>But that's part of the problem.
No, it isn't. Tech changes rapidly, and legislation quite simply isn't going to be able to encode a specific contextual mutating standard. Law isn't wrong to offload that analysis to an institution that is in the thick of it, with access to expert testimony and amicus information to inform it. You WANT the EFF and other advocates being able to weigh in on how the balancing factors should work and you want the courts to listen.
>Side projects get posted to HN or similar and go from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands in the course of an afternoon.
Yes, and then 95% of those go back down to pre-spike levels of interest. If they's the odd exception which has a massive sustained uptick for their service which promoted copyright protected works, now they can think about licensing and formalizing their processes to protect all stakeholders now that they're a success.
Just because Napster was once small doesn't mean their business model was going to be exempt from attention forever.
> And the solution to that is quite straight forward -- make the penalty for a false claim sufficiently large, and the process for having it enforced sufficiently simple, that it justifies the victim in spending that amount of time to enforce the penalty.
That's not simple. Courts do not afford less due process to larger penalties. The cost is in the complexity; who owns the rights, what did they know about their claim, how easy was the mistake to make, etc. Proving this to a court that has no starting knowledge of what's going on requires money to compile information, prepare briefs, etc.
We like to believe there's no Kolgomorov complexity associated with getting justice, but getting justice requires translating reality into consensus at some level of fidelity. That process is EXPENSIVE.
>the biggest problem isn't overtly fraudulent claims, it's the extremely high volume of false positives the claimants have no real incentive to reduce
Maybe on Youtube that's the case, but that's more of an issue with us having a system of private algorithmic arbitration, which is a seperate issue. The courts are too expensive to follow up on individual claims, and the only alternative is for content holders to sue youtube for big $$$ through content collectives (the threat of which is why we are where we are).