I received a DMCA notice

it hard drive comic

No not lately, but a long time ago.

In case you don’t know a DMCA is a notice saying that you are posting illegal content and that you need to take it down or bad scary things will happen. I couldn’t believe it when I received it and what they claimed was a problem.

I care about copyright. The notice said that a video that I had posted was a private movie that I didn’t have the right to post. I looked at the movie and page again and it was a documentary about poverty that was in the public domain. I didn’t steal it, I wasn’t hosting it, only sharing a link to the original publically accessible file on Vimeo. It said was free to share and for a minute I thought someone was joking with me. I immediately took the page down because I was poor and couldn’t afford a legal fight.

I looked up the details of the company that sent it to me, and I sent a carefully worded email to the company with the original email as an attachment. I didn’t expect to hear a response so quickly.

The next day I got a response from the president of that company saying that they had made a mistake, and an AI (this was long ago like a decade) had automatically sent that email. He offered me $100 for the trouble which I turned down, but he insisted so I accepted. I considered the matter closed.

Why am I sharing this? Some people are accused of crimes and are innocent. AI needs to always get a third party to verify its findings before it starts sending out legal consequences.

This is the only time I have had this problem and the only time I ever will.

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