How often you hear about people being prosecuted for falsely flagging content as offensive online? How often you hear about prosecutions about false copyright infringement notifications? The latter happens only very rarely in cases of blatant abuse, usually coupled with massive fraud and other crimes (never happens to automatic systems big IP holders use, they just write it off as innocent error in 100% of the cases), the former happens never.
That happens under the DMCA, prosecution under existing EU law and the new art11 and art13 wouldn't change much. Notice&Takedown does allow me to review any requests unlike the DMCA and Art13 requires human review in case of disputes. To my knowledge I can ignore entities that send me lots of useless Notices about third party content without legal consequence, I could even get a restraining order.
> the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business
This all sounds quite lucrative for the lawyers and notaries. It remains disruptive, unsettling and expensive, not to mention unnecessary, for everyone else. Depending on which of the EU’s 28 member states’ courts one finds oneself dragged into, what you’re proposing could be years of distraction.
>It remains disruptive, unsettling and expensive, not to mention unnecessary
Nobody will do this, no sane legal department signs this off or approves of such behavior. Doing otherwise is a great way to incinerate their legal licenses. There are fines for behavior like that.
The best outcome for the suing party of such a scenario is a 5 minute court room appearance in which the judge slaps you with a restraining order and closes the case.
This has literally never been an escalating problem in european courtrooms to my experience because judges don't like that behavior and laws exist to prevent it.
In theory, there are. In practice, the abuse of both copyright and offensive content notifications is rampant and almost never punished. You have to get to real hardcore crime on massive scale before judicial system starts noticing, and even then it can take years and a lot of effort to get it to do anything. In most cases, such abuse is completely unpunished or gets slap on the wrist.
Because the only system that sites implement is the DMCA, which is largely compatible with Notice&Takedown in the EU but N&T has much softer requirements and Art13 now requires human review and a founded response from the copyright holder.
> the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business by having you get into court for complaints without legal grounds.
Dubious. The other lawyer will claim they believed you had read the complaint and therefore that they were acting in good faith, and will see no punishment at all.
Burden of proof goes the other way here. This is why (one of the reasons) bogus DMCA complaints are never prosecuted. You need to prove that they believed you hadn't read the complaint and knowingly went after you anyway. We only persecute people for using the legal system maliciously, not accidentally incorrectly.
Assuming you can even find another party. What would stop anyone from creating a bunch of accounts under TOR and reporting thousands of links per hour? Good luck dealing with that.
Then I'll just ignore reports from Tor-based email domains? I don't think my email provider even accepts .onion for emails.
Or I just ban Tor users from creating reports, I'm not forced to enable abuse, if they have an actual complaint they can use their real internet connection. End of story.
If there is only one possible outcome, then that outcome should be clearly encoded in the law. The whole purpose of the court system is to provide interpretation when a law is vague - intentionally or not.
Remember that the law in europe tends to not function like the american law, including how courts work. The law is almost always vague and courts will have to interpret it.
Right - and that's what would drive US based companies just to shut down access to EU versus trying to comply. The uncertainty may not be worth it for small companies just trying to gauge demand.
They don't have to, they can simply wait a sufficient amount of time, usually a workday before they can enact further measures such as a C&D, which usually requires atleast 3 days before it can be considered received, after which you can take it to court.
If you are on holiday at that time, the court will in almost all cases instruct the other party to wait until you return at which point you can respond to the C&D.
