As someone receiving a notice you have no idea if it's legitimate or from a AOL account someone made 15 minutes ago, the threat of it being perjury doesn't work when there's no authentication whatsoever of who sent it. Unless the DMCA is signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox the receiver has no choice but to assume it's legitimate.
You're conflating two things: a DMCA counter-notice by an alleged infringer, and the refusal of an intermediary to honor a DMCA takedown notice. Your statement is a mixture of claims that are true about one or the other of those separate things.
DMCA counter-notice:
* Sent by an alleged infringer (in this case, that would be the artist) to an intermediary (in this case, TeePublic) asserting that a takedown notice the intermediary received was invalid.
* Requires the alleged infringer to provide information about themself ("authentically dox").
* Can enable the intermediary to restore access to the material without losing their liability shield.
* Doesn't affect the alleged infringer's copyright infringement liability in any direction (though as with takedown notices, there's the potential for perjury). If the alleged infringer committed copyright infringement, they were already liable for it, and remain so; if they didn't, then they never were liable and still aren't.
Intermediary refusal:
* Simply a lack of action on a takedown notice by the intermediary to whom it was sent.
* Doesn't require anyone to dox themselves, or to do anything in particular. The intermediary can throw the takedown notice in the garbage and go about their day.
* Removes the intermediary's liability shield; the intermediary can potentially be liable for infringement, when they would otherwise would have been immune.
Provider has to take it down. The vendor making the shirt can simply file a dmca counterclaim (basically stating that the dmca claim is invalid)
Then the provider puts the content back up and the courts decide.
I don't believe that's true. I think they must make the material available after a proper counter-notification, or they lose their liability shield as per the exception here. IANAL, just reading the text of the law at face value.
(g) REPLACEMENT OF REMOVED OR DISABLED MATERIAL AND
LIMITATION ON OTHER LIABILITY.—
(1) NO LIABILITY FOR TAKING DOWN GENERALLY.—Subject
to paragraph (2), a service provider shall not be liable to any
person for any claim based on the service provider’s good faith
disabling of access to, or removal of, material or activity claimed
to be infringing or based on facts or circumstances from which
infringing activity is apparent, regardless of whether the material or activity is ultimately determined to be infringing.
(2) EXCEPTION.—Paragraph (1) shall not apply with
respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber
of the service provider on a system or network controlled or
operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or
to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant
to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider—
(A) takes reasonable steps promptly to notify the
subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to the
material;
Applicability.
PUBLIC LAW 105–304—OCT. 28, 1998 112 STAT. 2883
(B) upon receipt of a counter notification described
in paragraph (3), promptly provides the person who provided the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) with a
copy of the counter notification, and informs that person
that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling
access to it in 10 business days; and
(C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14,
business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless
its designated agent first receives notice from the person
who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C)
that such person has filed an action seeking a court order
to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system
or network.
They lose their liability shield for the act of taking the content down, but that liability shield is of limited value to begin with because they'd typically be well within their rights to take any content down for any reason (or no reason).
I’m not entirely sure why it matters that silos of messaging data exist, if it’s encrypted like Signal and WhatsApp the centralized model is far superior to an arbitrary and unknown number of parties receiving metadata about messaging. It might have been an easier case to make if Matrix wasn’t an uphill battle in terms of usability and performance.
Signal and WhatsApp only address the personal messaging usecase, whereas the letter is also talking about wider chat services like Teams.
More to the point, even with e2ee, there is still communication metadata that is leaving your network for a third-party service. In a defense context, you would almost certainly prefer that the data does not leave your network unnecessarily.
The reason for the initial development of "the internet" as we know it, basically TCP/IP, was know as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.
The idea was to build a network that --unlike pre-existing networks-- did not need centralization. The goal was to make the network resilient to parts not working, with obvious military benefits.
The same can be said for messaging systems. Centralization makes it easy to take the whole service out.
> It might have been an easier case to make if Matrix wasn’t an uphill battle in terms of usability and performance.
I expect TCP/IP to have been an uphill battle as well. But now we take it for granted. This likely will also happen to Matrix if it is used everywhere.
Now I hope the DoD makes some massive donations to Matrix. Money makes uphill battles more likely to have a good ending.
This is nothing to do with resilience in the face of things being destroyed in a war. That's what I'm saying: it's not the same sort of centralisation.
> In the comparison to TCP/IP this is quite similar. You can add to the network without needing approval of a central institution.
I can join WhatsApp without approval as well. But also - how like that is TCP/IP? All IP addresses have to be agreed and assigned, do they not?
But Matrix works fine if a hospital disconnects itself from the internet because of some DDoS or hacking attack. WhatsApp doesn't, because you can't host it on-prem. I am not sure about if governments have that use case, but we certainly have seen it in hospitals. (And even then, there are benefits of having patient data only on specific servers in specific environments, even if they are encrypted, because if you use WhatsApp to talk to your doctor, Meta will know about that. And I am pretty sure governments can appreciate such features as well.)
Obligatory reminder that the whole "Internet routes around censorship" like it routes around glassed data centres during nuclear war, etc. applies to layers 3-4 of ISO/OSI model. The problematic centralization of the Internet happens at layer 7.
> I’m not entirely sure why it matters that silos of messaging data exist
It doesn't matter until one day, something happens that does make it matter.
Imagine if a centralised model was used and a foreign state managed to sever connections to the internet that was used by that country/central server. It's more resilient to be able to route messages even if the network is under attack. This kind of thinking is behind the original design of the internet although we now seem to have centralised large portions of functionality.
The real principles have always been a US dominated and controlled internet. The only ones who ever understood that and didn't sign up to Pax Americana are the Chinese who are building their own internet.
It needs server side support, but the OS just supports it out of the box. On linux enabling multi path is I believe just a configuration flag and then it just works.
and the other comments on lack of MPTCP support from middleboxes, my guess is even for Apple first party apps, out in the wild, might not see much MPTCP use?
Yes, absolutely. Part of the reason I’m very happy that people around me tend to use iPhones is that I have some base level confidence in what they’re installing. I don’t trust nearly anyone to make good decisions about what applications they are installing, given how much information cellphones have it’s untenable to have them installing random garbage because some website said so.
In Bitcoin public keys are hashed when publicly exposed, in the optimal case the ECDSA public keys are visible for only a period of a few minutes between broadcast of a transaction, and it being confirmed.
It is not an incompatible change to add new signature methods, a conservative implementation would have the public key commit to both an ecdsa key, and a quantum safe signature type, and use the committed ECDSA signature until such a time as it is no longer safe. This would result in no gain in signature size today, but allows for instant upgrades in place in the future with no additional transactions required.
