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Comment by zinkem | Hacker News Reader

>"given the volume and pace of new infringements on Hotfile, Warner could not practically download and view the contents of each file prior to requesting that it be taken down."

This seems to be the same line of reasoning that protects YouTube from legal responsibility for users' content.

YouTube won't (and doesn't have to) police everyone's uploads, because there are so many. Well now the media companies can spam DMCA takedown notices, but "there are too many to verify"... putting the costs of verification/validation of content back on the hosting sites?

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Solution for the companies: Recognize that infringements are not uniformly distributed and resign yourself to the fact that enforcement can never be perfect and that you can only knock over the big, confirmed cases.

Solution for society: Recognize that bending the law over backwards to provide perfect security for big content companies has costs in excess of benefits and isn't worth it, especially given the availability of the previous solution.

> Solution for society: Recognize that bending the law over backwards to provide perfect security for big content companies has costs in excess of benefits and isn't worth it, especially given the availability of the previous solution.

To the extent society has any opinion on that whatsoever, it already agrees with everything you just said, if not going further. But society doesn't determine the laws in question; if it did we wouldn't have them.

I'm not sure. For any given subject, the society has a majority of people largely ignorant of that subject.

Here, since BigContent managed to call some types of state-granted monopolies "Intellectual Property" and "Protection", the vast majority of people tend to agree with them by default (at least on principle, before they actually download something). Property and protection sound like good things, right?

Now if you meant "society" to exclude people who are totally ignorant of the subject (which would be reasonable if we found a fair, reliable way to exclude people from voting on subjects they don't know enough about), then of course I agree with you.

Hence why I said "To the extent society has any opinion on that whatsoever". I meant that society either doesn't know about the issue or tends to agree; very few people would disagree with you.

Are you aware of the automated "content-infringement" detection systems that youtube uses? If you post a clip from a movie or tv show that youtube has in its library of "stuff not to be infringed" then your video will automatically be taken down.

Yes, and often content is misidentified there too. I posted a anti-COICA video made with Xtranormal -- it was erroneously tagged as including content from Comcast Entertainment and banned outside of the U.S. (somewhat ironic, no?)

Was it erroneous? I used a small portion of a clip from the Beatles (among other sounds), and it was flagged.

(I'm not sure if it's fair use or not).

You do realize a good chunk of the DMCA takedowns on YouTube are via audio fingerprinting?

This seems to be the same line of reasoning that protects YouTube from legal responsibility for users' content.

No, what legally protects YouTube from uploaded infringing content is the safe habour part of the DMCA. YouTube is legally immune if they obey valid take down requests.

It appears that the big media companies are not fulfilling all the parts of the DMCA.

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