Will filing a DCMA takedown mean that the jackass behind the theft will see my legal name and contact info?
I'm not a lawyer so I can't say for sure, but I think it's likely.
For starters, the takedown notice will go to the company so they'll definitely see your details.
nyuuzyou (the person claiming ownership of the dataset into which they've processed all our unlocked works on AO3) has already clearly indicated that they believe they're in the right, and they're willing to fight against the takedown notices - they filed a counter notice to say as much right after OTW filed the first takedown notice with huggingface (the website to which nyuuzyou uploaded the dataset).
They also tried to upload the dataset to two other websites (it's thankfully now been removed).
Given that, it's possible (though I can't judge how likely) that these takedown notices might end up in a court of law somewhere, and in such a case nyuuzyou will definitely have access to them - and all of our IRL names.
This is one of the hazards of DMCA takedown notices, leaving fanwork creators to choose between protecting our creations or connecting our IRL and fannish identities at the risk of doxing. It is also why I've been careful not to say that we must all file takedown notices, in fact I think that anyone who is in a vulnerable situation most emphatically MUST NOT.
Let me be clear.
DO NOT DO THIS IF IT WILL HURT YOU.
Instead, leave that up to fans like myself who have less to lose and are willing to take that risk.
Right now, what we are doing is engaging in both a legal fight but also something of a public awareness campaign.
The huggingface site that is currently hosting this dataset is actually one facet of Hugging Face, Inc. a well known French-American company based in New York City that works in the machine learning space. I can't imagine that they want to be known as bad faith actors who host databases full of stolen material. They are a private company right now, but if their founders ever want to go public (and make a lot of money selling their shares) they would prefer not to be the subject of bad press. I make a note that they might already be preparing for an IPO since their stocks seem to be available for purchase on the NASDAQ private market and they raised $235 million in their series D funding round. This is a company that is potentially valued at $4.5 billion - they have bigger fish to fry than a bunch of members of the public conducting the legal equivalent of a DDoS on them.
Because that's effectively what we're doing - we are snowing them under with takedown notices that have to be individually replied to and dealt with. We are trying to convince huggingface that deleting the dataset nyuuzyou uploaded is the easier and less problematic option than legally defending nyuuzyou's right to post it.
The other thing that we're doing is making a public anti-AI stand.
We are telling the LLM / Gen AI community that AO3 is not the soft target it might look like - they might be able to crawl the site against site rules and community standards but if they post their datasets publicly for street cred (and that's exactly what nyuuzyou is doing) then we will act to protect ourselves.
The status of fanwork as a legally valid creative pursuit - to be protected and cherished like any other - is a long campaign, and one that the OTW was founded on. When @astolat first proposed AO3, it was the next step in a fight that had been ongoing for years.
I'd been a fan for over a decade before AO3 was founded and I personally don't intend to see it fall to this new wave of assaults.
Though it is interesting to be on this end of a takedown notice for once in my life! 🤣