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Comment by bradleyland | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone ever think we'd see the day where we were using DMCA as an example of the preferrable alternative?

The DMCA was a whole bundle of legislation, and some of its effects were highly desirable -- in particular the safe harbor provisions. Without those[1] sites like youtube could never have existed.

You can read about the various portions of it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

Title I includes the anti-circumvention measures, which is what everyone loves to hate, but the act as a whole deals with a lot of other stuff. (Title V deals with copyright and boat hull designs, for instance!)

[1]Or something stronger, tis not like it was perfect!

Although some aspects of DMCA aren't bad, I believe this is also the Overton Window[1] in action. I wonder if all this outrage of SOPA might actually allow the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA) to pass "as a compromise".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Yes, it's strange isn't it? But since the big media copyright lads want to go further than the DMCA, that would imply it was OK. And the USA has the DMCA now, how has the last 10 years been for internet freedom? Not too bad, so it probably wasn't that bad.

How much freer would the Internet have been if the DMCA had not been passed? Think of all the hours YouTube alone spends in policing itself and handling copyright takedown notices and imagine those hours spent improving YouTube or coming up with new video sharing services.

The current copyright regime is tolerable. Tolerable and good are worlds apart.

YouTube would not exist today without the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA. It would have been sued out of existence years ago.

The DMCA did not create copyright law, it modified it, and pre-DMCA, YouTube would have had no protections.

And without a fair use exception to copyright, search engines like Google could not show matching web site excerpts in their results.

Imagine search engine results that consisted only of URL's.

Yes, but I'm a pessimist. Do I win anything? :(

Big media has scary pull in D.C.

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