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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

Lets remember that the DMCA is what allows providers like youtube to host content without being liable to the copyright infringement of its users. The takedown provision sucks, but its an essential law for the open internet to even exist.

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The legal requirement to act instantly on the automatic presumption of the claimants being both right and acting in good faith with no evidence required isn't required to avoid liability. They could have required some higher standard of proof of ownership and as long as they followed the process, YouTube would have the same protection.

The system is specifically designed to be gamed by claimants.

It works the other way: it let's a site post user content without the user having to prove legal clearance for the content. Without this, there would be no sites allowing users to post nearly anything. In exchange for this freedom, the sites have to agree to some resolution format for when a copyright complaint is triggered.

So the system is not designed to be gamed by claimants. It's designed to give legal protections to hosts of sites. But this is most definitely a carveout to protect sites. Without the law no one would face to liability of hosting user generated content.

The DMCA was passed in 1998.

You do realize we had a fully functioning internet filled with user-generated content before 1998, right?

Yet not one of the biggest sites with user content was formed before the DMCA. Why didn't any of those fully functioning internet user sites dominate? Certainly other, non-user content sites from then were big.

Its almost as if providing safe harbor allowed such sites to grow......

With as much evidence, one can say that it's almost as if the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 allowed it.

Geocities, say, was huge before the DMCA and died after it.

Geocities had ~1.8M users in Dec 1997. They were often sued for copyright (e.g., here[1]) infringement since then providers were liable. This made it harder for them to raise money, since as copyright holders became more saavy about what companies were doing on the internet, they were increasingly targeting them.

After DMCA when those suits were gone, they raised $$$, became much more valuable, grew, and soon got bought by Yahoo. They went from the 5th most visited to 3rd, even with much more competition. They grew the user base.

The same thing happened to Tripod and Angelfire from that time.

Instead of trying to cherry pick one example, look at all companies before and after. That is the accurate way to see what happened. If you think the safe harbor content protection did not and does not matter, look how hard current companies are pushing to keep Congress from removing such laws.

[1] https://washingtontechnology.com/1996/11/publishers-push-pir...

None of that automatically means a safe harbor provision can only exist if claimants are able to make obviously bogus claims without redress, though, which is what the original point was before or was derailed into a false dichotomy of having any safe harbor vs not. Either the DMCA is defective in that regard, or it's a deliberate feature. Either way, it's open for abuse.

You don't know your history. The DMCA was passed in 1998 with the express purpose of saving that fully functioning internet, as BBS systems and ISPs were being held liable for vicarious copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement, making the business of operating an ISP legally and financially untenable. There was a realistic danger that no business would continue operating a public ISP under the existing legal framework after notable cases like Playboy Enterprises Inc v Frena. ISPs lobbied legislators in the 104th Congress (1995-96) for legislation that would preserve the open internet by shielding them from that liability for users' actions, and this lobbying directly resulted in the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (aka Safe Harbor) getting written into the DMCA.

> The DMCA was passed in 1998 with the express purpose of saving that fully functioning internet

Given this blatantly incorrect reframing of the DMCA as anything other than being intended to serve the copyright lobby’s interests, it’s hard to believe you’re arguing in good faith.

It's not necessarily true that a system that requires a claimant to demonstrate ownership also requires a user to pre-emptively prove it.

You could have a law that provides a safe harbor provision but also requires claims to be honest and backed-up to "some" level of confidence.

The law as it stands does appear to have the possibility of the penalty of perjury for intentional misuse, but, apparently, a comma means that apparently this is actually only applicable to a small part of the claim[1], and as far as I know has never done so. I do not know if this is because the law doesn't make definitions clear enough to demonstrate bad-faith in court (including that comma), or the legal system in general simply doesn't care to enforce the law.

[1]: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...

Considering the open internet existed before DMCA did, I suspect “essential” is an exaggeration.

Internet wasn't that fast, consumers weren't informed, legislators weren't informed.

The internet was more than fast enough for copyright infringement. Copywritten books, images, and even music were commonly shared online before the DMCA was passed.

The criteria was existence. It existed.

Could the internet exist in a way that makes the RIAA/MPAA/etc happy without DMCA? Maybe not. But there’s no reason to assume their happiness is a requirement, or even desirable.

> Lets remember that the DMCA is what allows providers like youtube to host content without being liable to the copyright infringement of its users.

It arguably doesn’t actually allow sites very specifically like Youtube to do that, which is why YouTube has a separate and more draconian arrangement with major rights holders, created in response to previous litigation and litigation threats, and is also currently being sued by a variety of rights holders in a suit which hasn’t been easily been barred by the DMCA safe harbor.

I thought the reason was section 230 not dmca.

Section 230 doesn't apply to copyright infringement claims (https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...). Immunity from copyright infringement claims relies on the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.

false dilemmas are seen to intentionally omit the possibility of additional options and approaches

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