Comment by otterley
16 hours ago
At least the DMCA in the U.S. has guardrails: not just anyone can send a takedown demand for everything. The requester has identify the works and declare under penalty of perjury that they are operating on the behalf of the owner. I imagine the equivalent EU law has similar requirements.
CloudFlare uses legal chicanery to try to subvert the DMCA by claiming that because they’re not the origin server, they’re not subject to takedown demands. So far no court has told them to knock it off. I expect that day will eventually come. Every lawsuit against them to date has ended in a settlement because CloudFlare would rather pay up than get an unfavorable ruling on the books.
CloudFlare has consistently treated loss of DMCA safe harbor protection as a material business risk; it’s been cited in every SEC filing from the 2019 IPO S-1 through the FY2025 10-K.
Nobody cares about the DMCA guardrails and they are never meaningfully enforced. Case in point, Anthropic DMCAing thousands of repositories that simply mentioned the word "claude".
> At least the DMCA in the U.S. has guardrails: not just anyone can send a takedown demand for everything. The requester has identify the works and declare under penalty of perjury that they are operating on the behalf of the owner.
You'd think so, but no.
DMCA came into effect 28 years ago. All those decades, all those billions of takedowns, and you don't even need the fingers of one hand to count those who've been hit with perjury for a false takedown request, because the number is ... zero.
You might misunderstand what the law requires. The person making the complaint (demand) only has to declare under penalty of perjury that they represent the copyright holder. It does not require them, under penalty of perjury, to be correct about the underlying facts.
See 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A):
"(A) To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following: ...
"(vi) 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."
In other words: someone issuing a notice of infringement relating to a Disney work must declare under penalty of perjury that they represent Disney. They don't have to declare under penalty of perjury that the work is in fact a Disney work, that the title is correct, that the use in question is not fair use, etc.
This would explain why you're not seeing what you expect to see.