Youtube could make the penalty much higher. They don't want to because they know that working with content creation corporations is good for business, and over deletion doesn't hurt their bottom line at all.
Youtube isn't the party that should be punishing these take-downs. They might be able to apply some pressure to them but only through threatening to remove the DMCA sidestepping process which, honestly, benefits everyone. This is a case of folks with a lot of money persecuting folks with very little money - and that scenario breaks our current legal system. I think we need better support (and a restoration of the removed rights that were sidelined into forced arbitration) for class actions or other styles of group lawsuits. Amicus briefs from prestigious institutions and advocacy groups are surprising effective in this space already - but you can still get really boned when you have a winning case but not enough money to actually win it.
It's still far from optimal though, with that system it is still way too easy to do legal bullying. If you draw out a legal case long enough the coverage of legal expenses for the defendant does matter less and less (still better than not having it, of course!), because the financial pressure can still do permament damage that might not be easily reverted, add to that the intimidation and potential crippling of work/career/brand/profession of the defendant if any of those are part of the legal battle.
Companies can still calculate the costs of losing the case and come to the conclusion that the benefit of the intimidation alone is worth it.
This can have a chilling effect - if you are a legitimately wronged party you still might be hesitant to engage in a legal battle if some technicalities failing to be technicalities could result on you losing everything you've ever earned in life when you get hit with a suit to recover legal fees.
I think we sorta want more proactive and aggressive state attorneys that will prosecute seen injustices for the public good. I've pondered this a lot and I can't really see any obvious other path that doesn't have even worse potential consequences.
Make both parties start in non-binding arbitration, where the plaintiff pays.
If either party chooses to escalate, they'll be on the hook for all the fees, including the original arbitration, if they loose.
Plaintiffs could purchase insurance or some other vehicle to de-risk their claims if they believe, but aren't certain, that they'll win. This will help smaller parties that get infringed upon.
If anything it would make it worse. For those who are making a little over ends meet, a small percentage loss could put them under the threshold, whereas those with far more than they need can afford to lose a larger portion of their wealth.
More fundamentally, the purpose of such measures is explicitly to discourage the bringing of suits - anything big enough to be a viable deterrent to bad faith actors will inevitably also be big enough to deter good faith actors.
It might make sense if potential legal liability was limited to your own expenditure (though that might get complicated with self-representation). For instance if you've spent 30k on a defense vs. a company that put in 20M - you'd be on the hook for 30k or some multiplier/proportion of that. It'd essentially be a one-way filter: little guys get protection and bigger companies receive almost none - but it might also be exploitable by legal trolls filing bogus suits with essentially no liability exposure.
The law of the law be a complicated and harsh mistress.
I agree. In addition, multiple occurrences of wrongful copyright assertion should result in losing existing copyrights. If you abuse the system, you should lose the ability to protect future work.
I mean, the obvious alternative is simply "no copyright". The world existed before it, and people created things without it.
Anyways, less extreme would be that we could go back to reasonable copyright terms as existed a hundred years ago. It seems likely at this point that our current 'experiment' with extreme copyright enforcement is going to produce an entire 100+ year range where the only works that will survive will be those owned by massive corporations who hold perpetual ownership of the work instead of their actual creators.
These "industries" forget that public domain is the default. It's natural, it's just how things are. Copying is not just trivial, it is natural. People infringe copyright every single day without even realizing what they are doing.
The fact is society is doing them a huge favor by pretending their works are scarce. In return they abuse our good will and erode our public domain rights. All we have to do is stop pretending. Start treating everything as public domain. That ought to be enough of a reality check to an industry that thinks it can monopolize numbers for hundreds of years.
Nobody cares how much money they spent to make stuff either. They don't get to deny reality just because they spent money.
Not parent, but if you ask me[0]: nothing. The world is not starved for creative content, there is little reason to continue incentivizing its creation so massively. People have shown quite willing to continue creating even while receiving nothing at all for their trouble, and we can always donate money to the people who's work we want to support.
Yes, it means no more Disney movies or AAA games. I'm personally quite ok with that.
[0] This is largely for the sake of argument, although I do definitely lean this direction.
A society that provides for its people without restricting freedom of information.
There's nothing wrong with protecting trade secrets, etc. but that is the onus of the secret holder to employ proper security measures. If someone assaults those measures, you prosecute them for those specific assaults (physical, cyber, etc).
But you don't prosecute people merely for being in possession or distributing "intellectual property" i.e. ideas and symbols. Only a backwards society would allow that.
The alternative is people figure out a way to get paid before or while they're creating. Because after the work is done and published, it's over. Artificial scarcity isn't gonna save creators anymore.
