[sbronstein]

Look Joey, if you want to argue that the DMCA is flawed and we should have a stronger law to protect rightsholders, then you really need to spell out what you want that law to look like. Because it turns out that whenever anyone tries to suggest a "compromise", that compromise will break the internet in some fundamental way. That is the point that tomjen3 is making.

So tell us - how to you propose to "fix" the DMCA? Because if you won't give us any specifics except saying that the DMCA is flawed, and you won't come out against SOPA, then guess what - the recording industry is just showing the rest of us who you really are.

[earbitscom]

Okay. Don't say I didn't try.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3372166

[shasta]

Some kind of audio/video fingerprint registry that allowed copyright holders to once and for all register their copyrights seems like it could be a good balance.

[chris11]

Places like youtube already use methods like that to keep track of copyrights. But that still doesn't deal with the problem of convincing every website to use a registry. Places like TPB definitely wouldn't. And I doubt some file locker services like MegaUpload would willingly go along with it. And if you still have websites that ignore the regulation, it basically becomes useless. So what is the benefit?

[nitrogen]

Not to mention that Youtube's system and fingerprint systems in general don't understand fair use, permission, or false positives.

[shasta]

My suggestion was that the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA be weakened so that you only qualify if you've taken reasonable technological steps to identify copyrighted content. You're right that's not a solution to overseas websites.

[Natsu]

There can't be any "reasonable steps," Copyright is a matter of permission and the only people who know who has permission to do what are the owners, who are the only people authorized to give that permission in the first place.

Techies everywhere hate spam. They've used every trick in the book on the spammers. There's also anti-spam legislation. But how much spam do we still have? Tons of it. And any filter you make won't even work as well as the spam filters do, because the people actually want to pirate stuff, while they don't want spam.

So this is one of those solutions where we end up worse off than when we started, being forced to buy or create useless filters that get in the way and still don't solve the problem they were supposed to, perhaps with legal penalties for failing to do the impossible.

[burgerbrain]

Who pays for those "reasonable technological steps"?