Though it has been established that piracy occurs primarily for economic reasons, it is in the interests of the artists to reduce its occurrence as much as possible, as piracy impacts their earnings directly. George E. Higgins and Catherine D. Marcum claim that “an original is more valuable than a copy and copyright protection increases a consumer’s disutility of a product. In turn, there is a reduction in the number of copiers.” The DMCA is indeed slightly effective at preventing piracy, but it is an incomplete solution that comes with numerous drawbacks.

 

There exist alternative solutions besides the takedown system that would prevent piracy without the negative attributes of the DMCA. One such solution is website blocking. Though many Americans would protest the idea due to fears of censorship, “website blocking is being used in a growing number of countries: it can be a reasonable and useful tool to reduce piracy and encourage consumption of legal content.” Blocking known pirate sites is far easier than filing thousands of takedown claims, and it also helps to funnel users into legal content channels.

 

Another solution is to simply increase the number of legal avenues for content. The most well-known avenue of this sort is Spotify, the popular music streaming platform, which boasts that “both Sweden’s and the Netherlands’ respective music industries followed similar paths…music revenues are now showing clear signs of sustainable growth thanks largely to the success of Spotify." The introduction of Spotify has dealt a significant blow to rates of music piracy, and if similar platforms come out for other forms of media, then piracy would be effectively combatted without resorting to excessive laws. While the DMCA has an impact on piracy, there are other methods of lowering piracy rates without the drawbacks that the DMCA has.

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Piracy is a pressing problem, and general copyright infringement happens often as well. The United States passed the DMCA to protect artists and stop these rampant violations, but instead produced a broken act with confusing provisions. The DMCA takedown process is cumbersome and ineffective on today’s large-scale P2P sites, and it is also used to target opposing ideas as a weapon or milk licensing fees from fairly used content. It produces inconsistent results, which leads to it occasionally protecting pirates or, more often, wiping a site with millions of legitimate users for the actions of a few pirates, as was the case with both Megaupload and Napster. The DMCA must be replaced with a comprehensive, streamlined solution detailing strict liability and takedown procedures. Until then, the DMCA will loom over the Internet as an oppressive obelisk, keeping copyright holders in absolute power while doing little to stop pirates, and digital fair use will never be realized in the United States.