[anigbrowl]

Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness? Basically if you are hit with a copyright or any other sort of terms of service violation, you are stuck spending time and energy trying to communicate with a black box.

Platformists say that this is necessary because transparency will allow bad actors to game the system, but their solution to this to make society into an oppressive panopticon; the cure is worse than the disease. Further, the ignore the degree to which the lack of transparency is already weaponized by bad faith actors.

[fivre]

Yes. In general, DMCA was written by rightsholder lawyers early in the internet's lifetime to maximize their power and minimize their responsibilities or damages if they abuse it. The prevalence of systems like Youtube's contentID allowing (often real, but also often flimsily alleged) rightsholders to nigh-unilaterally capture all value on the barest suggestion of unlicensed use is abysmal and calls for a compulsory license system more akin to radio, but rightsholders don't want that because compulsory licenses don't let them negotiate megaprofit deals on their own terms.

The anti-circumvention provsions are also a trash fire. DRM regimes are some hot consumer-hostile bullshit that have no (legal) alternative because the law is behind them and heavily weighted towards the needs and wants of major IP holders. Modern US copyright law is designed primarily to maximize profits and enforcement mechanisms for entrenched interests with little regard for anything that isn't, idk, Beyonce tier of actually needing that much licensing cruft.

There's some joke somewhere about ours being the first few generations to systematically deny ourselves access to our own culture because biglaw is more than happy to cut off its cultural nose to spite its face so long as the money train keeps flowing for the few elites that really benefit from the current system. We have a walled garden that will likely never fall because life is peachy if you're inside the garden already, and anyone outside can't compete with the financial and lobbying muscle of those inside it without operating in legal gray areas at best.

[flangola7]

One single change could have made the DMCA better: Only allow copy "rights" to be assigned to real persons, and grant the original artist a permanent ownership (if I take a photograph I can sell or give you a license to use it, but not in a way that prevents me from continuing to use it). This prevents wealthy classes from financially bulling regular artists out of their own works.

For a large production like a film, that may mean splitting the rights up fractionally to thousands of different people. This would prevent the kind of unilateral rent seeking that squashes artistic creativity - getting a thousand regular actual artists and normal people to agree to sue a harmless fan project is much less likely than an executive suite.

[foverzar]

If that's how companies generally operate under the legislation, then yes, it's the legislation that is shitty.

Them's the rules. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

[bluefirebrand]

In this case, "The players" have a direct influence on what becomes a part of the game, through lobbying, campaign finances and whatever other more shady shit corporations get up to in order to stack the deck in their favor.

At some point you have to realize the players are dictating the game, and then yeah, hate them.

[foverzar]

You also have a direct influence through voting, etc. Besides, the "players" here (content hosting platforms) don't lobby anything, you beef is with large IP holders. But that's not the point.

The legislation is bad, because it neither accounts for normal actors that generally would always follow the passive path of least resistance, nor for bad actors that would actively try to abuse the system.

This is basically being upset over the effects of a natural law. You don't blame rocket for exploding, you blame the idiots who designed it that way. And you definitely don't blame the launchpad operators for poor rocket design - that's not even their job.

[anigbrowl]

Why shouldn't I hate the players? That's just some BS used to shrug off accountability.

[foverzar]

What "accountability" are you referring to? They aren't accountable for the poor design of the legislation.

[thomastjeffery]

It's a run-time error.

Law is not objective ideology sitting in context-free space. Law is ideology applied, and that very application made explicit. A law defines the very context it exists in.

So we can't just objectively ignore the failure of a law being applied, because a better application of that law must be defined in that law.

Even if a law defines a reasonable ideological mapping (expected behavior), it still needs to define a reasonable application of that mapping.

If, in practice, we see a law being abused, then the solution must be to change that law such that it isn't abusable anymore.

DMCA is an extreme failure, not in defining expected behavior per se, but in defining the domain for implementing behavior. The way DMCA is put into practice circumvents the very ideological behaviors it defined as its expectations, in nearly every case it is applied to.

A version of DMCA that "isn't shitty" would be incapable of such overt and widespread abuse. Clearly the version we have does not meet that criteria.

[anigbrowl]

This is a totalizing the solution. Why not put pressure on a company, which is easier than getting the law changed? Corporate entities can be herded by other means than regulation. Not that we shouldn't consider changing the law, but that's one of the slowest and least responsive approaches.

[yellowapple]

> Is the DMCA such a shitty law (questions about copyright in general aside), or are companies in shitty in just automatically responding to any DMCA allegation while refusing to invest anything in transparency/process/even-handedness?

If the law enables said shitty automatic responses, then yes, the law is indeed shitty.

[Zak]

The broken part of the notice/takedown/counter-notice process is that a takedown requires prompt action, but a counter-notice requires a waiting period. Removing the waiting period and relying on damages to make the copyright holder whole seems like a more fair process.

I think the anticircumvention part of the DMCA is what's really shitty, but that's a tangent.

[slowmovintarget]

It's a crappy law. It was bought and paid for by the recording industry, which should tell you something.

[cld8483]

If the default most common way of complying with a law is shitty behavior, then the law itself is shitty. Good laws don't incentivize bad behavior.