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by dragonwriter 1831 days ago
> I haven't seen any strong movement from Congress or the Supreme Court to suggest that the interpretation is incorrect.

Congress—both parties, for different reasons—seems more in the vein of “the basic idea of 230 is wrong in any case and we need to broadly restore publisher liability” (though most of the specific examples cited for that position seem to be situations where the host had actual notice, so there's probably a good argument that the expansive application of 230 beyond its text is a central part of the reason it keeps getting chipped away at); I think Justice Thomas wrote extensively on the distributor liability argument in a dissent (maybe concurrence) to a decision that turbed on another issue.

1 comments

This is interesting, but seems to be getting a little off topic.

The DMCA as it's applied today has a lot of unintended consequences and problems. For Section 230 to be interpreted in the same way would not equalize the two laws and make both of them unproblematic, that would just be a world where content was as vulnerable to stuff like frivolous libel takedown requests as it currently is to frivolous copyright takedown requests. It would be a disaster for the Open Internet.

My take is that we can look at the application of the DMCA today and see its effects, and view that as pretty strong evidence that this approach doesn't really work and that very little else in regards to platform/distributor liability online should be set up to work like the DMCA does. So I would love to see the DMCA revisited and the takedown provisions dropped.