The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the worst laws ever enacted in the history of our United States of America. Imagine that you are an ordinary publisher. Whether newspapers or books, movies or media, you are responsible for producing your own content, paying your employees, paying for services, etc. Now imagine that your competitor doesn't pay for anything except an Internet connection and computer. Your competitor downloads copies of all of your content and allows the whole world to search through it for free. A few years go by. No one has to read through content anymore. No one has to remember or type in website addresses anymore. Why would they? Just type a search term into your competitor, and instantly get a sentence or two that answers their question, gives them a pancake recipe, or provides them with whatever data they needed, all at your expense. No one ever even needs to browse your own website. Sure, you could exclude your competitor from downloading your data by following their unofficial and non-legally-required "robots exclusion protocol" but then your business would go from a few mostly accidental hits through your competitor to exactly zero. Next, imagine that your competitor, once they have all of your data, then branches out. Everyone is using your competitor, so your competitor starts gathering data from everyone. Your competitor soon possesses not only all the valuable data available online of every other company in the world including you, but now also has all of baby pictures, family pictures, practically everything ever posted that belongs to a vast majority of Internet users, over 2.5 billion. Sounds awful? Could you ever compete with a competitor like this? It gets worse. Your competitor also has the right to temporarily publish everything else that belongs to you even if you didn't ever provide it online, as long as any one of those 2.5 billion people finds it and uploads it. Yes, technically, in that case you can go through a process to remove it... Good luck keeping up with 2.5 billion people... Especially if, like most historic content creators, you don't even exist anymore... while over the corpse of your company, your original content that long since stopped making you a cent is now cramming the coffers of your competitor. And all of this copyright theft is perfectly legal because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that essentially allows copyright theft as long as it helps the Internet. This "competitor" I am collectively referring to is the combination of Internet search and social media providers whose sole existence is predicated on the copyright loopholes allowed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now let's move from this imaginary story to real life. Typical newspapers have lost money nearly every year for at least 20 years, if they're not out of business already. Everything that anyone ever creates is practically worthless in nearly every modern way unless they are willing to turn it over to this new competitor, who exists in a very real way, particularly in the duopoly of Google + Facebook. This nightmare that is actually real life is exactly the reason why copyright laws existed in the first place. Oh, yes, our intentions in 1998 when the DMCA was created were very pure. In the short term, "old-fashioned" copyright laws seemed like they would get in the way of bright ideas such as the fabulous Google of 1998 and the newly-born Facebook of 2004. But trying to do without real copyright laws didn't save the Internet. It ruined everything. Well, they say that hindsight is 20/20. Now we realize, 21 years after 1998, when the creators are crushed and the thieves are thriving, that good copyright laws were actually needed even more in the days of the Internet, not less. The Internet as it exists today would have been an impossible achievement without the legal foundation established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Yet I truly believe that a far better Internet than what exists now would not only have been possible, but also would have been already achieved and in much less than the 21 years it has taken to reach where we are today. Powerful ideas like Google and Facebook would still exist, but in other, healthier forms which would bear a much closer resemblance to the fair, free, and competitive essence of America, if the Digital Millennium Copyright Act never existed.