> You're making what amounts to a deontological challenge to the law, which I reject. The question for me is which legal framework leads to the best results.

It appears that we do indeed have different fundamental beliefs about what the law is for, and I agree that we're not going to resolve that kind of basic difference here.

However, I do not think your implied dichotomy between applying "deontological" rules and judging by "which legal framework leads to the best results" is valid. For how do we judge which results are "best"? We can't just continue to judge by results, because that is an infinite regress. Sooner or later we must reach a point where we are simply applying some kind of deontological rule to prefer one state of affairs over another.

It is true that I am applying a deontological rule "earlier" in the process, so to speak, than you are in this case. That is because I do not think that "judging by results" actually helps much in cases like this, because we simply do not have enough knowledge to reliably compare the results we have, under the current DMCA regime, with the results we would have if the DMCA were just abolished and we went back to relying on previous law (which is basically what I propose), or if we adopted some other course. We can try to make plausible arguments, but in most cases, as in this case, we simply end up with opposing sides each making plausible arguments for their side, and neither one having a clear advantage in that regard. Which means we are just back to applying deontological rules at square one anyway.

As for the specific deontological rules I am applying, they are based on the same kind of skepticism regarding how much we actually know about how to govern, how to construct legal regimes, how to make public policy, etc. It seems to me that as a society we are vastly overconfident about our ability, or our legal and political leaders' ability, to craft policies that effectively address issues much beyond the very basic rules that are needed for any civil society--the basic common law crimes and civil offenses and the legal processes that have evolved over centuries to deal with them in a reasonable way. Even the concept of copyright itself is already going beyond those basic rules; but at least, before the DMCA (and before other laws that have done things like greatly extend copyright and patent terms and allowed for basically infinite renewals), copyright was dealt with using the same basic framework as other civil offenses like torts.

The DMCA, viewed as charitably as possible (note that I don't actually believe this charitable view is entirely correct, since I suspect the motives of our legal and political leaders as much as I suspect their capabilities to effectively address issues), was an attempt to craft a more "efficient" way of dealing with copyright than the traditional framework for civil offenses. What it has in fact done, IMO, is prevent any actual innovation in the field of how to reconcile whatever is valid in copyright law with the technological changes introduced by computers and the Internet and the additional things people now want to do as a result of those technological changes. (The DMCA is by no means the only failure in this respect, but it's the one we're focusing on here.) Instead of a large corporation like YouTube, which, as I've said, is in the best possible position to figure out how to serve users with various preferences about how they want copyright complaints to be handled, actually figuring out how to do that, they are just punting based on the "safe harbor" the DMCA provides. Instead of people figuring out by natural evolution what the best ways are to meet the various preferences of users and respect the valid copyright claims of content owners, we are all operating under a one-size-fits-all system that was imposed by lawmakers well before something like YouTube even existed. There wasn't even an urgent need--at least, not according to anyone but media corporations unwilling to update their business models--for any legislation in this area at all in 1998. But we are still having to live under it now, 22 years and many orders of magnitude more Internet users later. What kind of sense does that make?