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: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:00AM (5 children)
The bastard should be in prison, and his victims dividing his possessions among themselves. Law enforcement and everyone who supports the 911 system should be in line to crucify him. And, yes, as the last sentence of TFS notes,
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @05:19AM (1 child)
Cops will be happy. They can armor up and maybe shoot somebody not just once, but twice.
Who in their right mind would give their home address?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:29PM
And don't forget the person's dog, either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:37AM
The sad part is that other people could do it and get away with it. "Doxing" isn't exactly a crime, it's on you to prove that the claim is fraudulent, and they could use fake details to file the initial claim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @10:12PM
Take him to court and prove extortion and fraud. As that is what this man did.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 26 2019, @02:20AM
Part of the effect of this lawsuit is that it will put to official court record exactly what the defendant did, including his fraudulent 911 call. So this actually aids the effort to put this jerk in prison.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(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.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(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.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(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?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:41AM (5 children)
But I thought that the big corporations that wrote these laws only had the small poor poor artists in mind. How come these laws are being used to hinder the poor artists? Surely the big corporations that wrote these laws weren't thinking only of themselves, right?
Does anyone else find it ridiculous that all someone has to do to get your information if they disagree with your Youtube video is claim, with no due process whatsoever, that you infringed on their copy protections? These laws are being used to stifle speech and to hinder the poor poor artists
What's even more outrageous is that the potential punishment for infringement is greater than the punishment for everything the perpetrator did in this article to the people that uploaded Youtube videos. The exact opposite should be true. Infringement should be a minor tort while fraudulent takedown notices should be a huge crime. In a sane world with laws not written by corporations fraud should be an offense far greater than infringement. False takedowns should also be an offense far greater than infringement. The burden should lie with the person claiming infringement to prove infringement and if it turns out they do not possess copy protection privileges over said content their punishment should be greater than the punishment of a would be infringer even if their infringement claims were a product of negligence.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Spamalope on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:09PM
Yeah. The lack of penalty for false reports, shifting the burden to the reported person, only requiring verification of the reported entity are all clues as to what the law are actually for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @04:18AM
What are you implying, that somehow Christopher L. Brady should have been censored? He was just exercising his right to free-speech.
He didn't actually do anything but speak; blame the others who acted on the speech, they are the culprits here.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 26 2019, @07:21AM (1 child)
Maybe there should be a three-strikes rule for takedown requests: If you do three false takedown requests, you lose the copyright on whatever work you falsely claimed was infringed upon.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @03:14PM
I like it, but it should be your ability to claim infringement for a time. Part of the issue is that there are multiple ways a fraudulent claim may be submitted: For each: actual infringement, not infringement by fair use but not recognized by claimant, not infringement because the piece use doesn't violate copyright(incorrect identification of piece, piece is no longer covered by copyright), human error Consider the following: Claimangt has copyright, Claimant is employed by the party who owns copyright, Claimant has no ownership of copyright, Claimant believes they have copyright but is mistaken. Many of the potential scenarios don't involve either party owning the copyright, hence ability to dispute is what I believe should be restricted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @05:29PM
No, nobody I'm aware of has claimed that the corporations only had the artists in mind - please share where that idea was advanced. Just as nobody claimed that the corporations don't have interests at play themselves. And the copyright enforcement system does not only benefit the corporations with no benefit accruing to the artists. (Or, more correctly, the songwriters most usually). Nobody even suggested that 'small' artists would be the beneficiary. The system before the Internet already supported the artists who were above the line and had recouped their expenses well above any indie act. It's a little disingenous to suggests that artists (both labeled and indie) do not obtain value out of the copyright system. And the system remains the same today: The music production industry benefits the music production industry and the recording artists make their money from touring. Sure, there are corner cases and artists who produce themselves and thus get a bigger chunk of the pie yet the YouTubes/Amazons/What-Have-You-Distributors-On-Teh-Internets get their cuts also just as radio stations did.
Does anyone else find it ridiculous that the owner of a copyright should file a lawsuit to allege that every YouTube video which infringes copyright and name YouTube as a defendant and/or get a judge to sign off on a subpeona to compel YouTube to disclose what it knows about the poster so that private investigators can track down the uploader to compel that person to pay the copyright holder a nominal royalty? Because that would be the process if a friendly lawyer's letter saying, "Please, sir, take down that reproduction of our audio recording that has monetary value to us and your host-protected selves aren't liable for such that we may take our contractual cut and pass the remainder along to be bundled as a lump royalty payment" was canned by YouTube under the copyright system of years past, you know. Or one might just have held YouTube liable as a provider of unlawful infringement from the get-go....
What's even more outrageous is that any person with an Internet connection could deliver a performance of such pieces to any and all who asked for it and just say, "muh freedoms of speeches trumps your rights as the legally entitled publisher of the work!"
Your solution would sure make a larger number of lawyers richer in the process. Now, you say that you think this will benefit the artist how?