10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web

[geebee]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/ten-years-later.html

[geebee]

Since I submitted this, I want to be clear I don't think it's a good article. I'm kind of stunned by this, hoping to believe it is satire...

Is this the conventional wisdom about the DMCA?

[wmf → geebee]

It's not satire. Some people believe that without the DMCA, every "user-generated content" site would have been slapped with a zillion-dollar lawsuit (or rather, the first few would have and nobody would have been willing to start new ones after that).

[geebee → wmf]

I've heard such negative things about the DMCA, I was surprised to see this article.

The general thrust of the anti-DMCA on the wired site seem to be that the DMCA was bad law, not because it was 100% bad, but because it went far beyond the needed provisions like you just described to push through a lot of restrictive provisions that hackers seem to dislike.

[wmf → geebee]

The DMCA has some completely unrelated things in it: notice-and-takedown: good, anti-circumvention: bad. There have been some more balanced articles published this week.