Petition to Repeal the DMCA

Title is misleading. It's not a petition to repeal the DMCA, it's a petition to revise it. And surprisingly it actually gets the facts right for once: Revising the law to allow circumvention for non-infringing acts would be a pure win. There is no legitimate reason to prohibit circumvention when there is no infringement, all it does is make criminals out of good people.<p>That still leaves the issue of whether circumvention should be criminal (as opposed to civil) when infringement does occur, and the related question of whether distributing "circumvention tools" should be illegal in itself, but those are things people can reasonably argue about. (I personally think they're both inane, especially given their demonstrable complete lack of effectiveness at their stated purpose.) But I have never heard any legitimate argument whatsoever in favor of prohibiting circumvention <i>when there is no infringement</i>, e.g. to unlock a phone or make fair use of the copyrighted work. So if anyone can supply any reason whatsoever why that should be prohibited then let's hear it, and if not then let's fix it.

It now has one more vote than my own petition:<p><a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-alcohol-schedule-i-drug-under-controlled-substances-act/hs6KnSGJ?utm_source=wh.gov&#38;utm_medium=shorturl&#38;utm_campaign=shorturl" rel="nofollow">https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-alcohol-sched...</a><p>Please note that mine is not a joke, but is designed to be rejected by the administration. The goal is to capture on record why a known dangerous substance is allowed to be sold for recreational consumption.<p>It's been a hard sell, because people:<p><pre><code> - are too lazy to click on a link - don't care - love their booze and don't understand my proposal - don't believe in the petitioning process </code></pre> edit: formatting

DMCA is not bad.<p>Like patents, it's become a popular punching bag here on HN. Well, I stand loud and proud against "the HN mob" of wanna be's and know it all's. I'm ready to get downvoted to hell on this one, but it's important that someone speaks up. I am pro DMCA! (And patents!)<p>Generally speaking, DMCA and patents are a pain in the ass for a really young company. Startups want to move fast and break stuff... which is great... except they typically do so at the expense of people who came before you and busted their butt just as hard as you're busting yours. Why should you get to play by a different set of rules then they did? You shouldn't.<p>When -- if ever -- your startup grows up, DMCA and patents are how you stay in business. It has to be easy and cost-effective to protect your creations, or else the incentive to create is greatly diminished and the ROI for R&#38;D is zero. Intellectual property protection is the keystone of a modern knowledge economy. And if you don't understand why, I'd recommend taking a microeconomics 101 on iTunes U or Youtube. VC, private equity.. hell, even Wall St., wouldn't be in America were it not for our world-class intellectual property laws.<p>Just because 100,000 people sign a DMCA petition doesn't make it right. 1,000,000 McDonalds hamburgers are sold every day... is that the right thing to eat just because a million people are doing it? My point is: one of the downfalls of voting websites like HN, reddit, or even the whitehouse.gov platform is people who know nothing get their votes counted the same as people who are experts on the subject. Well, I've been litigated for patent infringement, and I work with DMCA at my current company, and I know both issues intimately. DMCA, and patents, work. I know there are other startups out there who depend on DMCA, and if you're one of them, upvote this.<p>For everyone else, please educate yourself on what exactly DMCA does and the importance of IP laws in the American economy.<p>(N.B. Yes I am lumping DMCA and patents together a lot here, because the complaints behind both of them stem from a lot of the same entitlement mindset that startups are somehow entitled to implement technologies or host data that is not theirs.)

The DMCA has helped me get knock off websites taken down that consist of nothing but one of my blog posts copy-pasted.<p>I had a very high traffic blog article copied about a half dozen times with domain names purchased JUST to post the article and replace all the Amazon affiliate tags and advertisements with their own.<p>Had it not been for the DMCA, I'm not sure what I could have done. But for exactly $0 and 5 minutes of my time, I was able to email their host and the content was taken down in less than a few hours.

If the DMCA was repealed I have a bad feeling that whatever the current administration and congress/senate would come up with to replace it would be far worse than what we have now. When the DMCA was written the government had more of a hands off approach to the Internet than it does now.

Seeing as the president cannot propose his own bills is not this a rather "pious" and pointless exercise - surly would not the effort be better spent finding a sympathetic senator or congressman to introduce a reform the DMCA bill.

Text of the DMCA statute, for the curious: <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf</a>

I would like to see the registered agent registration with the fees go away. And replaced with the free and online 'registration of the point of contact' approach.