zlacker

Heroku did this to me. A former employer was mad at me for daring to leave my job and made a malicious DMCA claim against my website. Heroku took it down with zero notice and treated me like a criminal when I called them to quit their bullshit

>>beeboo+(OP)
The power of false DMCA takedowns is just insane. You can get a copyright strike if your fucking keyboard makes too much noise.

>>beeboo+(OP)
If this was a business site and you had a service interruption you should absolutely sue them for damages.

>>fallin+l6
I think the DMCA protects them against liability for simply staying within the DMCA safe harbor. But if the claim itself was malicious, the DMCA does allow you to sue the person who made the claim.

>>beeboo+(OP)
That's outrageous. How did this pan out, mate?

>>jkaplo+zn
A cursory googling suggests DCMA takedowns would take 1 day, 72 hours, or up to 10 days on various websites/services. If the law does not mandate it be that fast, then Heroku and Hetzner's alleged actions of less than 2 hours notice would indeed be tortuous and interference with business. They are backbones for businesses, they are not twitter.

>>antifa+TK2
The DMCA requires that service providers who wish to benefit from the safe harbor preventions act on takedown notices "expeditiously". No precise quantitative minimum or maximum timeline is provided by legislation, but under 2 hours is certainly expeditious.

>>jkaplo+bE3
Under 2 hours is fine for a rando on Twitter, it's not OK to cut off a paying customer after doing zero due diligence.

>>antifa+lS4
Morally and in terms of business sense I agree with you, except I might argue that 2h is too short even for randos on Twitter (especially late on Sunday night) when the allegation is of trademark violation instead of something more urgent to resolve. Trademark matters by definition impact commerce alone, unlike if the Twitter account were compromising computers through malware or harassing or stalking humans.

But to the extent US law applies and the other required details of the DMCA safe harbor are attended to, I do think the DMCA prevents the service provider from monetary liability in this scenario. Of course, criticizing them for acting rashly remains 100% fair game.

(As to the question of whether US law applies: one example you were discussing, Hetzner, is based in Germany and not the US. But I can imagine circumstances where US law might sometimes apply to them anyway, and/or Germany might have similar laws. I'm not an expert on the international angle here, and I'm not a lawyer in any case.)

>>hammyh+3q1
They said I was not allowed to ever host the falsely claimed content on Heroku ever again. They said that I should pursue external avenues for disputing the claim. I took my site off Heroku and kept it offline because of the implicit threats of lawsuits from my previous employer. The site was my online portfolio of work and experience I was using for job hunting. However, my Heroku account was also used to host my profit-generating website/business, and instead of taking down only my portfolio site, they took down every site on my account. My account was completely disabled and I wasn't able to even remove the specific site and put my other ones back online, which is why I had to call them to re-enable it, but only after they treated me like shit and like I was murdering babies even though I told them the DMCA claim was malicious.

I did not mention the former employer or any of their projects/clients by their names and did not include any images of those projects that were protected by any copyright that they held. It was screenshots of the website functionality after I had removed all original styling and revamped it myself (on my own time on my own machine using only publicly available HTML/CSS) from the ground up to anonymize it. All branding and images were removed and replaced. These revamps were never publicly released and were only used to create screenshots to display their functionality. They claimed copyright ownership of the images that I took, on my own computer, that had zero resemblance to their own software except for the workflows that they had. These were all public facing sites and there was no internal/proprietary workflow information being shown. The work being displayed was 100% my own creation during my employment, and I was not claiming any credit for work that wasn't done by me.

I did not bother disputing the fraudulent DMCA claim because my former employer that did it was extremely litigious and loved lawsuits and loved making them as long and expensive as possible to punish the people they were trying to bully into submission. The owner would frequently boast in the (open concept) office about all his lawsuits and how he was forcing people to comply to his demands with the threat of ruining them financially with lawsuits.

It did have an impact on my ability to find new employment, but I found employment anyway. I just made a PDF version of my website (well laid out) and send that with my cover letter.

>>beeboo+jV7
Christ, that's absolutely awful. Sounds like leaving was a good decision though, I wouldn't want to work anywhere that toxic.