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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

Honestly though, it's not "fuck Google," it's "fuck Congress."

Google needs to err on the side of caution with DMCA because it's the immediate response to the requests that provides the safe harbor to Google under the law.

You had Disney (et al) lobbying like crazy decades ago to get the most insane laws passed when it came to digital IP.

Now we live in a world where those lobbying efforts were successful, which of course sucks for everyone that didn't have millions of dollars to spend on lobbying their interests and far outnumber those that did.

Minority rule through corruption causing a pseudo-oligarchy is sucking more and more every day, and DMCA takedowns are simply a small part of that larger sucking.

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Even before congress there is a lot of wiggle room for Google to step in. Why is this possible? : “The immediate challenge for Bungie was that the company either didn’t know or couldn’t prove the identity of the culprit before filing the lawsuit.”

The takedown notice should come with a verifiable address. Google has a business directory for crying out loud! Just make it mandatory you have a business listing account.

Honestly though, it's not "fuck Congress", it's "fuck the electorate".

One of the great ironies about the rise of corporate fascism in the US is that the democracy does function on a technical level. If enough people worked together to do the right things, ballots could be cast and there is no dictator to prevent the will of the people from being heard.

Of course, that does not happen. The people have proven ineffective at self-governance.

At this point I'm wondering if we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.

That seems better to me than the current system of an easily brainwashed public electing whoever has the best disinformation campaign.

Do you think we'd have all these crazy IP laws if the big IP holders and big tech companies had to get in a room together and actually figure out what the law should be?

> we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.

They might at least make the trains run on time.

We might have trains!

All the fascist stuff is pretty bad -- nationalism, strongman leaders, isolating an "other" with violence, grifters selling out the people's interests to corporations -- I'm not down with any of that.

But maybe we could have some kind of system where corporations are forced to vote on governance that applies to all other corporations for the collective good of capitalist progress?

There needs to be some kind of unified governing principle to make everyone's lives better.

We can't go on with BIG_CO hiring lobbying firms to most efficiently snake their legislation through the system unchecked.

In my thought experiment here, most corporations would want to enact policy responsibly for the public good. Cooperation between corporations would happen, but the default position would be for more happy consumers.

So far we've tried letting representative democracy work out hard issues and that hasn't gone well. We've also tried deferring governance entirely to the courts with poor results.

I'm open to suggestions.

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