While a false DMCA takedown request can be fined and ultimately punished with jail time, most of the casework on this has clear malicious intent. These are parties that send out a notice just for articles or posts that are critical of said party. In these cases, you had a human on one side knowingly filing a single false DMCA takedown.
These are cases of programmers creating takedown bots with false positives. Do the programmers know that there will be false positives? Yes. Do they not make a good faith effort to prevent those false positives? Probably. Good luck proving this in court though.
A startup clearly has value even though it isn't a public company yet. Figuring out that value just has more steps.
IANAL, but MobileVet's situation may have been illegal, running afoul of minority shareholder rights, if the situation was accurately described. I imagine what happened was the CEO divided the company then paid a pittance for the portion without the debt to the portion with the debt. You can't do this, or well, other shareholders have legal recourse if you do. If you play enough shell games, you can somewhat hide what you did. That doesn't make it legal. If this is the case, the CEO just relied on the former employees not doing anything.
You are totally right with respect to the fact that it isn't aboveboard, but one of the biggest problems with our legal system is that you need money to protect your money. Other wise you'll go bankrupt while their attorneys file delay motions causing you to have to pay your attorney more and more.
I was the CTO of a company and built its entire infrastructure for 4% of the business. One day I came into work and the CEO(and majority owner) tells me to put aside everything and start work on a totally separate project. Oh, yeah and the company name is now different. The new project that I'm assigned is much more intensive in terms of volume and uptime requirements and came with no rewards.
So I start building the company in good faith with no real contract in place with the new company with the expectation that we would negotiate while I developed so as to not cause delays. This was a naive decision. Always get the contract first because as soon as real money starts flowing in everyone starts grabbing theirs. Prior friends or acquaintances also get preferential treatment which is how I ended up with the VP of marketing taking assignments from me and yet somehow being given 9x as much equity.
Eventually, after the system was stable and I felt confident in my work quality I asked to negotiate my contract. I was instead let go. The joke was on them though, I revoked their access to the repository and told them to show me the contract that says the software is theirs.
I think they decided that it was infeasible to continue using my system without fully knowing how it all worked. I intentionally made parts of it opaque (ie hidden in DLLs) until my contract was resolved. This is part of the reason why they let me go. I insisted that they purchase the rights to those opaque code blocks as part of my contract since they were in fact developed by me for a different project long before I joined the company. (It was a proprietary web server written in c++ designed for high-performance web services and since it was 1 of a kind it had a degree of security through obscurity and therefore I didn't want to release the code for free)
I guess a part of me knew things weren't right but I ignored the signs because I loved what I was doing and I was good at it.
Oh, also they tried to claim that they didn't withhold any taxes by not giving me a W2. So now I can't e-file my taxes but they mistakenly reported my income to the department of employment back in Q2 so I'm sure the IRS will be calling them.
Yea, I figured it was unethical at best, illegal at worst. I could have pursued it but chose not to. I should have at least talked with a couple other former employees to see if we could go after it together, but I didn't want to be blackballed from the startup space. This is a very well known individual... though their reputation isn't exactly stellar.
Maybe I should have, but it wasn't going to be life changing money either way and it would have required a lot of time, money and emotional energy.
Chromebooks have recovery mode. This is functionality in the firmware to reinstall the OS from a signed image on a USB drive or SD card (device obviously needs to have the SD card reader for this). Just look up instructions online for more details which will be better than anything I could write.
http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/consequences-of-filing-a-false-...
These are cases of programmers creating takedown bots with false positives. Do the programmers know that there will be false positives? Yes. Do they not make a good faith effort to prevent those false positives? Probably. Good luck proving this in court though.