DMCA Abuse Widespread

Doc Ruby writes "Via TechDirt, the news that despite the intent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's very popular to abuse the law by using it merely to compete, without legal basis: 'Supporters of the DMCA claim that only an occasional improper takedown notice gets through. Some new research suggests otherwise. Over 30% of DMCA takedown notices have been deemed improper and potentially illegal.'"

Power to abuse?

[Dubpal]

If you asked those Swedish guys over at thepiratebay.org (a search engine for .torrent files), I'm sure their data would show higher than 30% abuse.
Their legal threats [thepiratebay.org] page is a hoot.

On a more serious note, laws like the DMCA that put (arguably) too much power at the hands of copyright holders were always going to be susceptible to abuse. Remaining on the subject of torrent search engines, lokitorrent.com pulled its site down after threats from the MPAA who cited the DMCA, without even going to court. (They later went to court, where it was ruled that the domain owner release all visitor data to the MPAA.) With power like that, where's the incentive not to abuse it?

Re:Power to abuse?

[richwmn]

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Used as the basis for Animal Farm by George Orwell

Chilling Effects

[Misch]

ChillingEffects.org [chillingeffects.org] keeps a library of submitted DMCA takedown notices.

Re:I hate the DMCA as much as anyone

[Bruce_Nash]

This issue is discussed in the report, (http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep-ExecSum_out .pdf [usc.edu] - PDF, http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep/ [usc.edu] - HTML).

The data set falls into two halves -- self-reported takedown notices and takedown notices sent to Google. The Google part of the set is a complete record of all the notices they have received over the last 3 years or so.

One would expect the self-reported notices to have a bias, but it turns out that Google notices shows the same proportion of flawed notices: 30%.

Bruce

(Full disclosure: my wife is one of the co-authors of the paper.)

Re:Power to abuse?

[Braxton_the_Covenant]

The economist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote a book entitled _The Road To Serfdom_, specifically written to the New Deal American public with the case examples of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in mind, describing how a generally civilized free society with some degree of free market capitalism can by its own ineluctable inner political workings become tyrannical socialist totalitarian states.

Hayek has a chapter in his book called "Why the Worst Get on Top" that basically makes your point meringuoid, except that he says it is inevitable with a statist form of government that the very worst (i.e. most evil) will get on top while with a capitalist/laissez-faire system, unless it becomes co-opted by communistic or fascistic forces from within, there would never be the system of rewards and power present to make the job worthwhile for the evil-minded man.