Recently there was increased discussion about DMCA takedown requests being used in bad faith between competitors on Shopify. I can confirm that the volume of these has very much increased recently. Let me give you some examples of what we are doing about it. Our goal is to work within the DMCA’s framework and make a system in which the right things happen quickly. We want to give merchants the maximum time to respond with the minimum disruption. We also need legitimate claims to resolve in favor of the claimants quickly. The first thing we did recently is to productize this properly. We shipped a feature to manage these cases directly in the Shopify admin to make it a lot more obvious. Before that a lot was managed through form emails. This process is now much simpler and faster. The second thing we did is to make the identity system more robust so that we know more about the claims filed. We consider the claimants previous cases in order to decide what decisions to take. Similarly we consider documentation from previous cases that merchants had to deal with more strongly to make accurate decisions when repeat claims are received against products. If we detect bad faith claims from accounts we take action. We recently filed multiple lawsuits against claimants in court. This matches our aggressive stance when we see frivolous or bad faith patent action in which we had a lot of success invalidating bad patents. The end result of this is that we catch spammy or frivolous claims at much higher frequency already. We also make responding to cases much easier and this can be managed directly from the admin now and is less work for the merchants. Lots of additional improvements coming- but what I can guarantee you is that that Shopify will be the worst platform on which to make fraudulent DMCA claims on. “Be merchant obsessed” is a core value here, and we reflect that better in this area.
@tobi This is great news and a big step forward. Well done 👏
@tobi Thank you for doing this! Too many people have weaponized DMCA notices, reporting algorithms, etc. These abuses have to be stopped.
@tobi I refer you to Ticket 44375356 in Shopify's rotten chat non-support system.
Merchant Obsessed! I love that. Also, love to see the improvements for developers and builders. You are allowing developers and app owners to be merchant-obsessed by creating these processes and showing that you're listening to real-time concerns. Great work, and thank you for your continued acceleration, moving fast, and making things!
@tobi Productized it! ♥️ The only loser here are DMCA abusers.
@tobi Being merchant obsessed is why we build with Shopify 💚