The notice-and-takedown system created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides an essential safe harbor for online services to innovate. This system is the result of an intense series of negotiations between content and tech companies to balance their important competing interests. Without it, content companies would be constantly filing even more copyright suits against online services like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Pinterest, and those sites would likely be unable to exist in the face of such liability. As such, it’s often hailed as a carefully constructed compromise between the two sides. However, this is not a two-sided issue. By only looking at copyright holders and online services, we neglect the interests of the most populous sector involved in copyright law: the public.