Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.
Someone should DDOS the web pages of all the American congresscritters and their campaigns and campaign contractors with DMCA notices. That's probably the only way this will get fixed.
Lenz v Universal was fought over this, and has opened the floodgates for these claims. Copyright holders cannot just blanket issue DMCA takedowns without evaluating the supposedly infringing content, including consideration of fair use.
While it’s not an easy case to win, it has teeth - unfortunately they are limited to ACTUAL damages, which does give companies incentive to file misrepresented claims as one cannot easily hire a contingent attorney without the possibility of a statutory windfall.
This was the first successful 512(f) verdict back in 2004, though it may still stand nearly alone, and did not yield enough in damages to affect megacorp behavior in the absence of a huge flurry of such lawsuits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebo....
No individual will ever pursue this in court because of the cost in time and money and the risk of being declared liable anyway. Corporations with legal departments are certainly capable of pursuing this against individuals.
For a specific example, you can definitely take a company's products off the Chrome Web Store for multiple weeks with a forged DMCA request. Of course, if your company relies on Google to make money you should be expecting this to happen already... Whether you could effectively do this against other marketplaces like the iOS or Android app stores is an interesting question. I suspect those are run better but they'd still have to honor the takedown.
Also makes me wonder if people could DDOS an entire company with DMCA takedown requests.