Legal question - If you send a bad DMCA and can't be proven to have sent it in bad faith (so the penalties under that law don't apply), could you still be sued for negligence, loss of business, etc etc? I.e. you didn't break the federal law, but you still damaged me.
(I am not a lawyer, but did read coverage of the SCO lawsuit extensively)
Falsely claiming to hold copyright in a work to which you do not hold copyright may open the possibility for slander of title (which was one of the claims in the SCO lawsuit).
I would be interested to see some sufficiently-deep-pocketed entity try to use that to turn an automated-DMCA-complaint house into a smoking hole in the ground, pour encourager les autres.
Arguably there may be other causes of action, but for a lone a DMCA takedown notice sans any accompanying threats, I believe Federal law would preempt and you're stuck try to meet the bar of intentional malice or negligence.
(IAANAL, but I listen to a lot of Jay-Z songs so I know a little bit.)
It's supposed to be perjury if they pretend to represent a work they do not, in fact, own. So if I falsely claim that I own Harry Potter and go file DMCA notices, I should get busted. But if I claim that something I actually do own the copyright on is infringed by something that clearly isn't infringing... well, there's nothing in the DMCA penalizing that.
In theory there might be some other claim against a person filing bogus DMCA notices, but given that people have been spamming half-bogus notices like this for years now, I'm not really holding my breath. I guess there have been a few that got in a little trouble, but not much. If they get in trouble it's usually for something bigger.
>But if I claim that something I actually do own the copyright on is infringed by something that clearly isn't infringing... well, there's nothing in the DMCA penalizing that.
Well that's not true. As posted by dangrossman above, the DMCA stipulates penalties if you misrepresent that the material is infringing. You will be liable for damages, including lawyer's fees.
"A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
The wording actually results in "under penalty of purjury" to modify the succeeding part of the sentence, not the preceding part. As a result, the penalties only apply if you act on behalf of another party without authorization.
Penalties would apply for mislabelling content as copyright infringing as well as acting without authorization if the requirement was this along the lines of "a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
I think he's talking about the knowing misrepresentation clause that I forgot about, actually (which is not the same as signing off on it under penalty of perjury). As noted by one of the comments above, this provision is completely toothless. To quote DannyBee: "Nobody has successfully gotten anyone fined/real damages for this provision yet. Partially because it requires knowing misrepresentation, not just negligent or even grossly negligent misrepresentation."
So you have to prove that they actually KNEW that Github was not a porno movie owned by them, not just that they were (hypothetically) filing legal papers while intoxicated or without actually reading them.
How you're supposed to prove they actually know anything at all in the face of the sheer stupidity demonstrated by this notice is an open question. I think a real lawyer would need to answer that, but I found something that makes it seem like the standard could be met if they made the statements with a complete disregard for the truth thereof - http://legal.practitioner.com/regulation/standards_9_3_1.htm
But it makes it seem like they could argue that they were simply careless and avoid it, so I don't honestly know.