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.
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.
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.
