> a way for copyright owners to be punished for broadly overreaching with their claims.
That will only harm small businesses and individuals. It doesn't take a huge sum of imagination to draw the situation in the brain. A lawyer hired by a big corporation on one side, and a poor artist on another side, both standing in the same courtroom. You already get the drama about to happen. Lawyers will happily bully those poor souls that they are fully capable of introducing more misery to their opponents, so you should just sign this paper and f** off. A few may resist, and few will survive, but the majority won't even take the case to the court out of fear.
The corporate bullies have been trotting out this argument forever to keep the status quo. But it is not as if it is impossible to craft a law that carves out protections for this exact harm, like fee shifting provisions or a cheaper administrative proceeding available to small business and non-corporate ownership. We are, as a society, capable of changing and writing creative laws.
Specifically here, how do you imagine a punishment for overreach hurting small owners? They are the plaintiffs here, assuming they bring meritorious casee, they are in the driver's seat with no downside over the status quo.
No, I don't get it. When a large corp steals music from a small musician, they already get all this, and copyright doesn't help with the situation. Disney has been ripping off independent artists and musicians for decades with no consequences. Ffs even Robin Williams struggled to get paid by them.
At least, for now, people can resist by suing, without fearing unfairly being punished. However, punishing for making false claims will suppress only the weaks by making it harder to sue powerful entities, as they'll get doubly punished for failing to prove their own rights.
OK. But this is a problem with the legal system then. If you give people legal rights to sue that they can't actually exercise because it costs too much, then that's a different problem from giving them the legal right to sue in the first place.
You're basically saying "no-one should get any legal rights at all because rich people will always win any legal dispute". I'm not saying you're wrong. But it's a different problem.
The DMCA (federal law) already provides a way to punish claimants, both small and large alike. A false claim under the DMCA is perjury (a felony in many locales). YouTube's system isn't the DMCA, which is why it's worse for creators and more generous to fraudulent claimants.
The way to punish someone for a false claim (both for claims filed on youtube and claims filed elsewhere) is to file an expensive lawsuit against the original claimant. It's very burdensome.
No it's not, but it's what DMCA is. And EU is following USA with building broad and abusive copyright protection legislation.
And everytime there's a proposal to make copyright law less abusive and ridiculous, there's a huge pushback from both authors, giant content megacorps and even people on HN who should know better.
I bet Warner/Disney/etc. lawyers are laughing their ass off when Google - due to their crazy incompetence and use of AI - gets blamed for the law they lobbied to accept.
No, but the claims are automated as well (there are APIs between content publishers and big content silos which make this distinction pretty unimportant).
Ideally, the law would defend you against content providers and Googles/YouTubes and protect you from frivoulous claims. Instead DMCA codifies this approach (even if it's a bit different than what Google is doing right now).
The codified counter-notice approach in the DMCA is different from YouTube's approach in a very significant way. The difference is clearly felt by creators.
That will only harm small businesses and individuals. It doesn't take a huge sum of imagination to draw the situation in the brain. A lawyer hired by a big corporation on one side, and a poor artist on another side, both standing in the same courtroom. You already get the drama about to happen. Lawyers will happily bully those poor souls that they are fully capable of introducing more misery to their opponents, so you should just sign this paper and f** off. A few may resist, and few will survive, but the majority won't even take the case to the court out of fear.
So, no, that's not a solution.