Check my twitter timeline where you will find any number of arguments with (especially: music company executives, or former ones) people who call for more and pre-emptive copyright filtering of user-generated content, often pooh-poohing or ignoring the issue that would provide illiberal governments with censorship capabilities.

Turns out: it’s happening. See this page from AccessNow:

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Due to the way the law works, copyright claims are not only leading to censorship but also raising serious security concerns for these individuals and organizations … If you don’t give up your anonymity, you don’t get to exercise the right to challenge the takedown of your content. In addition, under the DMCA, copyright holders can subpoena YouTube in order to identify you. … Many independent activists, journalists, bloggers, and other members of civil society that are targeted for abuse have neither the necessary legal background nor access to affordable legal assistance to fend off a lawsuit. 

https://www.accessnow.org/dmca-takedown-demands-censor-activists/

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The balance between rights enforcement and freedom of speech is a delicate one, and my preference is to prefer the latter by trying to simplify and diversify the means of monetisation for an artist, so that the need for strict rights enforcement is reduced. To build infrastructure that exists purely to chill speech – video, audio, text, code; all speech – and then expect this not to happen, to expect its intended purpose not to be perverted, seems incredible.

So it’s important to share these stories, so that people at least do not have the excuse of ignorance or disbelief.

Elsewhere:

when we were fighting compulsory filters in Europe, I met a whole generation of folks who were amazed that *copyright* (of all things!) could be used to disrupt the internet.

I think the next few months are going to remind people how crazy intellectual property laws can get

— Danny O'Brien? (@mala) December 22, 2020