Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms

I'm extremely wary of any law that can be used to censor or otherwise remove material online, but one gripe i have with the Techdirt article is their assertion that hash matching is expensive or difficult.

Generating a SHA hash of an image when uploaded is very inexpensive in terms of processing, and there's already going to be a db somewhere that stores the image metadata, so it's not like putting the hash there is hard. Similarly, a simple No/SQL lookup for a known hash is incredibly simple and non-intensive.

The real issue is the lack of an appeal mechanism, the lack of penalty for, or legal mechanism to, ignore false reports (which should probably be about spam/ volume of requests, rather than single requests), and the lack of definition around what exactly a site must do to show good-faith, reasonable compliance.