eek04

We're talking about 17 USC § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201), the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, most importantly 1201(a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures (with the associated 1201(b) Additional Violations).

What you're talking about is USC 512 (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512), 17 USC § 512 - Limitations on liability relating to material online

These are more or less completely unrelated apart from being introduced in the same legislative act (which also did a fair number of other changes to the law.)

Presuming that the theory is correct, there seems to be two sides to this:

First, you're going to be transferring that money to the banks/institutions that lend to them. So the money isn't going away, it's just ending up as profit for somebody else (as compensation for them considering themselves to be taking on more risk.)

Second, the taxpayers going to get rid of that amount of cost in the form of risk; the averaged risk is paid by the taxpayers, it is just paid in bulk when the banks are about to fail.

This assumes the calculations are all correct, and it doesn't count in what indirect cost the economy would have from loans getting a bit more expensive overall.

I think it's very hard to make anything help. Here's a shortlist of things that should be fixed to avoid it horribly hurting innocent people, but I doubt it's enough - there seems likely to be more things in there. The original purpose of the law seems to be "Give the 'intellectual property' industries a blunt instrument to attack perceived violators", so making it less blunt probably violate the original purpose anyway.

Stop removing DNS entries; that's attempting to censor things that aren't in the US for non-US citizens.

Require a full court proceeding to stop advertisements and payment processing in the US - ie, no "court order", it has to be a full lawsuit with the ability to defend.

Require the removal of access to only affect a specific, listed set of companies.

Require the company requesting the blocking to pay reasonable costs of blocking.

Remove the making of copyright infringement into a felony; each of these things can easily happen by mistake.

signalfd() don't exist. I'm sorry that the manpage isn't really explicitly clear about that.

(It's a Linux-specific extension.)