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10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA Is the Law That "Saved the Web"
mattOzan writes "On the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [PDF], Wired Magazine posits that the DMCA should be praised for catalyzing the interactive '2.0' Web that we enjoy today. While acknowledging the troublesome 'anti-circumvention' provision of the act, they claim that any harm caused by that is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs. Fritz Attaway, policy adviser for the MPAA weighed in saying 'It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing.'"
It's true, the notice-and-takedown is a bitch for the user but without the safe harbor that it provides, the service providers would do a lot more validation and the web 2.0 would not be so user oriented.
Now the DMCA applied to hardware makes me scream so it's not perfect but the safe harbor is one thing that they got right.
The anicircumvention things should go, certainly, and the illegal search-and-seziure stuff should be purged, but the article makes a good point. Without the explicit "fair use" bits, the Web wouldn't look like it does today.
"Asteroids do not concern me, Admiral. I want that ship, not excuses."
"Lord Vader, there nothing we can do, the ship is protected under the Digital Millennium Falcon Copyright Act."
"..."
This article is complete and utter bullshit.
How about we celebrate rape and murder too, while we're at it? After all, if it weren't for rape and murder, we wouldn't be living in this violence-free Utopia.
TFA basically says the DMCA could be much, much worse. True. Any law of this nature is going to piss someone off. Any law of this nature is going to be abused. Any law of this nature is going to contain something odious for someone.
But this is /., so cue the small-but-vocal crowd of hysterical anti-copyright trolls.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I also credit my wife for her strict "anti-pr0n act". Being forced to keep such activities underground has allowed me a much more extensive viewing regimen.
On a more serious note, this analogous to the Boll Weevil Monument. The Boll Weevil taught farmers about crop rotation, among other useful lessons.
Would someone mind doing a car analogy?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Assisting web 2.0 is almost as heinous of a crime as assisting the MAFIAA.
Would that be the very safe harbor they are trying to remove in the new copyright law that's pending?
any harm caused ... is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs
Revenue:
Comcast
AT&T
Verizon
These billion-dollar companies are charging us exorbitant rates for service and still don't have enough balls to stand up to the other bullies on the block (ex. MPAA & RIAA)?
Being a Tor server operator, I get a couple copyright infringment letters and take down notices here and there...I just reference DMCA and they go away. Seems to work well.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
It's kind of like praising No Child Left Behind. Something like it was necessary, but did we have to have the result?
In an economy where knowledge, software, and creative work is paid for, you do have to have some legal protection for those works. Despite what some may wish, this isn't a Brave GNU World where everything is free as in give it all away. People want paychecks.
That said, what we desperately need is a system that both protects the copyright of these works, and allows common sense fair use for the end customer. We don't have that with a Wild West kind of no-copyright system, and we don't have that with the DMCA.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
TFA is a total fallacy, there is not even a weak attempt at justifying the conclusion
that the DMCA has had any sort of beneficial effects on technology, much less
"catalyzing the interactive '2.0' web".
There is as much of a cause/effect relationship between the two as
there is between the DMCA being enacted and my balls growing gray hairs the same year.
Here's a link to the definition of Non sequitur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)
Just your typical lame eyeball whoring by Wired, nothing to see move along.
The DMCA is an umbrella act of at least five different acts (well, four and a few miscellaneous stuff). The article's praise is for the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, whereas most of the criticism over the past decade is actually aimed at the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act.
I've always felt like the DMCA is like an authority figure that tries to sound lenient by saying, "You know, we could have made it a lot worse..." or "Aren't you thankful you can still have your toys/music?"
Not one user ever says, Gee, I wish that today I could do *less* with my music today than I could yesterday.
The DMCA is a corporation-driven, draconian rule that is abused on both sides, by the enforcers and the afflicted. Increased government regulation is rarely the answer to any of our societal/economic ills, much less so in the case of digital media.
What's next, praise for the security provided by the PATRIOT Act? This wired article wreaks of bovine excrement.
Nothing is better.
A variant of the DMCA that merely granted ISPs the safe-harbor in exchange for identifying who placed the content online, and required a court order from a federal judge for a takedown, would have worked just as well in terms of enabling content hosting providers like YouTube. The RIAA and MPAA would certainly have not liked it. So while the safe-harbor aspect of the DMCA certainly had its benefits, other aspects of the DMCA clearly do not.
It's time to make some revisions on the DMCA, such shortening the takedown period, and requiring a federal judge's temporary restraining order to extend it. There should also be a minimum base damage liability for a false or fraudulent takedown (I propose $250 per day). Thus, even for individuals not making any money from content, there is something to recover from all those embarrassing days their content was gone. There should also be $25 processing fee paid to the ISPs per takedown. No more freebies.
I'm sure a lot of people reading this would argue that it should just go away. Well, that is very unlikely to happen.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Despite the problems and abuses, it's impossible to gauge what the internet landscape would look like today had it not been for the DMCA
Er, you could look at the Internet landscape found in other countries that didn't have a DMCA-style law in 1998.
So if not for a draconian law that takes away fair use rights and introduces excessive and harsh penalties for minor infringements, we wouldn't have a buzzword laden technique for dynamically changing the content on a web page withuot a full refresh.
I don't think I've heard anything this absurd, even on slashdot, in quite some time.
(And yes I know I've over-simplified, but come on people!)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Right you are. The only part about fair use in the DMCA is that it (allegedly) doesn't change it any.
Thought it does leave abuse-prone Notice & Takedown problems. Granted, the Safe Harbor in the law _is_ a huge help and I wouldn't want to give that up. But that doesn't mean that the Takedown procedures shouldn't be reformed (or removed).
So there's really only one good part of it: the Safe Harbor. If you ditched the rest of the bill tomorrow, I doubt anyone but the MAFIAA would miss it.
Which must be why they're singing its praises right now. I mean, it is an election season and they have clueless people to manipulate so that they'll think it's something wonderful.
But they always do stuff like that. They want us to see only the fava beans and chianti and ignore the rest of the bill they ordered...
Web 2.0 flourished DESPITE the chokehold the greedy fat cats of imaginary property hold on our culture.
I don't know about you, but for me it says a lot that the mere fact that any law is being backed by a MPAA policy advisor makes me distrust it more.
Perjury by the legal establishment and it's practitioners is given a nod and a wink. It is only perjury if you or I do it.
The article contains a serious flaw in logic. Given the legal environment of the DMCA, if the internet we have now is a Good Thing, then how does that imply that the DMCA is the cause, without considering how much potentially better things could have been instead?
This kind of false rationalization is neither legitimate news reporting, nor is it respectful of those who have fought against the abuses of a poorly conceived and implemented law.
After all, it's a bit like saying that because my car got towed yesterday, I wasn't able to get into a car accident. That I had no car to wreck does not mean I am better off for having it towed--in fact, it is very probable the time and money I spent to retrieve it could have gone to something much more rewarding and useful.
Sounds like the typical "I've done nothing wrong" diatribe of a man who refuses to admit a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=bogus+dmca
I'm not impressed, and since I'm outside of the US, I've a good mind to make a bogus DMCA complaint to Wired's Teleco and get the apologist's blog taken down.
I know Wired has long since jumped the shark, but with this one they landed in the tank.
What other piece of legislatrue allows you to remove youtube videos you don't like?
I have to really wonder about this. The DMCA only applies within US borders. Piracy is alive and well. There is thepirate bay, somewhat lame video sites tudou.com and youku.com, and I can still find a ton of infringing material on Youtube. I can't for example upload a 20 second clip that Sony owns an interest in without it getting pulled based on keywords. I've had to deal with offline storage sites that to be fair take a takedown notice as license to terminate an account period without resolve.
Without the DMCA I have to wonder if the web would still be the wild wild west of 2000, and if so would it actually be better. Piracy is pretty damn good advertising.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In fact it's far from perfect. The "Safe Harbor" provisions are useful but really badly implemented.
Since we all agree that it isn't perfect perhaps it could be made a little better. Something like providing notice and allowing time for a response before the takedown.
If there should be a processing fee, then that fee should be paid by the accused if the content is found to be infringing.
The MPAA's Attaway, who calls himself the lobbying group's "old man" for his 33 years of service, recalls that the DMCA was a compromise from the start. "The ISPs wanted safe harbor provisions in return for their support for the anti-circumvention provisions, which was one of the major and most important compromises in this legislation," he says. "It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing."
This MPAA lawyer speaks of a compromise between themselves and ISPs. As if they are the only parties involved.
What about the 300 million actual human bodies that the politicians are supposed to represent? Attaway knows what the MPAA and the ISPs wanted. Does he have a clue what the actual human beings wanted? Did congress?
Evidently the MPAA has successfully convinced Washington that those humans should be considered as "customers" and not "voters".
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Trouble is, the DMCA is two laws rolled into one. On the one hand you have the way hosting sites such as Youtube are not held responsible for copyright violations of user-uploaded content so long as they immediately withdraw material on allegation of infringement. This is what the article is saying is responsible for current sites such as Youtube, MySpace and others. This is a supportable argument (i.e. you may or may not agree with it, but there is certainly a case to be argued). On the other hand, you have the restrictions on circumvention technology. An entirely distinct law that most people here would probably agree is far less supportable from the viewpoint of social good. Yet these two very different things have been rolled into one, probably to increase the chances of getting the latter part passed. This has the effect of making it much harder to evaluate or debate the DMCA law in the USA.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
From the article: "President Clinton signed into law exactly a decade ago Tuesday."
Well good job Bill! (cheers). By the way, you're the same joker who signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed a portion of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (forbidding banks from speculating in stock markets), and thereby caused the current housing mess & rampant bank failures of 2007-8 and approximately 1.5 trillion in taxpayer bailouts to the rich fat cats on Wall Street (corporate welfare).
Nice job there ol' buddy.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
my interactive web 2.0 was catalysed in time. i just dont know what i would do if the DMCA hadn't made the web safe for scientology.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There is a whole world out there and to assume that the DMCA which hardly applies to anyone outside the US is just fooling yourselves.....
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I think people would be much more interested in the EFF's viewpoint on the whole DMCA anniversary.
The term "Web 2.0" does not mean anything. It's a marketing buzzword that's supposed to sell something that people used to get for free (blogs, "social" websites, etc.). In reality, it's the same old stuff now decorated with pastel colors and big buttons for the mentally impaired majority of computer users, allowing them to stream their stupidity straight into the eyes of millions other users.
PS The idea of treating the whole Internet like an application which can be assigned numbers is unbelievably retarded.
"My bumps my bumps, my lovely lady lumps"?
Yeah, we sure are better off with that one on the planet...
This is so much hogwash. BBS systems, Internet sites and other digital systems were protected under the "common carrier" rules long before congress put the notice and takedown procedure in place. Notice and takedown is all about protecting big copyright. It's a stick that the MPAA and RIAA can use which is quicker and much less expensive than bringing suit. I am not saying the concept is a bad thing, but it's not at all about protecting websites.
Better than nothing. It was poorly thought through and should be repealed.
Maybe the header in that section, "Conveying Non-Source Forms"? If he has given the source code, he is not bound by article 6.b)
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I'm so happy I didn't renew my shitty Wired subscription this time around. They publish outright lies, flame bait, and totally clueless articles on subjects they know nothing about. Only occasionally do they act like journalists.
You're right, the DMCA ain't perfect.
And it's not just the anti-circumvention clause. It's also the lack of any real penalties for sending bad-faith takedown notices, the requirement that takedowns must be assumed valid until proven invalid (and content must be taken down immediately upon receiving), and the lack of reliable protection for fair-use.
In fact, the entire law is a crapshoot. Safe harbor is the only thing they got right, and even then, you can't say that this "saved the Web" and brought about Web 2.0. The Web will always find a way. The only reason "Web 2.0" blossomed after the DMCA was signed is that the 2000's saw great advancement in broadband connectivity and speeds allowing content to be uploaded and downloaded at reasonable speeds by most people. YouTube and Flickr never would have worked when most people had dialup.
Speaking only for myself, possibly more than a few will agree with me, but "Horse Shit!"
Thank you, drive through....
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
He's not exactly happy with the arrangement, and neither is google, even though he and everybody else in the senate at the time voted for it.
Here's a clue: If isn't perfect perhaps it's time to emend it to address the problems, such as a stupid anti-circumvention provision that makes it illegal to circumvent protection even if the use is otherwise legal?
1) Bullshit.
2) So what? "Web 2.0" is nothing but a CPU-intensive marketing scam.
3) ("No, wait--THREE! Three points!") The DMCA is NOT better than nothing, it's actually worse than nothing.
I'm disappointed. Wired is usually better than this.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You know, he wasn't perfect, but he was responsible for Volkswagen! All hail misunderstood Hitler! All hail the misunderstood DMCA!
Don't forget, Blizzard was one of the early abusers of the DMCA
The DMCA has done more harm than any law regarding the internet. The internet would have become much larger, grown at a faster pace, had more free content, better business models, significantly less abuse.
This guy underestimates the amount of abuse the DMCA has created. He is pretty much clueless. The only thing he has on the mark are the safe harbor provisions except that the laws regarding telecommunications already cover that. As long as the tele companies don't interfere with anything they are immune. Once the get involved they are no longer immune.
So, all and all this guy is either heavily influenced or paid by the lobbyists.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
This is so spin dizzy it belongs as a headline story on Fox News.
Firstly, even if correlation WERE causation, I fail to see how "Web 2.0", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean outside of the boardrooms of envious failing web startups, was in any way assisted by DMCA. The DMCA, in result, was an attempt of CURTAILING fair use by more broadly defining infringement in the digital arena and calling into litigious question those things previously covered by fair use doctrines, such as transfer of media from one format to another for personal use.
If anything, Web 2.0 succeeded largely BECAUSE of fair use. DMCA is to the digital arena what concerns against VCRs and DAT was in the early '80s, only the DMCA actually passed while the concerns about the VCR were settled through interpretations of the fair use doctrine. So Web 2.0 is successful DESPITE the DMCA? Oh, the notification and withdrawal of infringing material may have allowed ISPs to breathe a little easier, but a few infringement cases upholding fair use could have just as easily codified this without all of the excess baggage that has led to the development of DRM and emboldened the MPAA and RIAA to take 12-year-olds to court for downloading shitty My Chemical Romance mp3s.
The fact is that DMCA was the favored child of the recording industry lobby, period. That fair use has to be held up and litigated BECAUSE of DMCA is a travesty, not a saving grace.
this is fascism. It is totally brutal what has happened to people - getting sued randomly, etc.
DMCA is not increased government regulation. It is decreased government regulation.
I'll let you reflect on that for a minute.
OK, still confused? Basically the DMCA was a law paid for by the recording industry lobby which gave the industry stronger criminal and civil litigation legs to stand on when pursuing profit. By essentially making an attempt at taking the teeth out of Fair Use doctrine (which would be PROPERLY classified as "increased government regulation" because it limits what the recording industry may derive profit from with respect to the individual and what it may legitimately sue over), it has sued for and received LESS governmental regulation of its own behaviors in both the free market AND in the courtroom.
Our government keeps trying to bring in a version of the DMCA and I've seen many companies destroyed in the US by abuses of the act.
Innovation is alive and well in Canada because we don't have the DMCA. I've seen cases where companies here have survived illegal lawsuits which the DMCA would have killed the company.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
There's two major sections of the DMCA that are commonly discussed.
17 USC 1201: There's basically nothing good to be said about this one. This is the anti-circumvention provision, with a few extra goodies like protection for Macrovision's analog copy-protection as well.
17 USC 512: This is what the article is referring to. The story goes that this article trades a takedown provision for safe harbor. Only problem with the story is that the safe harbor already existed in precedent. So what does 512 really do? It provides an effortless takedown procedure, gives ISPs an excuse to boot users off for no reason, gives the claimant in a copyright case what amounts to an automatic temporary restraining order against the ISP, and facilitated discovery of the claimed infringer's identity. The ISPs get a slightly more solid version of the safe harbor they already had (though the xxAAs have been trying to get that part revoked, as with the YouTube wrangling), and the users get... squat.
You want a real copyright act for the digital millennium? Start with "Article 17 of the United States Code is hereby repealed". Then start over from scratch, without making every operation performed by a computer into a technical violation.
The anti-circumvention clause, and takedowns without due process, are precisely the 2 portions of the DMCA that should NEVER have become law, and I will continue to fight them for as long as they exist.
I am not even remotely interested in "how fast industry adopted the DVD". I am only interested in justice and the protection of the innocent... ESPECIALLY from the very large corporations that typically benefit from these two provisions, at the cost of everybody else.
I call bullshit on this one. This article did not come even close to convincing me, nor have any other statements I have read so far.
If there should be a processing fee, then that fee should be paid by the accused if the content is found to be infringing.
Sure. Once the content is found to be infringing, and is not simply a legal fair-use, then the infringer should pay the costs to the infringed victim. It's up to a court to make the final decision. The infringed victim would likely already be asking for other damages. The cost of the takedown fee can be one of those. I have no problem with that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... is more stupid than words can express!
One of the results of DMCA (and similar laws outside of the US) is that in addition to hosting materials somehow illegal it is also equally illegal to link to someone else hosting such materials, regardless of the obvious inability of the linkee to verify the legality of whatever he or she links to on his homepage. And even second order links (linking to something that links to the offending material) have been ruled equally illegal, and third order links as well in a few cases.
Now, the absolute core of the web is links. The result of the DMCA has been that you are equally responsible for the links provided by someone you link to, thus severely inhibiting the cross linking for those worried about culpability in this matter.
In essense, whenever you put up a link, you are doing something illegal because it is highly probable that someone elsewhere has put up something that's illegal and that this material is reachable though the link you're putting up after only a few additional clicks. And when you're already responsible for at least third order links, you just might be responsible for this as well, so it's safer NOT to put up the link - and thus you've broken the essence of the web: Links. So the DMCA breaks the web, not saves it.
Now, when are the MAFIAA going after Google? - I mean, I can equally fast go to Google and type "heroes s03e07" (looking for the very latest episode of the tv-series "Heroes") as I can go to a torrent portal like isohunt.com (who's already been sued) and type the very same query, and in both cases get a result with a link directly to the .torrent file (a first order link). The torrent portal have been sued but Google has not... go figure.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --