Half man, Half Amazing

DMCA's are abused, there are penalties for doing so. Speeding laws are abused, there are penalties for doing so. Children are abused, there are penalties for doing so. Writing bad checks is abused, there are penalties for doing so. However, speeding laws don't penalize you for hit and run, thus we have hit and run laws. This is about the 100th thread I think you've tried to hype this DMCAs are abused thing and I'm just going to keep having to point out how there are penalties for doing so, maybe eventually you'll absorb that info. *hope*

DMCA (which is now a pretty old law in tech time) worked ok on some aspects not others. You should read about how the tech firms fought and lobbied hard against neutering parts of the proposed law that if they were in place now would lessen the need for SOPA. But I digress. In many ways SOPA is a fix of the DMCA law. And before you jump on some DNS-blocking rant, I'll say again, I don't think that part is good or even needed. If you want me to tell you the areas that DMCA doesn't cover that need fixing, I will. First of all, overseas criminal commercial copyright infringement rings don't care about DMCA takedown notices. Secondly, payment processors have been mostly excluded from liability (or even action) in DMCA law. Thirdly, advertising networks have been left out from DMCA laws. Fourth, the whole idea of streaming wasn't really around when the DMCA law was written, broadband wasn't even really around then so the idea of illegally streaming UFC 141 to millions of people wasn't considered in DMCA law. Fifth, no one could have imagined what broadband + the safe harbor of user generated content would create where a site can simply play dumb. In fact, one of the problems with the DMCA law is that sites are encouraged to play dumb even when they know something is infringing or risk losing safe harbor, something that Fabian has brought up many times when it comes to sites like Pornhub. That's a problem with the law.

Nearly all of these are attempting to be addressed by the current SOPA or PIPA or OPEN bills. They aren't re-writing the parts of the DMCA that work because there's no need to. Pirates (criminals - I'm not talking about cheap downloaders and neither are these bills) adapted to the DMCA law and found/made loopholes that enabled their criminal ways to continue. Thus you have to update the laws. No doubt they'll adapt again (the market for Ukranian ad networks will surely explode), and a few years from now we'll be discussing this again. No one with an ounce of pragmatism says "this will be the end to piracy", piracy will always be there, but having the tools to prosecute the worst offenders and disrupt their businesses will not only move some of them to other lines of 'work' but it will affect the availability to your average joe. Not a perfect bill to be sure, but then again, what is?

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Is this gonna get ugly, now? Huh? I hope not. Because I thought what we were here, racial differences notwithstanding, was just a couple of old friends. You know, just both of us Californians.