Along with the good suggestions by the other replies, let's also take into account actual DMCA takedown activity, and make sure we are not optimizing for an edge case. I would guess that "rich company spamming bogus notices" is far and away the most frequent case, followed maybe by "rich company filing legitimate notices" followed in the far distance by "small fry filing a legitimate notice." There are probably multiple orders of magnitude more bogus notices from companies than legit ones from small fries.

The DMCA is a weapon that mainly large, rich companies use to beat up mainly small, relatively powerless end-users. That's what needs to be corrected.

I'd also argue that a large portion of the US legal system is set up to facilitate this "big&rich beating up on small&poor" behavior, but that's a topic for a different day.

> I would guess that "rich company spamming bogus notices" is far and away the most frequent case, followed maybe by "rich company filing legitimate notices" followed in the far distance by "small fry filing a legitimate notice."

You are guessing wrong.

What an excellent rebuttal. Care to provide some sauce?

"I think it's X with no evidence"

"I think it's Y with no evidence"

"Woah woah there, how dare you disagree with the groupthink, are you prepared to cite some sources?"

Why does X but not Y get to be presumed true until proven otherwise? Because we really want X to be true okayy.

That is not how it went. The first person took a guess, and the second implied information that we don't have:

"I guess X"

"You are guessing wrong"

>Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

Yes! Now, what was asserted without evidence?

This sounds like the DMCA is solely a harm to mitigate?

Is using the DMCA to legitimately defend the copyrights of small-fries too much of an edge case?

I'm saying it should be measured to see, before proposing changes. I'd love to learn that a majority of DMCA notices are individual artists taking down legitimate infringement. Somehow I highly doubt that's the case.

I'm more idealistic about some things than the reality, and I like to think that US law doesn't do "customer support" like a well-known FAANG. (Where it's just good business to let some fraction of a percent of people be wrongly locked out of their accounts, rather than invest in covering those edge cases.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EqualJusticeUnderLaw.jpg

Defending copyrights held by small fry is usually of negative value, which is why they do their best to give all the material away themselves. They want the exposure more.

The counterfactual to making an illicit copy of Thriller might conceivably be that you pay for an official copy. The counterfactual to making an illicit copy of Everybody Needs A Robot is not that you pay for an official copy. It's that you go do something else, which is worse for the artist.

A one dollar fee would be entirely affordable to a "small fry person", while making automated "report anything the same color as our copyright" abuse untenable.

There are ways to set up classification schemes for fee payments: a small fry has to pay a $1. A big fry has to pay an escalating value. Sort of like truckers have to keep much higher insurance policy values than your typical personal auto driver.

If we can define small-fry then we can drop the fee for those entities.