btw, rereading my post, I see now that the tone is somewhat snarky and accusative, so I apologize for that. > Takedown notices slow progress throughout our ind

btw, rereading my post, I see now that the tone is somewhat snarky and accusative, so I apologize for that. > Takedown notices slow progress throughout our industry, whether legally justified or not. If you look at the comment threads below this one, many are asking questions like, "I want to start a website, should I worry about this?" to which the replies are, "yes, hire a lawyer". That's good advice in this legal climate, but it slows progress tremendously. I agree that's a factor, but I think the case is somewhat overstated. If you look at the list of top targeted companies on the blog post, you'll see names like filestube.com, torrentz.eu, etc. As far as I can tell, copyright-infringing material is the bread-and-butter of these firms. If the legal costs go up for them, then that's actually the goal. But companies like Instagram, airbnb, ridejoy, etc... I don't think they would have serious issues with, or incur substantial costs because of, the DMCA. Basically, if your business isn't leveraging copyrighted material to gain popularity without paying rights holders for it, you'll be ok. Also, Bastiat's dictum on "what you see, and what you don't see" applies: what you see is companies/units like YouTube getting embroiled in legal action and you think, "these laws aren't worth it". What you don't see are the companies that never make it (particularly in software) because of piracy, or the spectrum of business models that become unfeasible as a result of the fact that users have grown hooked to free content. > As for removing spam from search results; that's actually a warming effect I totally agree -- I just wish Google applied the same philosophy to copyright infringing links and material. IMHO the afore-mentioned sites/links are very much like spam in the copyrights arena -- they operate at the margins of respectable and honest practices. I think the internet would benefit, long-term, if rights holders were protected from infringement, as a result of the fact that the ad-based business model would be supplemented by a viable direct-payment model.