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The problem is that for some strange reason there is no punishment for malicious/false copyright claims.



There is, technically. It's perjury to file a false DMCA claim.

In practice nobody gets pursued for it for several reasons:

* Filing a counterclaim means handing the DMCA filer all your personal information (note that the entity filing the DMCA can and often has the ability to get this info redacted on their side of the equation unless you file a counterclaim), so a lot of people simply don't do it because you're handing your personal info to a possibly malicious party.

* The platform provider has no reason to pursue false claims, since the pushback against a malicious DMCA claim isn't large enough for them to meaningfully lose users.

* Legal fights in the US get expensive very quickly and the reward for winning isn't exactly high enough for a lawyer to give you the nice deals.

Finally, most of the problems with the DMCA are just baked into how the law is written. The entire law basically incentivizes providers to acquiesce to anyone who might be a copyright holder, because if they stick their neck out, they risk it blowing up and losing their safe harbor protections (which makes them liable for other copyright infringement.)


Laws that are not enforced are merely suggestions.


There are literally dozens of successful legal actions against people illicitly making copyright claims on YouTube.


Dozens out of the thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?).

Even then, people successfully litigating - therefore putting their own money at risk - to get a few wins proves my point: the law is not being enforced.



Because it’s less impactful for google to mindlessly accept potentially fraudulent claims then it is to risk ignoring a legitimate one.




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