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Comment by illuminati1911 | Hacker News Reader

illuminati1911

The DMCA is truly a steaming pile of shit.

Nintendo and other companies are also abusing it to take down fair use videos by individuals on YouTube.

There wouldn't be a place for individuals to infringe copyright without the DMCA. Any platform would be exposed to full liability for all their users' posts. So be careful what you wish for.

(This is same dynamic as Section 230, btw. It continues to astonish me that even the tech community is incapable of understanding the basic mechanisms)

YouTube take downs are usually done without DMCA, right?

Are you saying that the DMCA is explicitly being invoked by Nintendo and others, or are you talking more generally and including, for example, YouTube's Content ID system?

YouTube's content ID system is in place to facilitate DMCA takedowns. Folks such as Nintendo can go either the route of filing a claim to take the ad revenue of a video, or filing a copyright strike claim to have the video removed.

Whichever variation that is used is up to the copyright holder (legitimate or otherwise), and both are definitely used by legitimate actors for sometimes the most ridiculous of copyright claims (someone humming a song for instance).

AFAIK Content ID is an entirely extralegal system applied instead of DMCA, executed as a part of YouTube's TOS. It's used because copyright bullies would prefer not to involve courts if they can avoid it, and I suspect it exists to prevent MAFIAA from utterly destroying YouTube, as most of its value (until recently) came from copyright violation.

The content ID system is just a system for "search by video" or "search by audio". It doesn't do anything "instead of". Just helps copyright owners find infringing content. What they do after that is up to them.

In some strict sense that may be true, but in this discussion I think it is reasonable to read 'Content ID' as including YouTube's copyright strike system, demonetisation, and re-assignment of ad revenue to the claimed copyright holder.

These things are all very much extralegal, and used instead of the DMCA in many situations.

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