Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Personally, if we’re talking thousands then I’d be considering lawyering up. I know that’s a dangerous game to play with YouTube, but damn dude, that’s a lot of money.
My friend was actually a lawyer himself previous to going full time on YouTube. He talked about it once, but suing YouTube/Google itself for it is something he wasn’t prepared to do. It’s daunting enough to litigate against someone only moderately bigger than you, suing one of the largest corporations in the world wasn’t something he was eager to do. One of the rights companies maybe, but there have been a couple dozen of those for him alone. It would be like whack-a-mole.
Damn, imagine having a system so fucked up that even a lawyer can’t deal with it.