Why not some sort of suspension system?

Request take down of something you don't own -> you can't invoke DMCA for a month. That should be a deterrent.

They can't outright refuse to handle DMCA requests, but they can stop automated handling of such requests. If I understand correctly, big content holders get special tools they can use to remove infringing content from some Google services (YouTube at least; not sure about search results). If they abuse that special access, Google can take away these privileges and double check everything manually. That takes a lot of time, and means that the infringing content will remain accessible for a longer time.

I doubt that is legal. That (or something along these lines) would be a good improvement to DMCA process in general, but doubtfully something that Google can decide to do.

How about "request takedown of something you do not own and all your takedown requests will be hand-checked for a month" which will put a reasonable and significant delay into processing. The law doesn't mandate immediate automatic action.

or maybe charging, if such a request is sent they have to pay for the employee time wasted on that

The DCMA takedown process is broken, the burden is on services to proved their innocence and there are little or no consequences for bogus takedowns

More telling is that they requested that their own website be removed. To me that should be the headline.

That was the headline. Half a year ago. When it happened.

Are you asking them to use the wrong headlines for articles, or are you asking them to republish things every couple months?

I'm not asking for anything. The article tries to make the case that HBO, et. al., are trying to take down open source software. Seems to me that they're not even error-checking what they're asking for, as is made evident by the request to delist their own site.

>The article tries to make the case that HBO, et. al., are trying to take down open source software.

I see an article talking about very sloppy practices and flaws in the DMCA. I don't see the case you're talking about at all in the article. I'm confused.

"It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but their targeting of open source software is something new."

first line.

Which it goes on to explain that they did target it by mistake because of their horrible scattershot abuse of the DMCA.

I don't know, I guess I just understood it differently. I don't see an article arguing that this was intentional. Mikestew does, I guess?

The takedown request outlined in the article contains a reference to VLC as distributed by a popular torrent tracker, and not VLC itself. While this is still overstepping the boundaries of copyright, it is disingenuous to say that HBO asked Google to take down VLC.

How is it possible that nobody is ever held accountable for such egregious mistakes?

"VLC doesn't pirate movies - People pirate movies"