During the debate of the DMCA the media lobby was bribing congress to insanity to make sharing copyright material online a felony, and that any site enabling it be liable as an accomplice and enabler.
We might not be in great shape in terms of intellectual freedom, but things could have gone much worse if big media got their way.
That's the Overton Window/door-in-the-face tactic -- introduce extreme rhetoric (felonies for uploaders) in order to get a "compromise" that's basically what they wanted all along (forced takedowns at their discretion).
We might not be in great shape in terms of intellectual freedom, but things could have gone much worse if big media got their way.