You're raising a bunch of very legitimate concerns, and they speak to how deeply @#$#@%ed the DMCA is as a law. But I still think it's legitimate for a company

You're raising a bunch of very legitimate concerns, and they speak to how deeply @#$#@%ed the DMCA is as a law. But I still think it's legitimate for a company like SO to err on the side of taking things down. You can cast it as being toadies, you can cast it as CYA. You can also cast it as an abundance of caution. It's probably a distinction without a difference, but words are funny things like that. The lawyers who are often setting these policies are presumably thinking in terms of their professional responsibility, which is to minimize the chance that their employer gets sued. They're probably not thinking in terms of unlikely hypotheticals involving hostage scenarios, because "We thought it was OK to bend the rules because otherwise X might happen" is unlikely to hold up in court. The American courts are more like Immanuel Kant than Jeremy Bentham about these sorts of things. Nor do they give a crap about your free tablet, or whether or not Intel gives a crap about your free tablet. It's way too expensive for them to be making these decisions on a case-by-case basis. Maybe that's not exactly how SO was thinking. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are not lawyers, nor do I know if they consulted their lawyers. Nor am I a lawyer. But I had a dream where I played one on TV once, and that's more than a passing qualification for weighing in on legal matters around here.