Quote:
Originally Posted by pornlaw
The issue that I see with DMCA takedown services is the whack a mole situation.
Sure you can track the content, you can take it down and then you can do it again.
Over and over again.
This is why I say its a waste of time and money.
It is a never ending merry-go-round.
I am not saying DMCA never works. Its a temporary fix whereas trademark is a more permanent fix.
As long as the pirate site is registered with the US Copyright Office as an ISP, they have safe harbor. And those that are helping the site make money are basically untouchable when it comes to contributory copyright infringement.
There is no safe harbor from trademark infringement.
And the contributory infringers can also be held liable.
And there is an ongoing duty to keep the content off the site. This is not true with copyright infringement claims. If they continue to allow the trademark not just the content to be infringed, then you are talking about willful damages. Willful damages can be in the millions of dollars.
I think the strongest arrow in the trademark quiver though is the fact that co-infringers such as hosts, traffic companies, even site advertisers can be held joint and severally liable for contributory trademark infringement. So Telegram and Discord could also be held liable as well those companies providing processing services.
Are my services more expensive to do this rather than DMCA takedown services... absolutely.
But if you add up years and years of the costs of DMCA takedown services, I am less expensive.
And there is the possibility that I can produce litigation revenue whereas DMCA takedowns cannot. But a client has to be willing to pull that trigger.
And if necessary I can represent several clients who can tribute to a litigation fund to take down a certain site that might be causing the majority of their collective problems so they can lessen the costs for each one.
Millions of dollars that have been spent on DMCA takedown services over the past 15 years. Piracy still exists. And as you said its still going to be there.
Perhaps a new approach is necessary. Perhaps hammering one nail will cause a ripple effect.
There are a lot of traffic companies in this industry that support piracy. I don't represent any of them.
Take one of them down and you might cause the others to reevaluate how they do business and might cause them to use some KYC before agreeing to service an account.
Stop the monetization. Trademark can do that, copyright cant.
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I appreciate your insight. To me it has always been a combination of different efforts that reach the furthest. Short-term and long-term approaches, when employed together, will do the most good even if they are costlier upfront.
I don't know of any US-based, or allied country file sharing sites (that would respect the U.S. copyright office or a C&D outright.) Sure, a lot of these sites use something like Cloudflare or Amazon as a firewall/CDN, but after they're dropped by Cloudflare or Amazon, co-infringers might only be in countries where it's exceedingly difficult to bring a lawsuit like that. In those situations, I am not sure there's much you can do except exercise mitigation efforts.
Major mainstream companies, including every production company and streaming site out there, suffers from the same problem that the adult industry does. Although somewhat unrelated to the topic of copyright, I would add to my previous post to say, the easier it is for content to be obtained legally, the harder it is to justify piracy and obtaining that content illegally.