SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Man sued for using bogus YouTube takedowns to get address for swatting
YouTube is suing a Nebraska man the company says has blatantly abused its copyright takedown process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers online platforms like YouTube legal protections if they promptly take down content flagged by copyright holders. However, this process can be abused—and boy did defendant Christopher L. Brady abuse it, according to YouTube's legal complaint (pdf).
Brady allegedly made fraudulent takedown notices against YouTube videos from at least three well-known Minecraft streamers. In one case, Brady made two false claims against a YouTuber and then sent the user an anonymous message demanding a payment of $150 by PayPal—or $75 in bitcoin.
"If you decide not to pay us, we will file a 3rd strike," the message said. When a YouTube user receives a third copyright strike, the YouTuber's account gets terminated. A second target was ordered to pay $300 by PayPal or $200 in Bitcoin to avoid a third fraudulent copyright strike.
A third incident was arguably even more egregious. According to YouTube, Brady filed several fraudulent copyright notices against another YouTuber with whom he was "engaged in some sort of online dispute." The YouTuber responded with a formal counter-notice stating that the content wasn't infringing—a move that allows the content to be reinstated. However, the law requires the person filing the counter-notice to provide his or her real-world name and address—information that's passed along to the person who filed the takedown request.
This contact information is supposed to enable a legitimate copyright holder to file an infringement lawsuit in court. But YouTube says Brady had another idea. A few days after filing a counter-notice, the targeted YouTuber "announced via Twitter that he had been the victim of a swatting scheme." Swatting, YouTube notes, "is the act of making a bogus call to emergency services in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address."
YouTube doesn't provide hard proof that Brady was responsible for the swatting call, stating only that it "appears" he was responsible based on the sequence of events. But YouTube says it does have compelling evidence that Brady was responsible for the fraudulent takedown notices. And fraudulent takedown notices are themselves against the law.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:11AM (10 children)
You know this guy is far from the only person doxxed by these take down notices.
I'm not sure what bugs me the most about this entire mess. Google's system of generally not caring about the people in their own gig economy, a system setup to favor abusive copyright take down notices, the entire copyright abuse system that no one wants to think about fixing, the police system that can be abused so easily or the general attitude of everyone in this mess of "I don't give a fuck", "Let's do it for the lulz", "We're all making money son" and "Shit happens man...."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Sunday August 25 2019, @05:18AM
I think a lot of it comes from people "just doing their jobs", "just following orders", and CYA instead of taking personal responsibility in their actions.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday August 25 2019, @10:39AM (7 children)
I think that the decline of religion may be a factor in this. Not that I want to argue for more religion, but the education system is obviously failing to teach the morals that religion used to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Booga1 on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:31PM (2 children)
The education system is failing? Did you mean to say parents? I'm not exactly sure many parents want the schools teaching morality, but they sure aren't picking up the slack after dropping out of religious activities.
When your kids learn to steer their moral compass based on what makes them laugh on Youtube or 4chan, this is kinda where things wind up when parents just let kids do their own thing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:31PM (1 child)
I think one of the most basic rules for a society should be: "treat others as you want to be treated". Part of the population apparently can't seem to figure this out on their own while growing up. I you want a functioning society, that means that your society should pick up on this where parents fail to do so. Just look at the messed up world of today to see what happens if you leave it to parents alone.
Essentially what I meant was that society needs to find a sensible way to fill a void that religion left. How exactly I don't know, I'm just signalling a problem as I see it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Booga1 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:49PM
Gotcha. That certainly makes it clearer in my opinion. Thanks for the explanation.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 26 2019, @02:27AM (2 children)
Counterpoint: Some of the people who don't gaf, do things for the lulz, and are all about making money appear at least to be extremely religious.
There are and have always been completely selfish jerks out there. We should take steps as a society to prevent these folks from doing too much harm to everyone else. And just educating them on morality won't necessarily do the job.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday August 26 2019, @08:38AM (1 child)
I'm not a fan of religion either, because it's a surrogate for logical moral behavior. I have no problem with decline of religion, but I believe that possible side effects should be considered. Of course you will always have ruthless people and I agree that you have to prevent them from hurting others.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 26 2019, @05:35PM
My experience, knowing people from all over the world affiliated with every major religion as well as several stripes of atheist, is that religious affiliation has no effect whatsoever on a person's morality. You can find extremely moral and extremely immoral people among all religions as well as atheism, and even more people with grey-area morality in all those groups who can self-justify doing terrible things when it suits them. What the religion tends to change isn't what people do, but how they justify what they did, e.g. devout Christians will blame their bad acts on temptation from Satan, while supposedly more-rational atheists will declare that their bad acts are objectively justified, but invariably they will both arrive at "I shouldn't have to face any penalty for what I did".
These experiences convinced me a long time ago that groups of people don't have morals, individuals do, and even individuals are less principled than they'd like to think they are. The fastest way to make more people behave morally is to ensure they have enough food and other basic necessities of life. The fastest way to make more people behave immorally is to take away one of those necessities of life.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @05:08PM
Interesting theory. Though one could extend a little and say that the reason the morals had to be taught, even to the religious, is because people collectively have not been tremendously great at upholding morals which may decrease utility to the individual breaking the moral code. Many convicted murderers, thieves, perjurers, and parental abusers (and pedophiles if one expansively shoots for coveting others) are members of religions, and from a mores perspective so are many adulterers, avarists/coveters (is that a word for those who exhibit avarice), idolaters, blashphemists, 'Christmas/Easter' Christians, and slumlords/predatory lenders (if one expands coveting of housing). In this sense stating one is an adherent of a religion does not confer immunity from "sin," or immorality, bundled loosely. And I'm not really sure of the effectiveness or an obligation to flagellate (self or others).
Love the Divine, love yourself. Simple enough, but the devil is indeed in the details.
The thing is that I never really see that the purpose of education is to advocate that people learn how to love. (Although the education system has progressively been giving up it's sticks and only caring that children reach for the carrots when it comes to the standardized achievement testing scores.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:51PM
Uh, Google didn't invent the DMCA. It's people like you who shoot the messengers while the MAFIAA sit back and smoke their Benjamins in safety, that keep the system rolling.
Every other day I see "YouTube is doing blah". Guess what, it's the advertisers and big media corporations demanding YouTube to do blah (and also the public demanding YouTube to censor anything that could possibly offend anyone). If the public (and to a lesser extent advertisers) were instead demanding YouTube uncensor all the shootings and "fake news" and whatever, do you really think YouTube would still censor that stuff?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!