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Comment by JSadowski | Hacker News Reader

You and I see a single site where you can go and find movies people have uploaded to YouTube. The MPAA sees a single site where they can go and make their DMCA requests to YouTube. I question how long this will be useful.

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I'm the creator of Pegleg and there have been enough people who've had that concern that I wrote a post addressing it a few days ago, actually:

http://latest.pegleg.it/post/46983349526/pegleg-and-copyrigh...

Also, it's up to individual rightsholders to submit DMCA requests not the MPAA (as far as my experience goes). If you look into how fragmented rights ownership is in the film industry, you'll soon realise how unlikely it is that the site dies because of DMCA requests.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with the developer of this app.

In summary, he thinks that the elastic nature of films being added and removed is what makes the service fun.

He's posted his full thoughts on this here: http://latest.pegleg.it/post/46983349526/pegleg-and-copyrigh...

Yes, but the sword cuts both ways. You wouldn't have been able to find these films either, so if the there's a DMCA takedown it ends up being a wash (for the vast majority). Sure you can have underground sharing sites, but that requires a much larger personal time commitment for an inferior selection. Worst case would be that MPAA uses the data and the site stops being useful so people stop submitting, so the damage it could cause to film sharing seems self-limiting. It seems a worthy experiment to me.

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