Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
NGL, this bullshit is rampant in the 3D printing space, with fake accounts declaring infringement on IP they don’t own (much less do the claims even mention anything remotely relevant to the allegedly infringed IP), and it frankly comes down to a deep-seated flaw in cost-cutting automation processes. Specifically, if the monitoring systems in place weren’t 99.99% trigger-happy bots and 0.01% exploited human labor, maybe this wouldn’t be a fucking issue… But, that would take Google, et al, deciding that profit wasn’t THE reason for existing. 🖕🏽