Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

This is the state of the Internet under the DMCA--anyone can post or repost anything, even if they don't own it, and it is the burden of the original content owner to find each instance of unauthorized use and request it be taken down.

Part of Maddox's post addresses the frustration this can cause among people who create original content for a living. It seems to me that this frustration drives a lot of the worst impulses of groups like the RIAA and MPAA.

It also seems likely to me that there could be good technological solutions to the problem, that don't require lawsuits and crazy new laws. However, there is no incentive for people to develop these technological solutions. Instead the financial incentives (in this case, ad revenue) drive tech folks to build stupid sites like Ranker.com.

Acknowledged: I'm only addressing part of the story here...the friendly "you might like this!" emails are ridiculous. It's probably some 20 year old making 8 dollars an hour sending them...the 21st century equivalent of the telemarketer.

I definitely agree with you -- but I do think it's a double-edged sword. On one hand a lot of unauthorized content gets posted and people get frustrated because their original content is ripped/duplicated (with other people sometimes taking credit!), but on the other hand, the ease with which people can post stuff also leads to greater exposure.

Any extra steps to post content can mean the difference between something going viral and something remaining unseen in the dark corners of the Internet. I don't know if this is a good comparison, but this reminds me of the piracy study[1] that said piracy was beneficial for sales. These lists are a way of "pirating"/distributing content, though it seems without any real gain to the original creator due to lack of attribution (that's where the comparison definitely breaks down). I suppose the two would be more similar if you could somehow watermark the content to somehow point it back at the creator

Obviously, this method is really annoying for a lot of us, but the fact that it works so well and is generating all that traffic, likens it to all that Viagra spam we get -- people keep clicking! I don't know if there's any amount of technology that will help people gain common sense

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...

Honestly things are changing. When I make a rageface comic for /r/f7u12 (don't judge me) I really don't care if it gets reposted to 7gag, 4chan, whatever. I'd much prefer assumed copyleft than assumed copyright.

You indicate that the DMCA isn't powerful enough when in fact it also happens to be too powerful. It is a bit of a blunt instrument and is frequently used incorrectly for censorship and not just rights protection.

A good "technical" solution might be a search engine that harshly penalizes these types of articles and the domains that host them.

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