As horrible as the DMCA is, it does not mean that Mozilla or any other hoster has to honor any claim anyone thinks up. If they are confident that a claim is frivolous they can just tell the submitter to fuck off. It does mean that they take on some liability of the claim turns out to be valid but again, they can determine that themselves and there isn't any abosolute safety from having to defend yourself against invalid legal claims in either case. Mozilla trying to benefit from extension creators (which provide immense value to the browser) while trying to offload all legal risk to the little guy is not exactly making me more confident that they are all that interested in protecting the open internet.
Now I haven't seen this claim specifically (has Mozilla posted it publicly?) but I doub the extension is actually infringing anyones copyright and this is instead about providing a way to circumvent coyright protections. AFAIK DMCA circumvention is not grounds for a DMCA complaint, which are for direct infringement of the claimants "IP" only.
I believe DMCA also applies to circumvention tools.
I don't personally agree that youtube-dl is a circumvention tool since all it does is emulate what your browser does anyway, but I presume that is the argument.
It's pretty ridiculous. They might argue that a browser is a technological measure to protect a copyrighted work which youtube-dl circumvents since the DMCA is written so vaguely. Cases like this demonstrate why anti-circumvention litigation really has to go.
DMCA itself is bogus. It was deliberately designed to let companies censor: claims are valid by default and nobody has the desire to dispute invalid claims in court. The potential for abuse is a feature.
How exactly is the DMCA "bullshit"? It provides an (addmitedly imperfect, yet better than the alternative) notification/takedown/reinstatement process and indemnifies content providers from the infringing acts taken by their users.
There might be many BS copyright laws and extensions, but the DMCA ain't one of them.
If they knowingly misrepresent a claim that content is infringing, they're liable for damages (17 section 512(k)(2)) but didn't commit perjury. If they are simply negligent in making a claim (eg, because a piece of software told them an infringement had occurred and they didn't actually verify that), they're probably fine. This obviously makes abuse trivial and if anything actively discourages people from verifying whether an infringement actually exists - if they do and then send the takedown notice anyway they're potentially liable for damages, whereas if they never bother then negligence doesn't seem to result in bad outcomes for them. The DMCA is bad law.
All of their arguments are bullshit for one big reason: they talk only about trademark violations in the notification, while DMCA covers copyright violations. They appear to claim no copyright violations, which makes it totally invalid.
It's far from clear that draw-on-top paywalls qualify for the protection offered by either the DMCA or the CFAA. Even if they did, the mechanisms by which this specific extension works are indistinguishable actions users take for many other reasons. The legal notice is a gamble that the extension author doesn't want to spend the money to find out the hard way.
Fair question. I don't necessarily have something specific in mind, I just have a generally high prior of things like: the law is complicated; DMCA is complicated; things don't necessarily mean what they sound like they'd mean; arguments like "if you allow this you can't possibly forbid that, what on earth are you thinking" are unreliable at best[1].
But the sorts of things I could imagine going wrong with your argument might be...
* Yes, browsers are in violation of the thing bitwize quoted, but it doesn't apply to them for reasons written elsewhere.
* Yes, browsers are actually in violation of DMCA. People probably noticed this when the law was being written, but no one listened to them. If anyone tried to enforce DMCA against browsers, DMCA would get overturned, so no one's going to try. (I think this is unlikely - if there was an argument that browsers violate DMCA, I think I'd probably have heard of it. Probably. But including for completeness.)
* Browsers need Javascript engines for many many reasons. Youtube-dl (afaik) needs a javascript engine specifically to get around this obfuscation. That could be relevant somehow. (Similar reasoning might say that locksmiths are allowed to own lockpicks and no one else is. I believe the law has roundly rejected that. But that doesn't mean the law would reject this, too.)
Again, not claiming any of these actually apply. Just, this sort of thing is why I'm hesitant to make inferences that seem otherwise sensible.
The provision is infamously toothless. A proper DMCA notice (yes, you can send improper ones...) is supposed to contain a statement made under penalty of perjury saying you are or represent the owner of the allegedly infringed upon work.
So you just have to own the thing you claim is infringed, you do not have to be correct that the items you target with the notice are actually infringing upon your work. That stops me from claiming to own Mickey Mouse and sending notices against it. It does not stop me from claiming something I actually own copyright to and sending spurious notices to non-infringing works.
Now, there might be some minor monetary liability for costs incurred by a completely bogus notice, but they're probably not large enough to sue over without ending up losing more money on the suit than you win in most cases, so it's relatively untested, though I think there may have been a settlement or two over such claims.
The DMCA disagrees. Specific methods of "circumvention" which inevitably take the form of a software tool are prohibited. Tools and their authors can be held accountable.
Now I haven't seen this claim specifically (has Mozilla posted it publicly?) but I doub the extension is actually infringing anyones copyright and this is instead about providing a way to circumvent coyright protections. AFAIK DMCA circumvention is not grounds for a DMCA complaint, which are for direct infringement of the claimants "IP" only.
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