But it’s also why many “old media” producers and companies in the entertainment and music industry have careful policies around refusing to receive or acknowledge ideas and content from outside the organization.
It’s much harder for some fan-writer to pursue spurious legal credit for some plot idea or script content when you maintain an official policy to bin unsolicited submissions and to never acknowledge work shared in public.
That’s tricky for “new media” companies since consumers now expect direct engagement with publishers, especially for “indie” artists, but the old system was designed to guard against stuff like this.
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...
This story is copyright itself brought to its objective conclusion.
Everything here, the petty IP ownership claim, the expectation to have that ownership literally applied, the reactionary griefing, etc. is all baked in to what copyright is at its very foundations. This person is simply playing out the function of copyright as an ideology in their interactions with the game company and its business presence.
They feel they have the right to monopolize the product of their intellectual work, because copyright says so. They feel they can interrupt the sales of the game because copyright says so.
And most important, they feel that they should do these things, because the very existence of copyright, and it's foundational social purpose, tell them it's in their best interest, and their "best interest" is tantamount.
This isn't just a story about copyright, it's copyright itself told as a story, just with real people as subjects.
So let's stop pretending. This is ugly, frivolous, unhelpful, and damaging. This is copyright law. This is an exposition of the social malware that copyright is, was, and ever will be.
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.
Aside from this, false DMCA claims are even used as a vehicle for harassment. Of course that is broken as well...
Platformists say that this is necessary because transparency will allow bad actors to game the system, but their solution to this to make society into an oppressive panopticon; the cure is worse than the disease. Further, the ignore the degree to which the lack of transparency is already weaponized by bad faith actors.
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.
Them's the rules. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
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.
If the law enables said shitty automatic responses, then yes, the law is indeed shitty.
I think the anticircumvention part of the DMCA is what's really shitty, but that's a tangent.
It works extremely well, if you consider who the beneficiaries are (who also happened to write it).
You are own a small forum or site. You get DMCA takedown, you take content down and are safe. Send notification to uploader. They disagree. You can put stuff back up. You are not liable for damages after this. And really shouldn't be expected to fight.
Now it is up to the two other parties to fight it out. This is where the system fails, because whole process is long and expensive. But so is any other legal action. Maybe consider fixing that reality first.
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 system is specifically designed to be gamed by claimants.
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.
> 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”
People who do this without grounds should be punished/fines for abusing the system proportionate to what they claim.
Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
17 U.S.C.A. § 512YouTube 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...
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."
In this case, sending a counter-notice (free), filing for a declaratory judgment and asking for an injunction to prevent additional malicious filings would probably be the most direct pathway to relief.
Filing bar complaints isn't likely to work all that well, because it doesn't really map to the typical things that state bar associations really look to pursue. The vast majority of bar complaints result in nothing, and most of the ones that are deemed valid result in mandatory CLE rather than more substantive penalties.
And the target of a false claim can sue the party who made the claim for damages and attorney's fees.
Perjury is a pretty terrible mechanism, frankly. The whole law was and is poorly conceived.
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.
0. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/mediaviewer/rm188310835...
This has to be terrible for small dev shops to face, I'd imagine enough litigating and good projects just fold up shop unable to afford their own defense cost.
Anyone can sue you for whatever reason. The court can throw the case out but it’s a nuisance to you.