Hello guys and gals, it’s me Mutahar again! This time we take a look at an individual known as Techlead once again. This creator has had an incredibly controversial history but it’s in the last few days he’s decided to take advantage of the YouTube copyright system to gain information on his critics and unlawfully remove their content. YouTube needs to step in. Thanks for watching!
Added some clarification to the original title as it’s a bit clickbaity.
tl;dw: A YouTuber by the name of “TechLead” has openly admitted to using the DMCA process to file illegitimate takedown requests against people who use any footage of him while making exposé videos.
The way it works is by filing a DMCA request against the video, which then forces the creator to respond to the complaint or have the video permanently deleted. Because DMCA complaints are a legal process, responding to the complaint entails supplying a lot of your personal information, which TechLead has been accused of leaking in the past. This forces creators to either expose their personal information to a person who has already had credible doxxing allegations made against them, or have their video removed and their channel permanently stricken.
This process is not only a violation of YouTube’s ToS, but also several US laws; depending on what he does with the information he gets from the complaint response, it may fall under doxxing laws, but also knowingly submitting a frivolous DMCA request is considered perjury.
I don’t think Google would be the right target for this. YouTube’s DMCA process sucks because the DMCA, itself, sucks. The DMCA was conceived and written during a very early period of massive advancements in digital media production and was already outdated by the time it was put into place, and is absolutely archaic by today’s standards. YouTube’s process is basically just following the legal process as it’s written, so they don’t have much wiggle room to make improvements.
The DMCA needs to be rewritten to reflect modern technology and culture. I’d say it should be scrapped completely, but I know better than to dream too big.
Google or Alphabet or whatever are the sole agents who control the mechanism of reporting and enforcement of DMCA take down strikes within their own platform, they absolute are the primary responsible party from which creators should rely to ameliorate any issues within it. The reason they don’t, is the same reason Google doesn’t do much of any kind of customer service at all, cost of human interaction/headcount. Google is also pretty certain their creators who make their living from Google AdSense aren’t going to join in a class to sue the literal hand that feeds them, and so the abuse continues.