[mcpackieh]

We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.

[ZoomerCretin]

This is a very nice-sounding fantasy. Too many people profit from the status quo to do such a thing. Lawyers and judges would not dare issue a ruling or enact any law harming their and their friends' profession.

[rockskon]

Cynicism like this is poison for changing the political system. Not only have you ceded all ground to the copyright industry - you also discourage others from trying to make a difference.

The public isn't as powerless to enact change as you make them out to be.

[Terr_]

Also, the penalty against falsely claiming you represent a copyright holder can/will be weaponized against anyone trying to bring attention to abuse by issuing the "missing" DMCA takedown requests in a logically consistent manner.

In other words, it ends up making it easy for issuers to selectively bully small weak targets while carefully avoiding anyone who could fight back legally. The fact that one thing was removed/kept doesn't create precedent for another fundamentally identical thing posted by someone else.

[safety1st]

I mean the lawyers behind Prenda Law were disbarred and sent to jail for their outrageous copyright trolling in large part because they abused the justice system. Judges don't like it when you do that. They can and do bust lawyers and law firms all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

I think the main issue here is, if you're a victim of DMCA fraud it's hard to get a case in front of a judge because of the way the law is written. But that doesn't mean it will never happen, and if it does I absolutely feel like a judge might set a precedent which curtails the practice, because judges by nature tend to take a dim view of abuse of process.