We reported on this earlier this year and it’s great to see other voices stepping up!
by Stephen Carlisle
In other words, Google’s not going to do anything unless Google gets a slice of the profit. When asked, shouldn’t search engines have an affirmative duty to prevent the reposting of materials, she responded that it would be “impractical to enforce and it would chill online speech.” 19 This answer begs the question: since when is the repeated posting of “blatantly infringing” material online protected speech? To quote the Supreme Court of the United States, the First Amendment “securely protects the freedom to make—or decline to make—one’s own speech; it bears less heavily when speakers assert the right to make other people’s speeches.” 20 According to the RIAA, they have sent more than two million takedown requests to Google about the website mp3skull. Despite this, mp3skull continues to top Google’s search results for “artist+songname+download.” 21 Whose speech is being chilled here?
READ THE FULL STORY AT:
http://copyright.nova.edu/dmca-takedown-notices/
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DMCA “Take Down and Stay Down” Is The Logical Solution to a Flawed Loophole [VIDEO]
The Trichordist 
Our constitution provides creators “exclusive” rights to gains from their work for a good reason. In short. anything less is meaningless. The safe harbor has in fact made creators rights meaningless. You Tube and many other sites created a business model that relies on distributing work created and financed by others, against their will. Since they have no liabilities for losses to creators there is no incentive to change this. (See definition of “for profit corporation”) One has to see the damage goes beyond direct losses. The ability to hear any song or album from You Tube for free for so many years has created an established going rate of $0 to hear any song. The fact that people today think any cost at all for streaming audio is excessive is a consequence of the effects of the safe harbor.
Consider if shoplifting laws were made the same way as the DMCA. If one was caught shoplifting, they would be asked nicely to put back anything they haven’t already consumed or given away. They would not be asked to leave the store. And if they did it again the consequences would be the same. That kind of shows why shoplifting laws are not that way.
Another big problem with the safe harbor is that it serves as an indication that government does take creators rights seriously. It sends a large message that it is really ok to take content without paying for it.