The problem is that Google isn't hosting the content. They're merely linking to it. There's no content to "take down."
I don't think there's standing to sue. Linking to pirated content isn't illegal. They could be found guilty of contributory infringement but that's a tough case since the legal requirement is that Google needs to know for sure that it's pirated (which is impossible at scale).
The author only needs to show up to court with a driver’s license to prove their identity. The judge would rule in favor of the author the same day if someone from Google actually bothered to show up.
A scammer isn’t going to court. Don’t try to solve for that.
I love how this is the defense of all these tech companies. "I'm sorry, your honor, we are just a poor multi-trillion dollar company... there's just no way for us to control anything, because we're just too big..."
Either they solve it or they should give op the benefit of the doubt. Arguing that x or y isn't possible at scale doesn't mean you get to break the law.
No they shouldn’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt when that person claims copyright infringement! Not unless you want internet randos to be able to take down any YouTube channel they want for “copyright infringement.”
As far as I can tell, requiring valid ID would lose a provider safe harbor protection as it is not one of the required elements:
(3) Elements of notification.-
(A) To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
(i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
I'll be the first to shout from the rooftops that the DMCA is in general a bad law, but according to that law, if the takedown notice contains the required verbiage, then they are required by law to give it the benefit of the doubt (that is, if they want to keep their lack of liability).
> Not unless you want internet randos to be able to take down any YouTube channel they want for “copyright infringement.”
Until there's a database of all the copyrighted works in the world that anyone can access—along with their licenses—it is absolutely not possible to know for certain if something is violating copyright.
Simple example: Disney opens up a new website that has some of their obvious content on it. How does Google know that Disney owns that website and has authorized its use? If they get a takedown notice, how do they know the sender owns the content?
There's no formal verification system that exists for such things. It's all based on an honor system that is easy for bad actors to abuse (which is probably why Google changed how they do things).
The entirety of copyrighted law has failed. It isn't working as intended and hasn't for a long time now. Anyone who understands how easy it is to copy bits should know that the original intent of copyright can't work anymore. We need something new to replace it.
> Anyone who understands how easy it is to copy bits should know that the original intent of copyright can't work anymore.
AI makes this even more stringent. You cannot protect the "vibe" of your works, AI can replicate it in seconds. If you make "vibe infringement" the new rule, then creativity becomes legally risky. A catch 22.
In 1930 judge Hand said in relation to Nichols v. Universal Pictures:
> Upon any work...a great number of patterns of increasing generality will fit equally well. At the one end is the most concrete possible expression...at the other, a title...Nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can...As respects play, plagiarism may be found in the 'sequence of events'...this trivial points of expression come to be included.
And since then a litany of judges and tests expanded the notion of infringement towards vibes and away from expression:
- Hand's Abstractions / The "Patterns" Test (Nichols v. Universal Pictures)
- Total Concept and Feel (Roth Greeting Cards v. United Card Co.)
- The Krofft Test / Extrinsic and Intrinsic Analysis
- Sequence, Structure, and Organization (Whelan Associates v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory)
- Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison (AFC) Test (Computer Associates v. Altai)
The trend has been to make infringement more and more abstract over time, but this makes testing it an impossible burden. How do you ensure you are not infringing any protected abstraction on any level in any prior work? Due diligence has become too difficult now.
OP got in touch with one (or many) humans on Google. Humans then decided not to act on the DCMA request.
No need for the "doesn't scale" argument, whatever system they have in place is already good enough to process OP's inquire. The problematic bit is what they decided to do once they had all the information in their hands.
I do, however, think this is just a mishandled situation and Google will correct, particularly after being featured on the HN wall of shame.
Before we can assume this is impossible for Google, let's look at their revenue: Is it greater than the salary of 1 person, which is all that's required to comply with OP's request? If so, then it isn't impossible.
To judge the claim of unscalability true, we would first need to know the rate of DMCA takedown requests, the number 1 person can investigate in a day, and then we can do the math of whether total revenue can pay for those employees.
Even if not, it's not an excuse. The only legal venue google has to complain about this, is getting the law changed.
It’s certainly due for an update, but it isn’t doing nothing at all. The friction it creates for unlicensed use at scale is enough to keep all the streaming services etc. afloat, which in turn are still funding the production of content. Maybe the anarchy that would follow its abolition would be superior to the old system creaking along, but that remains to be seen (and would be silly to accept on faith).
I don't know, how did the world manage to work before the internet?
You call someone, you send a letter, something. It's not rocket science.
It's not automated, sure, but somethings will never be automated, just by their nature. That doesn't mean it doesn't scale. Well, sure it does. You just hire more staff.
For Christ's sake, it used to be that phone calls required physical action from an operator to get connected. And now we can't do shit if there isn't an API for it or some bullshit.
> It's not automated, sure, but somethings will never be automated, just by their nature. That doesn't mean it doesn't scale. Well, sure it does. You just hire more staff.
You're right, of course, but when people say "it doesn't scale" they tend to mean "it doesn't scale at with a near-zero marginal cost".
Right, it scales linearly, as is the case in most businesses. Only tech craves a constant time scaling factor, because in most business it's just not possible. You can't run 100 walmarts with the same employees as 1 Walmart, and Walmart knows that and is very successful in spite of it.
Deathbed regrets aren't fun at all. Deathbed wishes for their next life are much more interesting!
For example, Gil Amelio—former CEO of Apple—once expressed that he wanted to be reborn as a woman owning/working a vineyard in Southern France. That was so specific and interesting, I still remember it.
Wishing you used social media less doesn't exactly spark the imagination.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Hey now... We have to evolve somehow. The folks that continue to reproduce in this technological dystopia are passing on their "just ignore social media" (or more likely, "get bored with social media") genes to the next generation.
In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.
Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.
Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.
When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.
It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).
FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).
AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"
I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.
I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.
That literally *is* what they’re doing though, just not at sentence granularity—they’re doing it at both larger and smaller scales. Sometimes they may give you a plagiarized paragraph, sometimes they’ll give you a plagiarized phrase, sometimes they’ll give you a structure that they fill in with “their own” words where the structure itself was taken from something… They do nothing original.
...and "the fix" that companies usually resort to is "use it or lose it" policies (e.g. you lose your role/permission after 30 days of non-use). So if you only do deployments for any given thing like twice a year, you end up having to submit a permissions request every single time.
No big deal, right? Until something breaks in production and now you have to wait for multiple approvals before you can even begin to troubleshoot. "I guess it'll have to stay down until tomorrow."
The way systems like this usually get implemented is there's an approval chain: First, your boss must approve the request and then the owner of the resource. Except that's only the most basic case. For production systems, you'll often have a much more complicated approval chain where your boss is just one of many individuals that need to approve such requests.
The end result is a (compounding) inefficiency that slows down everything.
Then there's AI: Management wants to automate as much as possible—which is a fine thing and entirely doable!—except you have this system where making changes requires approvals at many steps. So you actually can't "automate all the things" because the policy prevents it.
To add to that, the roles also need to be identified.
When some obscure thing breaks you either need to go on a quest to understand which are all the roles involved in fixing it, or send a much vaguer "let me do X and Y" request to the approval chain and have them figure it out on their end.
And as the approval agents aren't the ones fixing the issue, it's a back and forth of "can you do X?" "no, I'm locked at Y" "ok. then how about now ?"
Overprovisioning at least some key people is a fatality.
Any non-trivial amount of data and you’ll run into non-trivial problems.
For example, some of our pg databases got into such state, that we had to write custom migration tool because we couldn’t copy data to new instance using standard tools. We had to re-write schema to using custom partitions because perf on built-in partitioning degrades as number of partitions gets high, and so on.
Once upon a time, MySQL/InnoDB was a better performance choice for UPDATE-heavy workloads. There was a somewhat famous blog post about this from Uber[1]. I'm not sure to what extent this persists today. The other big competitor is sqlite3, which fills a totally different niche for running databases on the edge and in-product.
Personally, I wouldn't use any SQL DB other that PostgreSQL for the typical "database in the cloud" use case, but I have years of experience both developing for and administering production PostgreSQL DBs, going back to 9.5 days at least. It has its warts, but I've grown to trust and understand it.
To be fair, postgres still suffers from a poor choice of MVCC implementation (copy on write rather than an undo log). This one small choice has a huge number of negative knock on effects once your load becomes non-trivial
I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be.
If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined.
Complaining about the environmental impact of AI is like plastic manufacturers putting recycling labels on plastic that is inherently not recycleable and making it seem like plastic pollution is every day people's fault for not recycling enough.
AI's impact on the environment is so tiny it's comparable to a rounding error when held up against the output of say, global shipping or air travel.
Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? They're vastly worse.
The answer to that is simple: They hate AI and the environment angle is just an excuse, much like their concern over AI art. Human psychology is such that many of these people actually believe the excuse too.
It helps when you put yourself in the shoes of people like that and ask yourself, if I find out tomorrow that the evidence that AI is actually good for the environment is stronger, will I believe it? Will it even matter for my opposition to AI? The answer is no.
You don't know that. I don't know about you (and whatever you wrote possibly tells more about yourself than anyone else), but I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
And the environment is far from being the only concern.
You are attacking a straw man. For you, being against GenAI, simply because it happens to be against your beliefs, is necessarily irrational. Please don't do this.
> I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
Then you would be the exception, not the rule.
And if you find yourself attached to any ideology, then you are also wrong about yourself. Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.
Being able to place yourself into the shoes of others is something evolution spent 1000s of generations hardwiring into us, I'm very confident in my reading of the situation.
> Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.
The lie is that you adopted "beliefs, principles or values" which cannot ever serve your interests, you have subsumed yourself into something that cannot ever reciprocate. Ideology by definition even alters your perceived interests, a more potent subversion cannot be had (up to now, with potential involuntary neural interfaces on the horizon).
> Citation needed
I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling. There is no further point to this discussion.
People are allowed to reject whatever they want, I'm sorry that democracy is failing you to make slightly more money while the rest of society suffers.
I'm glad people are grabbing the reigns of power back from some of the most evil people on the planet.
Of course they aren't polluters as in generating some kind of smoke themselves. But they do consume megawatts upon megawatts of power that has to be generated somewhere. Not often you have the luxury of building near nuclear power plant. And in the end you're still releasing those megawatts as heat into the atmosphere.
I don't think there's standing to sue. Linking to pirated content isn't illegal. They could be found guilty of contributory infringement but that's a tough case since the legal requirement is that Google needs to know for sure that it's pirated (which is impossible at scale).
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