Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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I believe what EFF and Mike Masnick have to say about it: it's the most forseeably abusable internet censorship law (so far), and it's a crying shame HN isn't confident enough to look past the good intention of it to recognize that.

How have DMCA takedowns gone? How many upstanding developers have been nuked, without recourse, by some invalid or malevolent false report? How many times over and over[0] has HN loudly lamented the DMCA takedowns, decried how awful it is to have state censorship—and one without any meaningful adversarial process?

Well, here we are again: "The takedown provision also lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests".

If courts don't strike this down, this might end up becoming DMCA for the whole of society. It'll certainly be used by politicians to silence critics. It'll be overrun by trolls. You'll see the results, and you'll hate them.

> "And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”"

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dmca&type=all

I fully agree, but this is not exactly a principled community and it is controlled and managed by interests that have censorious authoritarian tendencies when it comes to discussion of meaningful things like this.

The bill does have a nullifying logical flaw in it though for purposes of defense, but I also don’t think that enforcement is really the point of the law. It is very much more likely that feigned intimidation and acquiescence are the intended purpose, i.e., making the currently still painless violation of rights the easiest route for entities to follow.

It has been the MO to undermine, infiltrate, and subvert the fundamental laws in the USA that restrict the government and authoritarians from infringing on the inalienable, God given rights of the people for many decades now.

Just the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to make most people give in. Hard to fight against deep pockets even when you are in the right.

This is one place where I hope the emerging LLM world helps protect us. If the automated filters actually use image or text models to decide whether it is frivolous or not seems like a tool we didn't previously have in our tool belt.

Has a new YC business started that is looking to handle DMCA requests or is this largely the domain of Vanta and others?

> How many times over and over[0] has HN loudly lamented the DMCA takedowns, decried how awful it is to have state censorship—and one without any meaningful adversarial process?

DMCA does have an adversarial process. You're more likely thinking of e.g. YouTube's automatic DMCA-like process.

> DMCA does have an adversarial process. You're more likely thinking of e.g. YouTube's automatic DMCA-like process.

But that adversarial process has timelines that require removal for a minimum of ten days. Which is plenty of time to cause damage.

That process means fuck all because the providers who honor DMCA takedowns often do so instantly, but basically say “you can never host this content here again, ever” and don’t give any fucks about whatever stupid appeal process you do. I had Heroku take down my business with zero notice due to a malicious dmca and did exactly this. They offered zero paths other than “get a different provider”. They also disabled my entire account and all of my sites, not just the allegedly offending site. They refused to even respond to any further inquiries on the matter

This is a decision of Heroku, not something required of the DMCA

The incentives are structured to make immediate takedown the path of least resistance. Yes, in theory, they can do otherwise; why would they spend money and effort doing otherwise?

Providers not liable under DMCA still do this anyway. It's not worth fighting for anything at all, to them. They'd rather lose your $10/month of revenue than take a 0.01% chance of a $100,000 lawsuit. Try getting a false abuse report on almost any VPS provider.

Look at Fosta/Sosta. Craigslist didn't have to take down the personal sections, but they did to totally remove any chance at liability.

DCMA responses are all about minimizing costs. It's much cheaper to just do it.

Private companies will respond to this in exactly the same way.

Regardless if it's actually a part of dmca is beside the point. If the law didn't exist, this type of account loss wouldnt have happened.

Similar mal-interpretations/exaggerated response will happen with this new law too.

The keyword is "meaningful". The DMCA's counter-notice process is intimidating to use [1]. The DMCA as a whole is written in a way that effectively forces platforms to remove content targeted by unsubstantiated DMCA infringement notices [2]. (Tangentially, courts have read the DMCA's repeat infringer provision to apply to more parties than the text requires [2].)

YouTube's Content ID process, unfair as it is, is net fairer than the DMCA [3].

[1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-noti...

[2] https://www.rstreet.org/research/jawboning-in-plain-sight-th...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU - YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is.

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