I completely agree with you on lobbying.
An ISP is not required to pull content down when they receive a DMCA takedown notice. If the ISP takes the content down, however, they receive immunity from liability for any alleged copyright infringement. The ISP usually doesn't have the time or money to investigate whether the takedown notice is legitimate or not, so their first reaction is to take the content down.
Cases like this, where the person sending the takedown notice doesn't seem to understand that the ISP isn't hosting any infringing content, are pretty rare. If the ISP in this case reinstated the content, then the copyright owner would do more investigation before actually filing a lawsuit. If that happened, they would find that there isn't any actual infringement, so they wouldn't file a lawsuit.
I absolutely agree with your point that the laws need to be passed so that corporations can't threaten abusive litigation over this kind of crap. But muzzling organized advocacy isn't the answer.
If an individual company chooses one employee(say someone with a legal background) to interact with an elected official is that person a lobbyist or an employee?
I'm not sure what you're suggesting.
There are tons of ways to restructure the US legislative system that would ameliorate the current problems -- uncap the number of reps, allow individuals to override a fractional vote of their rep, split representation into technocratic branches and let everyone vote for a different rep on each domain, let people vote for committee membership, switch to approval voting or proportional representation, introduce term limits for reps and their staff, etc.
Setting aside the reasons this situation exists and the problems it's creating, I believe the usual methods are mail, e-mail, and phone calls.
Or if that doesn't work, then torches and pitchforks.
Everyone who knew about the DMCA before it went into effect hated it, but the monied interests pushed it through. Corruption in action.
A couple friends were banned erroneously via an automated purge of around 10k+ players. Their customer service was stone silent.
Randomly with no communication, one of their accounts was back online after a couple months.
It's worth mentioning that these were premium members, paying around $15 a month, with 1000s of hours spent playing. No apologies. No refund for their time banned.
I don't have a good feeling of their methodologies and business practices. It's a part of the reason why I stopped playing.
Battle.net allows names that are banned by Activision, and when logging into COD it was automatically imported, banning my account.
Never buy any hardware directly from them. If you have any issues with an order it's a nightmare. Still out ~$435 as well.
> We've got in touch with someone at SEGA of America and it is being looked into.
> Thanks for your support everyonee, it is truly amazing to see that my hobby (!) project is useful to so many people
https://smallbiztrends.com/2015/05/fraudulent-dmca-takedown-...
> The issue with SEGA has been resolved!
Shouldn't Cloudflare have some form where SteamDB could state "we don't infringe on your copyright" and then it's up to SEGA to take this to court?
Not really.
I mean, yes, the DMCA provides an additional safe harbor for putting stuff back up in response to a counternotice, but most providers have structured their relationship with users such that they are certain to have no liability for a takedown-and-keepdown in the first place, so they have very little incentive to have a counternotice process.
The difference between safe harbor requirements and real legal requirements is that whether there is any force behind the former depends entirely on whether you have any preexisting liability for the safe harbor to protect you from.
The DMCA should be repealed, but won't be, so instead should be updated to make erroneous claims have a financial penalty. Nothing major at first, but ratcheting upwards for every false claim. Oh, and all legal expenses for the victim party of course.
I can hardly imagine anything more unjust than using devices of justice to create unjustice.
This is only enabled because of the power imbalances between flesh-and-bone humans and corporate entities, unless that is addressed we'll be seeing more and more ridiculous SLAPP suits, DMCAs, power grabs and other stuff that would fit in a cyberpunk novel.
It is ironic that if you're wrong about content being infringing and get it taken down, there's no punishment unless you intentionally lie. If you're infringing, but thought your use was fair use, you've still committed a crime.
I do wonder how some of these satisfy the "good faith" clause, though. This isn't one of those cases (I think Sega is wrong, but I can see how they meet good faith here). Some of the other cases have involved filing DMCA complaints against Wikipedia for completely unrelated articles. Once or twice I've seen companies files DMCA complaints against themselves. I can't see how that could possibly be in good faith; they clearly haven't even looked at the content, which should preclude any claim of "good faith". You can't make a good faith argument if you have no idea what you're even arguing.
To me, this SEGA claim seems to border on a perjury violation for false DMCA claims (IANAL). But in practice, the victim has neither the ability nor funding to utilize the legal mechanisms for discouraging this behavior. To say nothing of the second issue which is Megacorporations having no obligations to communicate with the proles. And a third issue naturally consequent elsewhere: the hamfisted DMCA enforcement from the major media platforms.
I'm sure this horse has been beaten to a pulp at this point, but are there any good breakdowns of the merits in DMCA repeal/reform/status quo?
Obviously the system isn't perfect (and there are absolutely better solutions), but it does have its merits.
Highly unlikely, good luck with that.
However, they are still liable and can absolutely be sued civilly for an improper takedown notice. But the penalty probably wouldn't extend beyond a monetary payment.
No, it's not.
(There's a couple of points in a DMCA notice that are certified under penalty of perjury, but they aren't the 9bes that are likely to be be false on a false one in the first place.)
Has anybody in the history of the DMCA ever been successfully convicted of perjury for misusing it?
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, they are the same thing.
https://www.pcgamer.com/sega-is-metacritics-top-ranked-publi...
Someone's made a mistake in this DMCA complaint and Sega's being difficult to reach to resolve it. It's nothing like patent trolling.
Sega has army of lawyers and probably massive budget for court fees vs a small 2 people run shop who are actually not infringing anything and don’t have any of those resources. You get where this is going?
