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The abuse of copyright must end

Everyone knows what copyright is... right?

Yes, copyright is a system that is designed to protect the rights of anyone who creates "a protected work". These laws are designed to ensure that all the hard work and effort put into the creation of such a work can be protected in such a way tht the creator is able to earn money from their toil or at least have control over how, where and when it is used.

In essence, copyright is a great idea and means that those who improve our lives through things such as music, songs, artworks, movies, books or whatever, can earn a living from their work -- if they're good enough at it.

However, copyright law has become an incredibly complex thing with an increasing number of specialty lawyers making a very good living by arguing the details in the courts.

This complexity and more recent changes to the laws however, have opened the door for huge levels of abuse.

The USA in particular is rife with copyright abuse, thanks in part to the Digital Milennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Whilst the intent of the DMCA is laudable, its effects in the real world are often far from what was intended.

Under the DMCA, any online service that hosts content must, when advised of such, remove any material that infringes a copyright.

Sounds fair... right?

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this clause operates on the assumption that all complaints to content hosting services filed under the DMCA will be legitimate and correct. Sadly, in the real world, that is not the case and the DMCA has become weaponised by those who have other agendas.

Now that platforms such as YouTube have become an invaluable source of information through the plethora of product and service reviews being posted, some of those companies receiving poor reviews have opted to abuse the DMCA by filing bogus copyright take-down requests.

On receipt of any DMCA takedown request, most platforms (including YouTube) will simply take down the allegedly offending content. If not, they risk becoming a party to any legitimate claim so they almost invariably choose to take the safe option.

This form of abuse has become rife, with many channels complaining that their reviews have been hit with takedown notices by companies that simply don't like what they're seeing. Those companies file specious takedowns citing things as ludicrous as images of their product being used without permission. Sometimes they also cite trademark infringements.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the YouTube community has taken to fighting back against such abuse by downloading the offending video and re-uploading it en masse, to such an extent that the abusive party can't possibly find and flag all the copies.

The next step for abusers is obviously the defamation courts -- and that's exactly what Australian battery supplier DCS did recently. After they suffered from the en-masse re-upload push-back, they decided to sue a reviewer for defamation after that channel created a well researched, honest and objective review of a rather poor product of theirs.

Well that defamation case has come before the courts in Australia and been tossed out on its ear.

Hooray! A victory for the innocent.

Of course the Streisand Effect has also been in full force against DCS so I expect they're really hurting right now. Serves them right.

Strangely enough, the DMCA does include penalties for anyone who falsely files a take-down request (since that is effectively perjury) but I see very few examples of it ever being prosecuted. Perhaps it's time that changed!

Carpe Diem folks!

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