When I first read your comment I thought you had a good point, but now that I've thought about it for a few hours, I disagree.
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.
If someone just wants to share their weekend project, they're out a few hours and ten bucks a month to host the thing. But they're exposing them to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal liabilities; perhaps they miss some takedown notes while they are away on vacation. That's a pricey lawsuit should someone be inclined to pursue it. (And there's no indication that rightsholders won't.) The initial legal consultation regarding a site you want to launch is not cheap either -- an hour with a lawyer buys you a year of Amazon EC2 CPU time.
The end result is that people that want to share their programming work won't because they decide it's too legally risky. Sites like The Chilling Effect Clearinghouse let us see what sort of takedown notices are currently popular and plan our services accordingly. If that happens to discourage rightsholders from enforcing their rights, well, that's fine with me. I want to see new ways of using the Internet, even if it comes at the expensive of the big copyright holders.
As for removing spam from search results; that's actually a warming effect. Because Google removes spam results, small companies have the opportunity to compete with or compliment Google here. All they need to do is create an "uncensored" all-spam-site web index and offer that to the wider Internet community. The people that want to search spam sites will then be able to, creating value and a new business model. (Look at how successful DuckDuckGo has been, and all they do is wrap Bing's results. A new index could be amazingly successful.)
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.
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.
If someone just wants to share their weekend project, they're out a few hours and ten bucks a month to host the thing. But they're exposing them to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal liabilities; perhaps they miss some takedown notes while they are away on vacation. That's a pricey lawsuit should someone be inclined to pursue it. (And there's no indication that rightsholders won't.) The initial legal consultation regarding a site you want to launch is not cheap either -- an hour with a lawyer buys you a year of Amazon EC2 CPU time.
The end result is that people that want to share their programming work won't because they decide it's too legally risky. Sites like The Chilling Effect Clearinghouse let us see what sort of takedown notices are currently popular and plan our services accordingly. If that happens to discourage rightsholders from enforcing their rights, well, that's fine with me. I want to see new ways of using the Internet, even if it comes at the expensive of the big copyright holders.
As for removing spam from search results; that's actually a warming effect. Because Google removes spam results, small companies have the opportunity to compete with or compliment Google here. All they need to do is create an "uncensored" all-spam-site web index and offer that to the wider Internet community. The people that want to search spam sites will then be able to, creating value and a new business model. (Look at how successful DuckDuckGo has been, and all they do is wrap Bing's results. A new index could be amazingly successful.)