A Safeguard With No Teeth
On August 18, 2026, Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted summary judgment to Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC) against Channel 781 News, a YouTube-based citizen-journalism outlet that had sued under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) — the DMCA provision meant to punish copyright holders who knowingly misrepresent infringement in a takedown notice (Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog). The ruling is a case study in how a statute written to deter bad-faith takedowns has been narrowed into something closer to a dead letter.
What Actually Happened
Channel 781 posted short, captioned excerpts of Waltham City Council meetings, clipped from full recordings WCAC produces for the municipal public-access channel. In September 2023, WCAC sent YouTube three notices targeting fifteen of Channel 781's videos; YouTube complied and temporarily deactivated the channel's account entirely. Channel 781 sued, arguing WCAC never seriously considered that clipping government meeting footage for news commentary was fair use — and that sending takedowns anyway was a knowing misrepresentation under § 512(f) (Goldman blog).
The court didn't disagree that Channel 781 had a strong fair-use case. It found that WCAC's representative reviewed some educational material on fair use, decided a few clips might qualify while others didn't, and only targeted the ones he'd judged unprotected. Applying the subjective "Rossi standard" from Ninth Circuit precedent, Judge Saris held that § 512(f) asks only whether the sender actually believed the material infringed — not whether that belief withstood scrutiny. As she put it, the statute does not require "a perfect or even reasonable fair use analysis," and while the representative's "fair use analysis may have been deficient, he did not intentionally fail to consider the possibility" that the clips were protected. EFF, representing Channel 781, says it will appeal to the First Circuit (EFF Deeplinks, Sept. 3, 2026).
The Case for the Subjective Standard
There's a real argument for keeping the bar low. Congress built § 512's notice-and-takedown system to let copyright holders get infringing material off platforms fast, without first litigating fair use — a fact-intensive, four-factor inquiry that even courts routinely get wrong on the merits. If every takedown sender faced liability whenever a judge later disagreed with their fair-use judgment, rightsholders — especially small ones, like a municipal access channel — would face a genuine chilling effect on using the notice system at all, or would need to lawyer up before sending routine notices. A subjective standard also matches the statutory text: § 512(f) reaches someone who "knowingly materially misrepresents" infringement, and knowledge is inherently about the sender's own state of mind, not an objective legal correctness test (17 U.S.C. § 512(f), Cornell Legal Information Institute).
Why That Argument Doesn't Survive These Facts
But Rossi's subjective test was designed for cases where the sender's belief, however wrong, was at least a real belief formed through some process. Here, the court itself found the underlying analysis inadequate — and the remedy for the injured party was still nothing. That's the structural problem: § 512(f) is the only deterrent against notice senders who don't bother getting fair use right, because takedown targets have no other statutory remedy once their content and, in Channel 781's case, their entire channel disappear. YouTube's decision to deactivate the whole account over three notices — not just remove fifteen videos — is exactly the collateral damage § 512(f) was supposed to discourage senders from risking.
When a standard this permissive is paired with a platform response this severe, the practical result is that anyone can silence a critic's channel by sending a notice, watch a court agree the fair-use call was probably wrong, and face zero consequences anyway. That asymmetry falls hardest on exactly the speakers § 512(f) should protect: citizen journalists and small outlets without the resources to litigate a countersuit, let alone appeal it.
What Comes Next
EFF's appeal to the First Circuit will test whether "deficient" fair-use analysis can coexist with genuine subjective good faith, or whether courts need a standard that at least requires senders to meaningfully engage with obvious fair-use facts — like posting brief clips of a government meeting for news commentary — before invoking DMCA takedown power. Until an appellate court revisits Rossi's application to facts this stark, § 512(f) will keep functioning as a check that copyright holders can satisfy by doing the bare minimum, or less.