Here is an analogy - imagine we crack down on theft at the source by massive fines for receiving stolen property. Sounds good? Try to sell anything secondhand then.

Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!

That is exactly what secondary liability does.

> I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.

Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.

I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.

They can't and flag and take down your video until you prove it. The burden is on the uploader not the distributor. Which we know how Youtube is with that...

As many probably realize, the fact that "online videos" == Youtube for many members of the general public means that it is by far the number one source for both posting and watching videos online in a self-reinforcing loop. I think that it cannot be overstated how much the existence of platforms like that (e.g. video sharing websites, 2D art websites, music boards) drive non-professional creators to create, given the fact that for the first time, they can actually get an audience. So it is not so much that Youtube and similar platforms are necessary for content creation (which is a ridiculous claim that no one made), but that the absence of such platforms seems likely to result in the previous system where media was very rarely shared by the non-professionals.

If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.

You can sell your farm fresh strawberries in the backwoods of Alabama, doesn't mean you'll get any traffic that'll grow your business/platform/identity.

You're forgetting that everybody are liable under a law like this. Including reddit, and hacker news itself