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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Yes, a cease and desist is just a letter with no legal obligation whatsoever. I could send one to Rockstar today. The interesting part is the threat of legal action, so I wouldn't send one unless I had a solid case. The letter itself isn't interesting, the judge's order during or after the ensuing legal battle is.
And yes, a DMCA should only apply to copyright infringement, but there's no legal obligation to actually prove that in court before sending the request. Since the request is sent to the hosting service (e g. YouTube or GitHub) instead of the creator of the content, the content is often taken down before the creator even hears about the request. It is not in the hosting service's interests to fight such claims, nor look much more closely than to verify that the sender seems like they likely own the allegedly infringing content.
If you host your own content, yes, you're responsible for whether you take it down before being legally obligated to. Most people use a popular hosting service, especially for something like a video where any form of popularity will likely overwhelm their hosting. That's why people use services like YouTube, they don't want to deal with scaling if demand takes off.
The threat of legal action is the same with or without a formal letter. It's 5 minutes of a lawyer's time. The barrier is zero. Anyone can send one for any reason with no cause.
The hosting provider is not obligated to investigate or defend against DMCA claims. If they receive a valid counter claim, they are permitted to host it again until actual legal action is initiated, in a courtroom. They don't receive them for the exact same reason people don't respond The barrier of a DMCA takedown after the trivial counter claim is much higher than a cease and desist.
The hosting provider is free to ignore counterclaims as well, and they frequently do. So I'm practice, the DMCA is much more effective than a cease and desist when it comes to major content hosts.
Things rarely get to an actual, legally compelled takedown because content hosts so often voluntarily take down content even when there's a valid counterclaim.
Nobody is using DMCA requests on YouTube, your biggest example. YouTube has an easier process entirely unrelated to the DMCA.
Right, and that exists as a direct reaction to the DMCA. YouTube didn't want to deal with the legal process of a DMCA takedown, so they provided a process to shortcut that. Unless I'm mistaken, without the DMCA, lawyers would need to go after content creators, not hosts, to get infringing content removed, so YouTube would not feel the need to automate the process as it has.
That's what I mean about the DMCA essentially causing this setup. It's the same idea as a cease and desist scaring people into complying even when they're within the bounds of fair use, except the host has little if any reason to resist spurious claims. If lawyers can go after hosts, hosts will protect themselves to avoid legal fights.
Without the DMCA safe harbor provision, they'd be directly liable for content uploaded by users. Taking stuff down wouldn't protect them.
I don't think that's true, the law generally doesn't apply if you unknowingly are in possession of Illegal goods. So it would need to be proven that the host knew it was illegal.
Do you have evidence that a host was successfully held legally liable for unknowingly hosting illegal/unlicensed content? The Napster case is the closest I know of (post DMCA though), and that centered on whether they knew about the infringing content, as well as whether they promptly removed infringing content once they knew about it. This is certainly related to safe harbor provisions, but I'm interested to know of any examples before the DMCA was in place, because I have my doubts that they're truly necessary. To me it sounds like a way to hand even more control to copyright holders since they merely need to send a notice-and-takedown request instead of actually proving anything (at least that's my reading of Section 512 of Title 17).
That said, they're are better ways to handle it imo. For example, strengthening rights and responsibilities of individuals over submitted content could force hosts to explicitly partner with them to profit from it, which means they'll share liability and thus be expected to put more effort into verifying legality.