And if you can't say ahead of time what a judge should do with that law against that edge case, you have a legal vulnerability. Something that will cause "hard cases make bad law." Something that will be abused by the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. You have a bad law.
What you're advocating for is not thinking about the consequences of legislation before passing it.
And honestly, uninformed people talking about a law without doing an iota of research won't make a single difference in the world. Hacker News armchair amateur lawyers are not fighting for anyone, not even for themselves.
This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."
How is that compatible with a democracy? Don't voters have to be able to understand what their legislators are doing on their behalf? Are we all just permanently screwed?
It's not as if these criticisms don't come to fruition. People said DMCA 1201 would be a bad law from the beginning, and it still is. Sex workers objected to SESTA even though they were the ones it was supposed to protect, politicians passed it over their objection, and the bad things predicted to happen then happened. It is the calls to "reform" CDA 230 that seem to lack any understanding of the law, the reasons for it, or even what it does.
The most common flaw in new legislation is the failure to account for unintended consequences from bad edge cases and perverse incentives. It is actually really hard to create a law without these things. The discussion of how to avoid them, or even if they can be avoided sufficiently to cause the proposed law to be a net positive in the world, is really important.
Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-court-reins-cfaa-van-bur...
This is your system working, right? But the CFAA was passed in 1986. We lived under that uncertainty, and it caused much turmoil, for thirty five years. That's bad. We should want for that not to happen.
It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".
People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).
We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.
> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.
I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.
And they're not always wrong.
Constructive feedback: the first sentence isn't necessary. People will only see the anger and not the actual point. The second sentence stands on its own.
And it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens on HN. Programming has taught me to specifically pay attention to edge cases and evaluate how likely they are and what kind of consequences may follow. This same pattern of thinking then gets applied to other things in life. Laws are one of the closest analogues to programming.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
However, you have got my interest. What is the flaw in the reasoning?
Because the world is a very wide and varied place, with far more range of human situations than a set of rules is able to adequately deal with. Probably ever.
And if some individual's ability to find things or not decides what happens, then we're right back where we started, at a rather arbitrary system vulnerable to corruption. In which case, why did we even bother making this huge incomprehensible set of rules?
See for example the US Tax Code.
I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share.
Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs antitrust. Constraints on vertical integration.
The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
Even so, I would bet the vast majority Google's customers that are aware of ContentID like ContentID and want it to spread everywhere, to all companies in all nations. I mean, how likely is it that Ford (a big customer) would move to UpstartVideo.biz because they don't automatically analyze uploaded videos?
Which part of copyright law is the ContentID part? It's not in DMCA 512 anywhere I can see.
YouTube in particular had problems because in their early days they were, shall we say, not well-counseled on the copyright front, and were still getting sued over that. They were also trying to make nice with Hollywood to try to get them to license premium content.
Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
And the "you're not the customer, you're the product" trope doesn't really apply -- in a competitive market, suppliers have a choice in who to sell through too. And Ford follows the eyeballs.
It's a measure to avoid legal ramifications under the DMCA and other acts.
> Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar. Or they'll restrict and moderate uploads manually which has exactly the same effect, or perhaps even worse (still erring on the side of legal caution).
Why would there be "legal ramifications" for someone complying with the ordinary DMCA notice and takedown process?
> It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar.
It has been decades. They're still there.
The lack of popularity is for the reason already mentioned. If your YouTube video gets on the first page of Google search results and the exact same video hosted on some other site doesn't, what are content creators going to use?