4 ms·
To a small-fry person having their copyright violated, having to pay an upfront fee/deposit for each violating site could be onerous. If we're going to go to f
by neilv 3y ago
To a small-fry person having their copyright violated, having to pay an upfront fee/deposit for each violating site could be onerous.
If we're going to go to filing fees/deposits, how about make the remedy be a fast-track way for the violated person to seek damages, not just play takedown whack-a-mole?
- killjoywashere 3y agoThere are ways to set up classification schemes for fee payments: a small fry has to pay a $1. A big fry has to pay an escalating value. Sort of like truckers have to keep much higher insurance policy values than your typical personal auto driver.
- margalabargala 3y agoA one dollar fee would be entirely affordable to a "small fry person", while making automated "report anything the same color as our copyright" abuse untenable.
- ryandrake 3y agoAlong with the good suggestions by the other replies, let's also take into account actual DMCA takedown activity, and make sure we are not optimizing for an edge case. I would guess that "rich company spamming bogus notices" is far and away the most frequent case, followed maybe by "rich company filing legitimate notices" followed in the far distance by "small fry filing a legitimate notice." There are probably multiple orders of magnitude more bogus notices from companies than legit ones from small fries. The DMCA is a weapon that mainly large, rich companies use to beat up mainly small, relatively powerless end-users. That's what needs to be corrected. I'd also argue that a large portion of the US legal system is set up to facilitate this "big&rich beating up on small&poor" behavior, but that's a topic for a different day.
- neilv 3y agoThis sounds like the DMCA is solely a harm to mitigate? Is using the DMCA to legitimately defend the copyrights of small-fries too much of an edge case?
- ryandrake 3y agoI'm saying it should be measured to see, before proposing changes. I'd love to learn that a majority of DMCA notices are individual artists taking down legitimate infringement. Somehow I highly doubt that's the case.
- neilv 3y agoI'm more idealistic about some things than the reality, and I like to think that US law doesn't do "customer support" like a well-known FAANG. (Where it's just good business to let some fraction of a percent of people be wrongly locked out of their accounts, rather than invest in covering those edge cases.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EqualJusticeUnderLaw.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EqualJusticeUnderLaw.jpg
- thaumasiotes 3y agoDefending copyrights held by small fry is usually of negative value, which is why they do their best to give all the material away themselves. They want the exposure more. The counterfactual to making an illicit copy of Thriller might conceivably be that you pay for an official copy. The counterfactual to making an illicit copy of Everybody Needs A Robot is not that you pay for an official copy. It's that you go do something else, which is worse for the artist.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago> I would guess that "rich company spamming bogus notices" is far and away the most frequent case, followed maybe by "rich company filing legitimate notices" followed in the far distance by "small fry filing a legitimate notice." You are guessing wrong.
- chipt4 3y agoWhat an excellent rebuttal. Care to provide some sauce?
- Spivak 3y ago"I think it's X with no evidence" "I think it's Y with no evidence" "Woah woah there, how dare you disagree with the groupthink, are you prepared to cite some sources?" Why does X but not Y get to be presumed true until proven otherwise? Because we really want X to be true okayy.
- albedoa 3y agoThat is not how it went. The first person took a guess, and the second implied information that we don't have: "I guess X" "You are guessing wrong"
- ipaddr 3y agoIf we can define small-fry then we can drop the fee for those entities.