Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

It is perfectly clear that YouTube can stop it. As the article points out, we know there are things YouTube can do because those are the very same things The Verge asked about and YouTube refused to answer. The DMCA is broken, yes, but YouTube has made it worse with their kind-of-but-not-actually-DMCA counter-claim process.<p>If they really wanted to solve it, here&#x27;s an idea: if you get a takedown notice you also get a button that says &quot;I am sure my content does not infringe copyright and I&#x27;m willing to go to court for it&quot;. YouTube reinstates your content and, if the entity with the claim disagrees, they can take you personally to court. Is this good? No, but that&#x27;s on the DMCA. Is it better than now, when you have no recourse? I&#x27;d say yes.

I have a forum that receives a high number of DMCA claims. They link to pages on my forum where they claim I&#x27;m violating their copyright. However, when I review the pages, the content only mentions the name of a product or service. Imagine I write something here, like how I watched the movie &quot;Inception&quot; last week. A third party then sends me a DMCA request on behalf of Warner Bros, and Google removes this page from their search results. That&#x27;s what I get, but thousands of them.<p>It&#x27;s fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don&#x27;t have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.<p>It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I&#x27;m either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?

The DMCA has absolutely ruined a decade+ long hobby of mine, which was streaming&#x2F;content creation. I used to have really fun streams not that long ago that featured a variety of relaxing&#x2F;cool music set to the backdrop of me messing around on the computer, or in some game. Everyone was fine with this arrangement for a <i>long</i> time. Then, things suddenly changed a few years ago. First your VODs would get yanked and you&#x27;d get a warning if you played some extremely popular song, and it was like ok, I understand that. But now it&#x27;s even spread to <i>in game audio of a game I literally have purchased.</i> That is <i>ridiculous</i> to me. There are games I actually cannot publish playing with full audio settings enabled. That is <i>ridiculous</i> no matter your views on the DMCA, and I&#x27;d even go farther and say it&#x27;s completely ridiculous that I cannot use audio I have purchased or somehow leased on my own content. Why does it have to be this way? Someone can try to convince me this is somehow sane or necessary, but I really doubt it.

When DMCA was proposed, the internet was up in arms predicting exactly this sort of stuff. It was a ridiculous law then and it is now.

The DMCA is totally broken, and has been from the beginning. There are no consequences for anyone making a fake claim. However there are severe consequences for someone who receives one and doesn&#x27;t take action. There are counter-claims processes, but that puts a heavy burden on both the creator and the platform.<p>I myself am guilty of abusing the DMCA. When I was fighting fraud for eBay and PayPal, if we found someone hosting a phishing site, we would use the DMCA to get them to take it down, claiming they were violating the copyright of the logo. We would send DMCA notices to any host in any country. Most would just oblige. A few would reply and inform us they weren&#x27;t in the USA.<p>But it worked because the platforms feared the consequences of not following it, and there was no risk to us.<p>The DMCA needs fixing by adding severe consequences for incorrect use.

I&#x27;m surprised Russia &#x2F; China &#x2F; North Korea aren&#x27;t using this process against dissidents and activists. If you&#x27;re not reachable by American law enforcement, it seems like such a low-effort way to remove any content off the internet that you don&#x27;t like.<p>Getting access to the real names and addresses of these people is a nice bonus too; I&#x27;m sure their intelligence services would have plenty of uses for this information.<p>If there&#x27;s one way of making the DMCA (and similar legislation around the world) go away, spinning it as an anti-free-speech law with national security concerns is probably it, especially considering the upcoming US administration.

Nintendo&#x27;s problem is that this was fairly believable because it lines up pretty closely with their own past behavior. Nintendo regularly drags some of their biggest fans through the dirt with bogus copyright claims and other legal nonsense.

I worry about let&#x27;s plays (especially let&#x27;s plays without commentary). They pretty clearly exist in a &quot;yes, this is copyright infringement but yes, they are generally considered positive for a game&quot; space.<p>The moment some game creator decides to test this will get very interesting. Not good interesting.

The system is broken and I can&#x27;t see a way to fix it. Maybe pay to send a takedown notice?

Impersonating with intent to damage is legal?

This is wonderful. Automate this with vpns and ai and many individual volunteers and essentially make youtube take <i>all</i> of their content down, forcing them to rethink their policy.<p>Use youtube&#x27;s bad policy against itself.

Maybe the US Congress can amend the DMCA so that every company must publically list an email contact that must respond correctly to requests that take the form of forwarded DMCA notices and communications about IP issues. The company would have to reply with a confirmation or denial of the communication.<p>Companies could easily do this by including a tracking number for each communication, along with a copy of the communication then checking that tracking number on requests for confirmation.

They can easily stop it.<p>Question is, will there be enough incentive for them to do so.

It looks like a hater with a suck channel who has mental issues, but also knows how to use LLMs to generate fake lawyer letters

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A bit of topic, considering my English isn&#x27;t good at all, the article title isn&#x27;t missing an &quot;if&quot; here? I had a hard time reading that.<p>&gt; A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it’s not clear [if] YouTube can stop him

I had no idea spoofing email sender was so easy. Does anyone know of a good way to defend against this? I&#x27;ve always taken it for granted that if the sender was a domain that I trusted that I could trust the email itself.

Maybe don’t bully anyone unrelated to your organization until active shooters become a regular occurrence at their own office building.

Do YouTubers have any recourse against Google or the faker? Seems like a false DMCA takedown would be a first amendment violation.

What about verifying the entity sending the request is legit?<p>An email @nintendo.com is not that hard to get for the legal team of nintendo

YouTube can only stop if it the guy goes on Joe Rogan, then they can screw around with it with impunity.

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Fuck Nintendo! They were the first to &quot;get inspired&quot; from others, also being against copyrights because everybody benefits from copying each other. Let them die.

So the first email was from a Protonmail account, and the second one was spoofed and obviously had incorrect headers. Are you saying Youtube doesn&#x27;t check for these when processing take-down requests?