GirlWritesWhat – Best of luck in that DMCA case!!!

The one thing that the Internet has made me laugh time and again is when someone makes the claim that when someone filed a false DMCA that “they will sue them to death.” Some prominent Internet drama includes DPRJones and VFX, Brett Keane and ShredderlLives, and lastly GWW and presumed feminists. I’m going to focus on GWW’s claim since it’s the easiest of the three incidents. I don’t think GWW and others realize the process one would have to go through to achieve any type of victory.

In GWW’s claimed, made in the below video, she states and shows that two of her videos were falsely DMCAed, which I don’t doubt the videos were falsely DMCAed, but it is hilarious that she goes on to claim that she will sue them and then requests donations for her plight. And then a day later in her video she claims she has raised X amount of dollars to fight these DMCA claims.

Now moving on to the process she would have to go through to succeed, firstly she would have to obtain the recorded IP address from the users who filed the DMCAs. I’m certain that Youtube/Google are not going to hand that information willy nilly over to someone without a fight. So her next step would have to be to sue Youtube/Google, which can be done, more or less, at the state level. At this point she has several hurdles to jump over. Firstly, she needs to be sure that they still have the IP address on hand from the person(s) who filed the DMCA. Because I’m sure with video sharing sites they have to keep IP addresses on hand for a fixed period of time. The next hurdle she will have to jump is to fight Youtube/Google who will put up a fight to protect users privacy. And they have vested interest in protecting users privacy. Simply put, Youtube’s fundamental revenue stream is advertising, although I’m aware they have other means, but it’s obvious they make most of their revenue from advertisements. If Youtube/Google were to just freely hand out people’s IP addresses to anyone, how long would it be before users start closing their accounts and move to another site? The last hurdle she would face is she has to prove to the courts as to what damage this DMCA caused. Did it deprive her of revenue, if so, how much? Did it cause irreparable harm? She could claim that her freedom of speech was violated. But I have yet to hear of a case where a foreigner’s freedom of speech was violated in America, especially since that person isn’t a US citizen or even a resident. And if she were to pursue this last reasoning, she would be jumping from the world of copyright into the world of Constitutional law. Which in laymen’s terms is another can of worms.

Now if GWW is able to successfully jump those hurdles and find a judge that agrees with her, she then would have to survive the appeals process. And if she can survive that process and succeed, she then has to subpoena the Internet Provider (eg. Comcast, Time Warner, etc.) to obtain the person(s) home or business address. And if they do provide her with that the land addresses, she then would have to start a federal court case, since the DMCA is a federal law. And if the two defendants are in different parts of America, hence live in two different federal jurisdictions, that could very well mean she has to start two separate court cases. Or if she is lucky, assuming there are two different people in two different federal jurisdictions, she could get the cases conjoined. Then there is the other problem, what if, when she obtains the IP addresses, that the addresses are from a different country or countries. So her next step would be to file an extradition claim with that country’s justice department to have said person(s) extradited to America. The other option other than extradition is if the countries in question acknowledge and honor American copyrights laws, is she prepared to go through that country’s legal process to find and sue that person(s)?

At this point the reader should see the absurdity of this entire process GWW would be pursuing.

Finally, there is the question of the donations. What is she going to do or has done with the donations? Even if she stuck to her original claim of suing these false DMCAs, it shouldn’t take one long to see that the donations she collected could be better used for other pursuits instead of throwing them into a money pit.

The Damage Dealing Meat Shield

GWW’s Videos

you f***ing cowards

update on the DMCA issue

Tags: Brett Keane, Constitutional law, DMCA, DPRJones, federal law, freedom of speech, GirlWritesWhat, google, GWW, IP Address, Shredderlives, VFX, youtube