it's important that someone speaks up. I am pro DMCA! The petition isn't entirely anti-DMCA and neither are many people on HN. The DMCA offers a safe harbor fo

it's important that someone speaks up. I am pro DMCA! The petition isn't entirely anti-DMCA and neither are many people on HN. The DMCA offers a safe harbor for websites that host user submitted content and it gives a mechanism for truly infringing content to be taken down. There are alternative approaches that some might like better but they are unlikely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, these two aspects are both good for businesses and I doubt that they're as controversial here as you state they are. There are, however, serious issues with the DMCA. One of these is that there's little to no recourse when the DMCA is abused by a company to take down materials that they don't own the copyright to (this happens frequently). Another issue is that circumventing DRM is illegal even if no copyright infringement is taking place (this is the actual point of the petition). It's not impossible to support the positive aspects of the DMCA while simultaneously recognizing that it is far from perfect and in need of reform. PS - I downvoted you. It had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I agree with you. You're baiting for upvotes/downvotes with statements like "I'm ready to get downvoted to hell on this one" and "I know there are other startups out there who depend on DMCA, and if you're one of them, upvote this." You're also being unnecessarily insulting and condescending when saying *"I stand loud and proud against 'the HN mob' of wanna be's and know it all's," when this adds nothing to your argument. This behavior is clearly against the Hacker News Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and more importantly it's both rude and nonconstructive.