There are plenty of misunderstandings of copyright law from its detractors but this comment seems to be in places the other side of the coin (plenty of the DMCA

There are plenty of misunderstandings of copyright law from its detractors but this comment seems to be in places the other side of the coin (plenty of the DMCA's detractors misunderstand it but it's not as common to see a hardline supporter of copyright like yourself who doesn't seem to have heard of the DMCA) and in places failing to recognize that you're engaging in a discussion of whether the law as it exists is good or bad: claiming that our laws cause collateral damage to the public isn't always a "misunderstanding" of the law. >This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons. ISP monopolies aren't due to copyright law but these disconnections are a consequence of copyright law: it is the only reliable way you as a third party can get an ISP to disconnect someone based on unsubstantiated allegations. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is attacking your systems in violation of the CFAA and they'll likely ignore you, maybe they'll ask you to prove it or better yet go after the person doing the hacking. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is file sharing in violation of the Copyright Act, and if they don't meet your demands (which far exceed anything prescribed by the DMCA) they're liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement [1]. >Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence. They can, but the relevant laws and legal precedent decide whether the plaintiff can get a decent lawyer to take their case and whether the suit will survive your first attempt to get it dismissed. The doctrines we have around copyright make it easy to bring claims against infringers and get a court to hear it out. But unintentionally they allow for abuses as "small time" as internet subscribers to be dragged into multiyear lawsuits for file sharing when it later emerges that the plaintiff has - literally - no evidence [2] or as "big time" as Katy Perry getting baselessly sued for using a fairly generic sequence of chords and needing an appeals court to overturn the jury verdict against her [3]. In both of these examples, legislation or new legal precedent could raise the standards for bringing certain types of cases without hurting righteous plaintiffs. On the other hand, in both examples the righteous party eventually won. But in others they lose, or pay a nuisance settlement because the court fight isn't worth it [4]. Frivolous lawsuits are a big problem and aren't at all limited to copyright, but clearly there are features of copyright law that make it attractive for people looking to abuse the legal system. >No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost. I agree that there's a very common misconception here, but there are two real issues with copyright law that are also being referenced. Copyright law makes it unnecessarily difficult to create derivative works based on very old works that would have passed into the public domain if not for relentless lobbying for longer corporate copyright terms. It might also protect "abandoned" works and works where the corporate copyright holder is defunct too aggressively, there's a good argument for both sides of that issue. But it's an argument to be had over how the law can avoid causing real problems, not a "misunderstanding" of the law. >This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately. The article this comment thread is under is about precisely the issue of copyright lawsuit threats being used to hide youtube-dl from search results. >This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight. The "censorship without oversight" refers to the DMCA notice and takedown procedure. Outside of extremely rare court injunctions, there is no authority that can monitor or stop flagrant abusers of a system whose purpose is to legally compel the removal of content from online services, which might be called a form of censorship. >This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one. Again, this is "first paragraph of the Wikipedia article" level DMCA. If DRM circumvention were not illegal, it would be purely a technical means, but courts have repeatedly ruled that DRM doesn't need to be any good technically speaking to have legal force. >No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived. Those authors need something else because stopping annoying archivists is not in the scope of copyright law. The purpose of copyright is to give authors a limited monopoly on the making and selling of copies of their work. And before the second half of the 20th century, we had copyright law with the understanding that creative works outside of IP law were part of the "public property", "common property", or the newer term "public domain". Now, of course, there are ways of protecting works more effectively than copyright alone by never selling individuals copies of works, only licensing them, and using legally protected DRM to discourage breaking the license terms. [1] https://variety.com/2019/music/news/cox-communications-music-copyright-suit-verdict-1203449254/ https://variety.com/2019/music/news/cox-communications-music... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/16/malibu-media-ordered-to-pay-wrongfully-accused-pirate-even-more-money-after-failing-to-abide-courts-decision/ https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/16/malibu-media-ordered-to-... [3] https://variety.com/2022/music/news/katy-perry-appeal-dark-horse-copyright-lawsuit-1235201510/ https://variety.com/2022/music/news/katy-perry-appeal-dark-h... [4] https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751 https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751