[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.