[dhume]

1. Reviewing everything submitted by users is unreasonable to expect.

2. People are upset that takedown notices are issued for works to which the issuer does not hold copyright and that those who issue such notices do so with impunity.

[earbitscom]

I am not saying that reviewing everything is reasonable. I'm saying let's be glad the laws let you accept content without verifying ownership at all, and stop complaining that you have to take down content in dispute. The abusive takedown notices are a fraction of the number of legitimate infringements that take place. Content owners have to police the entire internet for their works. And we're supposed to have all this sympathy for the companies who have to respond to takedown notices by simply removing the content, not paying any penalty at all, when most of them are legit?

[slowpoke]

>Content owners have to police the entire internet for their works.

See, here's the problem. That is highly unfeasible, if not impossible (not to mention unethical) and should tell you more about the brokenness of distribution as a business model than it tells you about the need for copyright protection.

Oh, and about most of the notices being legit: Google estimates that more than a third of the notices they receive - of which more than 50% are aimed at competing businesses - are plain and simply bogus.[1] I'm sorry but I don't believe the claim that most of them are legit. And even then, such a high number of "false positives" are plain and simply unacceptable.

Oh, and there is still the thing about due process, which the DMCA completely eschews.

But in the end, it's meaningless to discuss this. I'll say it again: the DMCA is just one of the many useless tries to fight a symptom whose cause are the violent death throes of a business model that should have died nearly two decades ago. The root of the problem is still copyright, and as long as we cling to it we won't be able to find any meaningful solution, but keep trying to band-aid a leper with hemophilia.

[1] http://pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/pcw.nsf/feature/93FEDCEF6636CF9...

[earbitscom]

I wrote a lengthy response but I'm just going to pretend I stopped reading when you called protecting interests in your creations unethical.

[slowpoke]

I could write a lengthy response to this too but you are unwilling to even try to grasp my point, as apparent by your utter misinterpretation of what I said.

Hint: I was talking about policing the internet, not about protecting interests. The latter will always have to take a backseat if we have to prevent the former.

Oh, and yes, I consider the notion that you can "own" non-scarce resources such as music and software highly unethical.

Anyways, have nice day. Or night.

[billpatrianakos]

Right?! It's unethical to check to see if someone is ripping off your work online? Let me tell a kind of embarrassing story related to this. Some years ago I got into blogging... Like, a lot. And I was checking out all sorts of desktop apps that posted to your blog and I came across one I liked. It was going for about $20 so I got a pirated copy and decided to share it on a certain torrent site. The creators tracked me down and asked me to take it down. They very sanely explained how they worked how to produce this and would like to be able to keep making it better but couldn't if people like me kept ripping them off. They had to police the web and I don't see anything wrong with their actions. I ended up seeing things their way and took it down. They weren't being unethical by asking me not to steal their app. It was me who was being unethical. I'm baffled by that statement.

[slowpoke]

And I'm still baffled that people like you are insisting that

a) this is a problem with piracy, and not - for the umpteenth time now - the brokenness of distribution as a business model in the face of a world where copying is virtually costless. It's not my problem if people still cling to it and are unwilling to adapt.

b) that copying something is stealing (or "ripping someone off"). It's stupid, it's wrong, and most of all it is dishonest. At least call it what it unfortunately is: copyright infringement. I have made it a personal rule to not take anyone serious who calls copying "stealing", as it shows either a total lack of understanding of the matter or deliberate deception.

[earbitscom]

If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution.

I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.

[billpatrianakos]

In an ideal world we would be able to do away with copyright but I don't see that abolishing is right for everyone. Right now it does make sense for music and movies. That hurts middlemen but not the creators. That's fine. But in the software world it's different. You are hurting the creators.

You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.

Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing. Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply. When you argue that the developer only has to put in the work to make it once and is getting a free ride because he's just distributing copies well that's just a cop out. It isn't exactly the software itself that people are being charged for. It's what they are able to do with that software that they get charged for as well as the experience of using it. Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book? Why is it wrong to have a choice? Copyright holders don't go around telling people that they can't give away their own work for free so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.

I see and understand the anti-copyright arguments (at least more than half of them). I see the abuses by copyright holders and governments and I don't like it. But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes. If I knew of a way where both interests could be served equally I'd get on board with abolishing copyright. As it stands now I can't do that so I pray that SOPA doesn't pass and hope that we can all find a nice middle ground.