10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web

blog.wired.com

1 pointgeebee4 comments

Since I submitted this, I want to be clear I don't think it's a good article. I'm kind of stunned by this, hoping to believe it is satire...

Is this the conventional wisdom about the DMCA?

It's not satire. Some people believe that without the DMCA, every "user-generated content" site would have been slapped with a zillion-dollar lawsuit (or rather, the first few would have and nobody would have been willing to start new ones after that).

I've heard such negative things about the DMCA, I was surprised to see this article.

The general thrust of the anti-DMCA on the wired site seem to be that the DMCA was bad law, not because it was 100% bad, but because it went far beyond the needed provisions like you just described to push through a lot of restrictive provisions that hackers seem to dislike.

The DMCA has some completely unrelated things in it: notice-and-takedown: good, anti-circumvention: bad. There have been some more balanced articles published this week.

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