The issue is that nobody at the justice department seems to be interested in pursuing perjury, which is what filing a fake DMCA claim would be punished as.
It’s difficult. Perjury requires intent. If a badly trained employee in a hurry makes a mistake that’s not perjury.
This means it’s legal, under the current law, to badly train your employees and to set them quotas for the amount of DMCA takedowns they have to serve.
They’re not intentionally making false statements.
To stop this, you need to create new explicit penalties for bad takedown requests.
There’s plenty of examples of companies intentionally filling DMCA claims to screw competitors. As far as I know nobody’s ever seen any consequences for this. The law is broken when there’s no actual punishment for abuse.
I think the problem is that it shows irresponsibility, however the law requires intent. That’s sadly - or well, I suppose overall it’s a good thing! - a very different beast on a legal level.
The issue is that nobody at the justice department seems to be interested in pursuing perjury, which is what filing a fake DMCA claim would be punished as.
It’s difficult. Perjury requires intent. If a badly trained employee in a hurry makes a mistake that’s not perjury.
This means it’s legal, under the current law, to badly train your employees and to set them quotas for the amount of DMCA takedowns they have to serve.
They’re not intentionally making false statements.
To stop this, you need to create new explicit penalties for bad takedown requests.
There’s plenty of examples of companies intentionally filling DMCA claims to screw competitors. As far as I know nobody’s ever seen any consequences for this. The law is broken when there’s no actual punishment for abuse.
If it’s repeated offenses like the example in the article, it’s a little harder to prove it wasn’t intentional.
I think the problem is that it shows irresponsibility, however the law requires intent. That’s sadly - or well, I suppose overall it’s a good thing! - a very different beast on a legal level.