Filmora uses DMCA to attack YouTuber complaining about license changes [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMIIwQZMFLE

by xupybd • 4 years ago

166 48 4 years ago

youtube.com

gorbachev• 4 years ago

Fear not. Wondershare is here to help:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/youtube/youtube-copyright-cl...

kitanata• 4 years ago

How to completely destroy your reputation as a company 101. Just keep doubling down on the hostility, gaslighting and and narcissism Filmora. I am sure it will work out eventually. /s

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

GoPro used fraudulent DMCAs to silence negative reviews. They didn't face any repercussions.

Bilal_io2• 4 years ago

Bever hear that before, I'll look it up to confirm, and if true I will not give them my money in the future.

Edit: the single case I found was against DigitalRev back in 2013. Either that was a one off mistake, or Google betrayed me. Do your own research.

commoner• 4 years ago

Abusing the DMCA to take down unwanted reviews is an easy way to generate bad press for your own company.

GoPro’s poor attempt at taking down a (mostly positive) review of the GoPro Hero 3 erupted into a deluge of unwanted bad press for the camera company. The fact that they Streisanded themselves into an even worse position, and were pressured into giving a public response shortly thereafter, has not scared other companies away from abusing similar tactics.
Unhappy with Lennie’s review, Rotolight decided to file a DMCA takedown notice to Vimeo claiming “the title and tags for the Video, did infringe our trademark.” The video was then taken down by Vimeo, which at the time only had about 150 total views. After Lennie took to the Internet exposing the DMCA notice in a blog post, the takedown went viral across tech sites and copyright blogs, unanimously shaming Rotolight’s blatant abuse of the DMCA.
Rotolight, like GoPro, quickly issued an apology for their baseless claims of copyright infringement. In an almost identical series of events, both companies were caught red-handed trying to get away with suppressing negative criticism with DMCA notices they had to have known had no basis whatsoever. Both companies, were then rightfully shamed into publicly retracting their copyright claims.

https://www.lumendatabase.org/blog_entries/797

Magi604• 4 years ago

Ooh I want to read about this. Do you have a link?

sitkack3• 4 years ago

I will never buy a GoPro due to their actions.

bakugo• 4 years ago

I wish this was true. The reality is that this won't harm them at all because most people simply don't care. Plenty of companies that are openly hostile to their customers are doing better than ever, Nintendo comes to mind as another common DMCA abuser.

phpisthebest2• 4 years ago

Long term it will not hurt them, but they are not helping themselves short term.

The best course of action for them would have been to just ignore it, their continued engagement keeps it in the news and keeps expanding the Audience. I had never heard of this company before, however now multiple higher profile tech personalities have commented on it, and the more they double down and blame the consumer the wider the story will get

drak0n1c• 4 years ago

The Firewatch game developers used DMCA against PewDiePie when he played their game, and it was accepted and honored by YouTube. There was a brief social media backlash/discussion but that's mostly forgotten by now.

hirundo• 4 years ago

And the DCMA was filed against ... one of their own best sales videos, an enthusiastic tutorial on the software by someone enjoying it. And with whom they had an explicit sponsorship deal. And they did this as a response to a very calm and reasonable complaint about stealing licenses from their best customers.

If they are having problems caused by fans who are too attached to their product this is a brilliant solution.

mmastrac• 4 years ago

Common typo: s/DCMA/DMCA/

xupybd• 4 years ago

Thanks. Title edited.

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

I wish, just once, that someone who sends bogus DMCA claims like this would actually get sent to jail for committing perjury.

m-p-3• 4 years ago

Or at least lose their ability to fast-track takedown requests.

tialaramex• 4 years ago

Perjury is fairly a steep evidential climb because it inquires as to what the accused believed, and it wouldn't apply here anyway because the DMCA specifically applies perjury to the question of authorisation to act for the owner. It does not apply to the other information.

If I claim to be Disney and issue a DMCA takedown of somebody's video, that's perjury, because Disney did not authorize me to do that.

If Disney's lawyers claim your video about how much you enjoy yoga is infringing on their animated feature film "Snow White" that's not perjury even though the claim is wrong and the worst that'll happen is if it went to court it gets dismissed and maybe a Disney lawyer gets slapped on the wrist for wasting a judge's time with this nonsense.

t-writescode• 4 years ago

In a case like this, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an email trail at that company demanding that they use a DMCA to take the video down for reasons that are not DMCA-related.

JumpCrisscross2• 4 years ago

someone who sends bogus DMCA claims like this would actually get sent to jail for committing perjury

DMCA claims aren’t made to a court, so perjury doesn’t make sense. If one could prove intent, perhaps fraud?

williamscales• 4 years ago

(not a lawyer)

I wonder if wire-fraud applies because IIRC the DMCA claimant gets the video's ad revenue. You have an aspect of obtaining money, it happens over the wire, so...maybe?

cobbal• 4 years ago

From the DMCA (emphasis added):

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 in-fringed.

Though this may not refer to the falsehood here. See stackexchange (where I copy/pasted the above from): https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...

nobodyandproud• 4 years ago

Has anyone claimed any success by going through the CCB, to fight these fraudulent takedowns?

https://www.ccb.gov/

EarlKing• 4 years ago

Doesn't matter because...

1. The CCB is completely voluntary, so in most cases a determined troll in unlikely to submit to their jurisdiction.

2. In most cases when someone speaks of a DMCA takedown w/r/t Youtube there is no actual DMCA claim involved, but merely a claim made using the Content ID system, which does not involve making a formal complaint under the DMCA.

3. Fraudulent takedowns can subject you to claims for damages pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512, but of course that never happens because the only people targeted are those who don't have the ability to fight back.

smcin2• 4 years ago

I seriously doubt it, because the CCB's About page (https://www.ccb.gov/about/) says:

  - participation is _voluntary_ for both claimant and respondent
  - monetary damages are capped at $15k per work, for a total of $30K for 2 works
  - bad-faith claimants may be ordered to pay the other party’s costs up to $5K/2.5K
  - there's a limit on the number of claims any party can file per year
  - CCB determinations are open to public view, but not precedential for court
  - parties cannot file the same claim in federal court if they went through the CCB process. (sounds like ADR)
  - it's designed to be navigable by non-lawyers and, instead of a judge and/or jury, the case is heard by a panel of three officers and the entire process is held online

If you were a bad-faith claimant trying to intimidate under-funded good-faith users, or a copyright troll law-firm, those sound like _exactly_ the rules you'd want to avoid. Even simply the number of claims a claimant had filed, the identity and circumstances of the respondents (e.g. your own former business partners, film bloggers, rather than pirates or copycats) and the claims' success/failure rate would reveal abusive claimants (are there any statistics on DMCA abuse by claimants?)

An 8/2022 article "The First 100 Cases at the Copyright Claims Board" https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/08/18/the-first-100-cas...

smcin2• 4 years ago

There's an analysis at: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/02/a-glimmer-of-h...

The cap likely will encourage aggressive copyright enforcers to stay in federal court and skip the CCB altogether...
Based on this analysis, the caps (10 proceedings/year for copyright owners or 40/yr for law firms) seem to deter many potential CCB users. If the plaintiffs’ lawyers aren’t steering clients towards it, and if both the firms and copyright owners see more value in consolidating cases in federal court, the CCB will most likely cater to the copyright owner who doesn’t have a lawyer and views an occasional small claims proceeding as its best hope; and possibly the rare circumstances where a CCB proceeding will be more lucrative than a federal court proceeding (like where the owner has an unregistered copyright and would prefer the statutory damages available only in the CCB). If these become the main CCB use cases, I imagine there will be dozens of CCB cases in a year, not thousands or even hundreds, and the CCB will not be an especially important adjudicatory venue.

mikeortman• 4 years ago

Filmora now claiming that they just weren't clear enough on the old version 9 license page and sorry for not coming off that lifetime != lifetime, so they are "generously" offering one more upgrade. Also claiming lots of social media is spreading false information with bad intent and threatening legal action.

A very "I'm sorry you were offended" response.

https://twitter.com/Filmora_Editor/status/160918041318809600...

stordoff• 4 years ago

This archived page[1] was linked in a previous thread, which seems fairly clear to me:

6. Under what circumstances can I upgrade to Filmora 12 for free?
- You are a lifetime user of Filmora 9 or the earlier version.
- You are a Filmora subscription user.
- You purchased the Filmora 11 perpetual plan within 90 days.
- You are a business/education/team perpetual license user.

The current version of the same page says:

6. Under what circumstances can I upgrade to Filmora 12 for free?
- You are a Filmora subscription user.
- You purchased the Filmora 11 perpetual plan within 90 days before Filmora 12's official launch (Purchased from September 14, 2022 to December 11, 2022)

Obviously that page doesn't form part of the initial licence, but it doesn't exactly make the decision look any better.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221209023321/https://filmora.w...

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

they are "generously" offering one more upgrade

Their use of the word "generously" is egregiously wrong there, since the thing they're offering you is something that they already owed you anyway! That deal is basically "we're only going to give you a subset of what we originally promised you when you bought your license, and we're not going to give you anything else in return to make up for it."

prirun• 4 years ago

If someone uses the DMCA against you and is wrong, file a counter-notice with the hosting company. They are then required to put the content back online within 10 days unless the "rights owner" has filed legal action against the "violator".

From the DMCA https://www.copyright.gov/512/:

If the user believes that the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material, the user may submit a counter-notice requesting the reinstatement of the material. To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information:

(i) a physical or electronic signature of the user;

(ii) identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled;

(iii) a statement under penalty of perjury that the user has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled;

(iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.

A sample counter-notice is located under the “Notice-and-Takedown Resources” heading.

Following receipt of a compliant counter-notice, the online service provider must restore access to the material after no less than ten and no more than fourteen business days, unless the original notice sender informs the service provider that it has filed a court action against the user.

The notice and counter-notice steps can be visualized as follows:

    Notice — Rightsholder sends notice to online service provider regarding infringing material that appears on the online service provider’s system.

    Remove Access to Material — Online service provider must act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the infringing material.

    Notify User — Online service provider must then promptly notify the user that originally uploaded the material that it has been removed.

    Counter-notice — User may submit a counter-notice requesting the reinstatement of the material, if the user believes the removal was due to a mistake or misidentification.

    Restore Access or Initiate Court Action — Online service provider must restore access to the material after no less than 10 and no more than 14 business days, unless the original notice sender informs the service provider that it has filed a court action against the user.

Most of the shitty companies expect people to be afraid of the law, but in my experience, when people show that they aren't intimidated, the shit company just goes away. Filing a takedown notice is simple, free, usually very effective, and has no penalty for being wrong. Filing an inappropriate lawsuit however is another matter, and something most companies won't do. Just my opinion.

mijoharas• 4 years ago

Looks like the person in this youtube video filed a counter-notice[0] though it's possible that the legal action they threatened[1] may have been directed towards this guy (which is what he claims in the video).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy1HiWGchMg

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34200890

Filmora uses DMCA to attack YouTuber complaining about license changes [video]

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