> Yes, this happens in all industries that have cases being litigated all the time. In some instances, areas of settled law are completely upended by new rulings that change the status quo and force people to spend money on complying with the new state of affairs.
And court decisions that make major changes like that are rare, exactly because they result in widespread burdensome changes to existing behavior that would have been less burdensome if what was required had been better specified to begin with.
If you pass a law that requires such a court decision to happen before anybody knows how to comply with the law, what is anyone supposed to do in the meantime?
Especially when many of the questions are obvious, not bothering to answer them is just punting because they know the answers will be problematic.
> If they had a million users on a platform that shares and promotes other people's copyrighted works without a license, I'd sure hope they figured out their IP strategy.
Everything with user generated content is "a platform that shares and promotes other people's copyrighted works" and they're intended to be licensed from the user/creator. That the platform has no good way to know when what the user uploads is unlicensed is the whole problem.
And if they didn't have some way to do that when they were small then they don't have it when they first become big either. If you need a solution before you have a million users then you need a solution before you have a million users -- and then we're imposing the same burden on the little guy as on Google, if the little guy ever hopes to become Google without promptly getting sued into the ground.
I also reiterate that user count is unrelated to resource level. An individual can operate a platform with a million users and make no profit from it, but impose a laborious content filtering requirement and that platform is gone.
That is presumably the sort of thing they're trying to protect with language about non-profits, but this is where the ambiguity bites us again. If an individual operates a forum as a labor of love where the ads break even with the hosting costs, is that non-profit or not? What if some years there is a "profit" of $200/year? An individual who doesn't want to be bankrupted by lawsuits is not going to enjoy rolling the dice there.
> Why would they need to implement Content ID...?
We don't know what they would need.
> Do you think a blog's comment section needs filtering unless it becomes a common vector for sharing copyrighted material?
Are blog comments not copyrighted material?
How is the platform supposed to know what is being shared there without reading it all?
> The objective isn't to nuke small companies - it is to strike a fair balance between distribution and content creation. No one wants distribution dead.
The objective of DMCA 1201 wasn't to keep farmers from repairing their tractors.
The issue is the divergence between their stated objective and what they did.