Take It Down Act: A Flawed Attempt to Protect Victims That'll Lead to Censorship | Hacker News Reader

Take It Down Act: A Flawed Attempt to Protect Victims That'll Lead to Censorship

eff.org

119 pointsarchagon38 comments

Everything you love about the DMCA, in a brand new flavor and easier to abuse against free speech.

There's no penalty for crazy/spam requests, but you're destroyed if you ever miss one.

Can’t you just host a server outside of US jurisdiction?

Sure, whatever you say, Mr. Noriega.

I usually don’t get outraged at bills that are not laws yet, but… The Congress webpage says it has already passed the Senate and has 20 cosponsors, roughly even from each party.

It passed in the last Senate with a voice vote, which means it had overwhelming support.

Thankfully, it being in the previous Senate means that the bill has to start over. Hopefully, the increased scrutiny will lead to amendments or killing the bill.

With Trump essentially admitting that he intends to abuse it, I have a bad feeling that it’ll pass with a party line vote.

He admitted that he intends to abuse this bill? Got a link? I missed that one.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/trump-calls-congress-p...

Oh I see so we’re just interpreting what he says ridiculously again. I figured after this many years we would be past that.

And, apparently, we’re still doing the deliberately obtuse act. Nothing ever changes.

The Take It Down Act isn't a law, it's a weapon

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43293573

they will keep pushing until encryption has been made illegal.

I’ve heard this argument and seen the pearl clutching about every Internet bill that has ever been considered. They whip Internet activists into a frenzy. None of it has borne out once the bills have become law. It’s Chicken Little every time.

You’re absolutely incorrect. Would you like to know the impacts of the previous bills that passed? You probably wouldn’t know.

The CDA, COPPA, DMCA, GDPR and copyright directives were all predicted (hysterically) to destroy the Internet. Oops, it still exists.

Questionable.

Low effort responses are disregardable.

Those laws have re-shaped the entire internet.

Laws are designed to have an effect, that is their purpose. However, the changes did not live up to the hysteria. Most of the doomsday predictions were so embarrassing in retrospect that the original articles have since been taken down.

The GDPR has had huge and shitty impact on the entire internet. It's night and day with cookie banners on every website. DMCA has pros and cons. But it's clear the lack of real penalties for bogus copyright notifications leads to abuse.

The cookie banners aren’t mandated by the GDPR, they are malicious sites’ response to the GDPR.

They were/are and entirely predictable response.

The broader issue with GDPR is the benefit it gives incumbents over startups.

It might not be the best result, but at least the bad sites are identifying themselves.

Lol, when GDPR came out one of our euro devs was threatening to walk out if we didn't put a banner up because he thought he'd be personally fined.

Now it's obvious of course.

Where did I claim cookie banners were mandated by the GDPR? I don't think this is responsive to my comment.

The GDPR is unrelated to the internet. It is very deep and protects my personal information in every company. Please educate yourself.

This is not responsive to my comment.

The DMCA is pretty terrible.

GDPR is fine. The only annoying thing about it is the petulant malicious compliance banners that some sites started using in response. Unfortunately it didn’t destroy the ad/tracking based internet, but that was probably too optimistic.

I don't know who said "destroy" but COPPA and the DMCA have had a lot of negative effects. And some positive ones too, but it's hard to argue they succeed in their objectives at all really, and easy to see the harms.

They didn't destroy the internet, but they did embolden the platforms at the cost of smaller players, who couldn't step up

DMCA alone reshaped the internet, with DMCA copyright notices becoming a shady industry of supression and fear.

GDPR is the source of all those "mandatory cookie consent" banners that Firefox now has builtin features to detect them.

COPPA besides making websites either ban children or become "family-friendly", led to this corporate scheme: `A small fee was charged by Microsoft under COPPA as a way to verify parental consent. The fee was donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.[48] Google, however, charges a small fee as a way to verify one's date of birth. `( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot... )

CDA and its derivatives, striped much of section 230 protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...

There's another circumstance where people were calling out threats and mostly no one cared - the recent presidential election. it's difficult to argue nothing will change when on occasion it does.

nothing ever happens

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