There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist.
We own a lot of “unique” sites with dedicated markets through out the US. Two sites in two separate markets have been getting hit hard with these DMCAs. No rhyme or reason to the content being suprezsed. In fact, the content is typically a decade old, paginated taxonomy, or ridiculously spamming page paths we don’t claim.
Stakeholders receive the same notices I do and think we should care. I don’t want to waste my time with the nonsense.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I thought it was common knowledge that there are companies dedicated to suppressing information on the net by using (fraudulently or not) the DMCA, GDPR, and whatever else.
I doubt anything can be done about this.
catalog3115@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Google asks for tax records, passport, id card for there developer account & adword. They can certainly ask for more info to verify the sender before sending the DMCA
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I doubt they can. Once they learn about something infringing, they have to remove the link “expeditiously”. A proper DMCA notification is not even strictly necessary. Even so, the DMCA specifies what information a proper notification should contain. An email address is sufficient ID. ->DMCA
Look at it from the perspective of the copyright industry. They want to be able to take down infringing material as quickly and easily as possible. If some small players get caught in the cross-fire, that doesn’t matter. In fact, it is still competition that was removed. The “official” outlets are safe. Everything else can go.
And it’s not like Google would make any friends by lawyering this. If Google made this a little bit hard for the copyright industry, you’d get complaints about how they are ripping off those poor, starving artists. Everybody’s darlings, like Taylor Swift, would make noise. Lemmy would be up in arms against the evil corporation.
Look at this thread. Crickets. Look at the threads on AI. What people here want is more takedowns*, more restrictive copyright. And people here are apparently the left-wing, traditionally opposed to that sort of thing. I always get gloomy when this comes up.
Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Use anything other than google. Which I have done so for years with little difficulty. On a varyrare occasion I make an exception but even then %99 of the time Searx does the job for me.