The "under penalty of perjury" phrase modifies the second clause, not the first. In other words, it's not perjury if the information in the notice is inaccurate -- it's perjury if you falsely claim you are authorized to act on behalf of the grieving party.
So I'm thinking if I want to boost my rankings, all I have to do is file a DMCA notice on my competitor's sites?
Certainly someone has to be doing this, somewhere. At worst, sneak your target URLs into a long list of torrents. How much is bumping off a few competing search results worth?
I wonder how much due diligence Google puts into verifying DMCA notices beforehand. And if you wanted to do it "legit" you could create some works with search terms you wanna censor. So like, "Hotel Reservations in X", a photograph of a Ramada Inn. Then get these takedown firms to go spam notices like Wicked did here, and collateral damage ends up removing some of your competitors.
The DMCA is deliberately designed to discourage recipients of takedown notices for doing any verification beyond that the notices ate in the correct form before complying, since the safe harbor only applies when a proper (in form) notice is complied with and there is expressly no liability that can attach for complying with a formally correct notice that is substantively incorrect.
So I'd assume any due diligence is directed at formal correctness rather than substance as any other approach would have added cost to implement while increasing legal risk.
Yeah, which means people have to check searches for their result, then the DMCA notice, then file counterclaim and wait for Google to reinstate it. Seems like a pretty nifty blackhat tactic, especially if timed right.
Well, not quite, at least by my reading. It says specifically:
"that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
In other words they are acting on behalf of the owner of the owners of the content being infringed (the content located at the URLs).
If the content at the URLs is NOT owned by Wicked, than they are claiming to represent the owner of the content at those locations, when they are in fact not.
> If the content at the URLs is NOT owned by Wicked, than they are claiming to represent the owner of the content at those locations, when they are in fact not.
No, there are two separate claims:
1) that the person represents the owner of a particular copyrighted work, and
2) that particular hosted content violates the copyright on the particular copyrighted work.
Only the first of those is under penalty of perjury. If the particular identified copyrighted work is owned by the party represented, then even if the particular identified hosted content doesn't violate the copyright of the identified work, there is no perjury issue (there may be a knowing false claim of infringement issue, but that requires proving that the person sending the notice knew that the identified hosted content did not infringe.)
