The part of the DMCA that lets sites and ISPs host/transmit user uploads without being sued on a daily basis is pretty nice.
IMHO being thankful for "safe harbor" seems more like a post-rationalization than anything else. If poor definitions meant common carriers weren't actually exempt, then that could have been resolved with straightforward clarification instead of an unnecessary "compromise".
...in much the same way as Grokster and Napster, DMCA notwithstanding.
"Frena" wasn't necessarily a correct decision, especially given the extreme power imbalance between parties. Would the same decision be reached if the defendant had been a well capitalized business? Similarly, the modern inverse of an individual file sharer trying to hide behind the DMCA likely wouldn't fly.
The decision certainly goes against what one would expect from general legal principles, but I suppose that's inevitable in the face of cancer like intent-free criminality. The same reasoning would have indicted him for a cd-r tossed onto his lawn.
Today, the purpose is lost, and the use is exploitative.
Enforcement is just utterly at odds with physics and at this point, the idea of "owning" control of bits in someone else's possession is incompatible with a free society.
"The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads."
At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.
All you need at that point is one copyright holder who believes – right or wrong – that you are in sufficiently zealous about protecting their content and, poof, lawsuit. This goes treble if you have money and the actual infringer is likely to be a broke college student in another country.
Now contrast this to many other people, including the people in favor of stronger IP law, who want the government to enact their views into law.
Now what's really bad is that Stallman is the less pragmatic and realistic of these two camps, because he wants regular people to "see the light" and voluntarily subscribe to his views, which obviously isn't happening (he's been at this for 3 decades now, and while Free software has made traction for sure (e.g. Linux kernel in most smartphones and many other devices), users seem to have less real freedom than ever thanks to locked bootloaders, app stores, etc.). By contrast, the jerks who want to force more DMCA-style silliness and even lengthier (effectively perpetual) copyright terms are more realistic because their approach actually works: we have or are getting all these bad laws.
This somehow reminds me of the quote by Shaw about all progress depending on the unreasonable man.
Those bastards! They stole all of our hard work to make some money! Now there are two possible scenarios. It will fail because they can't compete with GIMP which can be obtained at a $0 pricetag and respects their freedom. The user can have their cake and eat it too!
That's a pretty tough nut to crack but what if people actually end up buying the software? The only explanation would be that the fork presents added value that is worth paying money for!
In both scenarios the end user cannot lose. They either get higher quality software that suits their needs or software for free that respects their freedom.
I guess I can't fault the authors for failing to anticipate petty YouTube rivalries back in 1998, but it seems like the sole imagined use case was a respected corporation going after a pseudonymous warez jockey.
What a funny concept you created.
Here's a good intro:
https://www.copyrightalliance.org/2012/03/in-plain-english-a...
The law is far from ideal but a large part of the problem is the penalties for false claims are rarely enforced so there's been little corrective force against the companies which robo-spam claims. Additionally, companies like YouTube have invented additional processes which are often Kafkaesque and, since they're just arbitrary business processes, aren't subject to the normal legal process.
edit: abuse as in fraudulent take down requests