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0 pointsjsmith455y ago0 comments

The normal safe harbor protections and takedown procedure specified by law does not apply to claims under section 1201 like this one was. This also means no safe harbor protections against being sued for redistributing section 1201 infringing works either. There is instead an "innocent violation" clause that offers extremely limited defense that could apply to sites like GitHub or gitlab, but which would become void upon being informed of serving up a work that infringes section 1201, which practically means if such a site is so informed, it will take down the work immediately, as otherwise they become liable.

GitHub has voluntarily instituted its own takedown procedures for violations of that section, and therefore do not actually need to strictly follow the procedure outlined in the law. Instead they can chose their own procedures for handling these claims based upon percieved likelyhood of being sued and being found liable.

Mircosoft is likely fairly confident that the RIAA will not sue them over this, since the other RIAA members (the Labels) all know that if Microsoft chose to enforce their huge pool of rarely enforced software patents against the labels and distribution mechanisms (like Spotify) the harm to their bottom lines would be many thousands of times larger than any harm to their bottom line from youtube-dl could ever be. Heck even just a more thorough than typical Mircosoft Software audit would likely be more costly to the labels than youtube-dl.

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jrochkind15y ago

Interesting, thanks this clears some things up and gives me avenues for more research to understand what's up.

Sounds like claims under 1201 (circumventing technology) are actually really dangerous for the host, there is no safe harbor? At least not after you've received any notification at all?

All the more surprising that a host would be willing to disagree with a claimant and say "nah, we don't think you'd win in court." they are definitely risking their own liability, not just the customers.

As you say, Microsoft can afford to do this cause Microsoft has deep pockets and the ability to counter-strike. All the more reason we should actually be grateful to the for USING that power to defend in this case, right? (And ironically, that suggests that you will get the most protection hosted by a company that has the resources to stand up, which not all do. I am not a fan of that outcome either).

DMCA is still awful regardless of host of course.

jsmith45OP5y ago

Yeah. The whole Section 1201 is just terrible. And the "innocent violations" thing is burden of proof on the "infringer", and is subject to court discresion. You can prove that you neither knew, nor had no way of knowing that the thing you distributed was designed to defeat a technological measure and still have the court say "too bad, that is the risk you take distributing things, you owe every cent they lost via piracy attributable to this plus statutory damages (despite the fact they already sued other people and got all the money they lost from piracy from them already)".

And the infringer is anyone who "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" with respect to an infringing device/program. note the "part thereof". While intended to allow RIAA/MPAA to go after people who are knowingly benefiting from selling some part that people found can be used to construct a piracy device, it technically means they can sue Linus Torvalds if Linux is used in an infringement tool and win if the Judge is not exercising that discretion.

Everything about 1201 et seq is poorly thought out.

I actually don't mind some other parts of the DCMA, like the basic safe harbor concept, but do believe it needs to updated to make false takedown notices actually carry real consequences for the false claimant (including eventually losing the right to file takedown notices without suing and winning first). Furthermore, that should also cover any similar system implemented by platforms, such as false uploads to a ContentID database, or false use of manual claims.

But yeah, there are a lot of changes/reforms that really ought to be made to US copyright law, to better match what people actually expect the law to be.

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