Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Assisting web 2.0 is almost as heinous of a crime as assisting the MAFIAA.
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
They have no financial incentive to defend you, and all past activities suggest they'd kick you to the curb and say "Use someone else for your ISP" regardless of whether or not that's possible.
I mean, do you really want Comcast fighting for your rights?
How a 'bout a whac-a-mole(TM) analogy?
As a result of whacking the mole on the head with a mallet when it tries to pop up out of four of the five holes, the DMCA is responsible for the mole's successful appearance out of the last hole.
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.
Without the explicit "fair use" bits, the Web wouldn't look like it does today.
Fair Use existed as US common law over a hundred years ago.
Without the DMCA, those (media) companies would have had to file lawsuits that would have quickly and explicitly carved out the limits of fair use, which would be good for us and not for them.
The DMCA did not give us, the end users, any benefit that I can see.
Even if you want to argue benefits, I don't think it will take much to show the negatives have far outweighed any positives.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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
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 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.
Hmmm, I somehow have this feeling that stating the whole of the web would look significantly different because of a single law in only one of the countries that are on that web, is a bit presumptious.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
>Without the DMCA, those (media) companies would have had to file lawsuits that would have quickly and explicitly carved out the limits of fair use, which would be good for us and not for them.
I'm not sure I would trust the courts to make the right decisions about fair use when it comes to the Internet.
From the bits and pieces of US court rulings I've heard since the Internet gained popularity (~1993 to present), I've noticed a trend: When US courts are faced with cases involving technology they don't understand the details of, they sometimes ignore the existing well-established law that anyone familiar with the technology could see was obviously relevant and instead toss a coin and follow one party or another's 'creative' (i.e. off-the-wall) theories without anyone providing substantial arguments in support of any of the theories.
I can't remember every unquestioningly-accepted theory that has led me to this conclusion, but off the top of my head, the highlights are:
- Treating domain names as property
- Applying trademark restrictions to queries (e.g. DNS lookups and web searches)
- Deeming linking to a document to be the same as copying or distributing it
- More generally, assigning responsibility for actions automatically carried out by a computer to [any of: the computer's owner, operator, designer, manufacturer, programmer] without suggesting negligence or giving any other reason for this at all
In any case, all of this means that I'm a little uncertain where (or in what ballpark) a US court would put the boundaries for fair use on the Internet. =)
I'm not saying that the DMCA is the answer (it's about 180 degrees from it), but I think another law clarifying things for the courts was (and still is?) what is needed.
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.
I think people would be much more interested in the EFF's viewpoint on the whole DMCA anniversary.