incentivize bad behavior.

The safe-harbor part isn't bad. What's bad is that people can file an obviously bogus DMCA takedown request with zero repercussions.

Companies that host content do basically nothing to actually verify that the takedown request is even from a real person (nevermind the original copyright holder).

A better system would be one that allows the uploader to take the takedown issuer to court, and if the takedown request was clearly malicious and bogus then the takedown issuer would get a penalty. This approach would still allow a legitimate takedown request, but not be forced the issuer into taking a contested case to court.

The legal requirement to act instantly on the automatic presumption of the claimants being both right and acting in good faith with no evidence required isn't required to avoid liability. They could have required some higher standard of proof of ownership and as long as they followed the process, YouTube would have the same protection.

The system is specifically designed to be gamed by claimants.

Considering the open internet existed before DMCA did, I suspect “essential” is an exaggeration.

> Lets remember that the DMCA is what allows providers like youtube to host content without being liable to the copyright infringement of its users.

It arguably doesn’t actually allow sites very specifically like Youtube to do that, which is why YouTube has a separate and more draconian arrangement with major rights holders, created in response to previous litigation and litigation threats, and is also currently being sued by a variety of rights holders in a suit which hasn’t been easily been barred by the DMCA safe harbor.

I thought the reason was section 230 not dmca.

false dilemmas are seen to intentionally omit the possibility of additional options and approaches

A bar association can remediate pretty quickly if it chooses to.

FTA:

> Matters have now escalated to the point where the game itself has been taken off Steam due to a DMCA request, and the player is “now claiming that they own the rights to the [realistic] game mode”

YouTube has an internal system for handing requests apart of DMCA but videos may also be taken down from YouTube via a DMCA request per law. “Takedown” is a word often used interchangeably for a video taken down via either method.

What about Steam takedowns?

Yep! It isn't very hard to get someone punished for abusing the system if you have the resources.

YouTube did it a few years ago [1] to a popular creator in the Minecraft community who was threatening creator's with Community Guideline Strikes in order to extort them for money.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/man-agrees-to-pa...

> It also needs to not be some "DMCA Lite" contractual mechanism like Youtube's shitty ContentID system.

Why not? By my reading of the section you quoted, it stands independently from its parent sections; anyone who makes a legal claim of copyright infringement, or pursues action under the principle that such a claim exists, would seemingly be liable for damages if they're "knowingly materially misrepresenting" the facts of that infringement, whether or not in the context of a DMCA takedown claim.

Which, I mean, obviously; that's already the law, without the DMCA having to say anything additionally about it. If someone threatens legal action against you unless you do X, and you do X, and it costs you money, and then you find out it was a lie and they had no basis for their legal action — then you can totally sue them for damages, and you'll probably win. The DMCA just provides a very explicit basis for evaluating that particular situation without referring to any other bodies of potentially-conflicting case-law, so as to turn that "probably" into a "definitely."

So if you're rich and have the time there may be consequences, but ultimately since anyone can file a false DMCA notice, there's really no assurance that you will ever get your own lawyer's fees back let alone damages (even if they were awarded).

Perjury is a pretty terrible mechanism, frankly. The whole law was and is poorly conceived.

Strictly speaking, I think the only bit that's perjury would be falsely claiming to be the copyright holder (which probably applies in this case, though I suppose the argument could be made that they were just wrong, not lying), which still leaves plenty of room for falsely claiming that something infringes a copyright.

I'm not so sure. It's a fact that he was involved in the development of this new feature, and it's his opinion that he originated the idea. Whether he did or not is for a court to decide, but he's not committing perjury by believing this.

Now if he knows he didn't originate the idea and has brought vexatious proceedings, then sure, this may be perjury, but we are some way off knowing this, and i don't think we'll be in a position to determine this either way.