Honest question, Does the DMCA allow hosts to require proof before action?
If their liability isn't contingent on being provided valid evidence beyond a simple statement, then hosts don't have much of an ability to perform an assessment.
> Honest question, Does the DMCA allow hosts to require proof before action?
The DMCA (well, the Safe Harbor provision under discussion, the DMCA has lots of other provisions that are irrelevant to the discussion) doesn't require action in the first place, so it necessasrily allows anything before action.
> If their liability isn't contingent on being provided valid evidence beyond a simple statement, then hosts don't have much of an ability to perform an assessment.
The DMCA doesn't create liability in the first place.
What stops the Google's of the world from simply ignoring every dmca takedown request? Alternatively what do you think prevents them from requiring rigorous proof in a machine readable format before honoring a request? What do you think the incentives at play are?
The lawsuit with Viacom in the mid 2000s that could have basically killed the entire platform over copyright complaints with big studios. ContentID was a direct result of that lawsuit with the explicit goal of making sure google would never be held responsible for copyright violations.
The vast majority of "Copyright claims" on youtube are not DMCA takedowns.
Google doesn't require proof or ask for evidence or anything because they don't give a fuck about the rights of a creator. The entire goal of youtube's copyright programs are about the continuation of youtube as a profitable entity. They do that by purposely making it easy for big rightsholders to get what they want, and in the process have made it easy for strangers to bogus claim things and possibly get advertising revenue for a bit unless the creator has enough clout and access to youtube support reps to get it fixed.
> What stops the Google's of the world from simply ignoring every dmca takedown request?
The same thing that leads them to make deals with big money copyright-based industries for copyright systems that go far beyond what the DMCA safe harbor requires for situations it covers: the fact that they are deeply and actually aware of the copyright violation they facilitate (putting them outside of the DMCA safe harbor to start with), and rely almost entirely on the fact that that is hard and expensive to prove (which the DMCA negates, but which forces them to go beyond the DMCA for industries for which the cost and expense of proving actual knowledge would otherwise be worthwhile.)
If their liability isn't contingent on being provided valid evidence beyond a simple statement, then hosts don't have much of an ability to perform an assessment.