I worked front line technical support at a web hosting company in the early 2010s. We were told to just immediately shut down any site when receiving a DMCA takedown request. We were barely paid above minimum wage, and received no training on how to handle legal requests like this - the rule was just "shut the site down".
Years ago we had an opsec competition called "Karmageddon". The goal was to get as many upvotes on Reddit on an account in one day, with absolutely no ethical limitations to achieving that.
I was winning against 10-20 people by posting a lot of random "f this politician" garbage in the political subreddits (this was in late 2016 and it was a feeding frenzy), until someone posted a "check out this picture of me and my brother I haven't seen in 10 years wearing the same Ghostbusters shirt!" post. It wasn't his brother, he found it somewhere, but it was going viral and I was about to lose.
So I filed a DMCA takedown request with Reddit, and they deleted the post and the picture very quickly after, no questions asked. I ended up winning the competition, but I think we ended up giving the prize to the Ghostbusters guy anyways.
Before anyone reacts negatively to this - you’ve never seen how much spam, and how many DMCA requests, are completely real. I would personally estimate 90%+.
It doesn't matter. A 10% false positive rate means grave injustices are being inflicted on people on a daily basis. They are being censored by the government at a corporation's whim for bogus reasons. The corporations exploit the fact people will not fight their claims because it costs time and a small fortune to do so.
Spam? Infringement? Irrelevant. Small issues compared to corporate censorship. Let it happen. Not a single person should be censored over it.
