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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

Let's just ignore the fact that you do not actually need to be guilty of copyright infringement to have your blog / website / video / etc. forced offline by a DMCA notice. There is no court involved; it is a guilty until proven innocent process, and most people do not have the resources to sue a large corporation or well-funded organization of any sort.

The DMCA is a textbook example of how the US caters to big corporations, not how to write good laws. The few redeeming qualities of the DMCA are vastly outweighed by the harm that the DMCA has caused and is continuing to cause.

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> Let's just ignore the fact that you do not actually need to be guilty of copyright infringement

I'm not ignoring that. A simple counter-claim will get your contents reinstated. You don't actually have to be guilty of copyright infringement to get sued in court. The DMCA does not change this.

> most people do not have the resources to sue a large corporation

What does this have to do with the DMCA? The DMCA is about content carriers, not end users. There is no way data carriers would allow themselves to be liable for the copyright infringements of their users. Thus, without the DMCA, they would simply comply with any legal threat regardless of its merits. The DMCA puts the power back in the hands of the people by allowing the user to file a counter-claim and getting their contents reinstated without any risk to the content carrier.

You could get sued for copyright infringement before the DMCA, and now you still can. Nothing has changed in that regard.

But why is that better than allowing the content to remain up until it is proven to be infringing? Extend safe harbor to apply until infringement is proven and you take away the ability for large organizations to abuse the DMCA to take down anything they dislike.

> There is no court involved; it is a guilty until proven innocent process,

Granted, but at the same time, the requirement to get your blog/website/etc back online isn't difficult.

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