The primary thing commentators on HN don't acknowledge is that dealing with legal issues, whether in court or phone calls/letters, costs money and time. That ta

The primary thing commentators on HN don't acknowledge is that dealing with legal issues, whether in court or phone calls/letters, costs money and time. That takes a company away from their core objective of delivering service to their customers (in the round) and making a profit. Most companies would rather spend their money on product/customer development than hire more lawyers. But, there's a lot of low-level 'rights holders' hassle for many digital companies. A steady and constant stream of Copyright and (separately) DMCA take-down notices. When I was in a service provider we didn't think it was our job to resolve those issues (it's for the end-user site to defend whether it is or is not copyright infringing) because we were just providing a service: as a SP you're just caught in the cross-fire. It comes down to them making a risk assessment on whether they're more likely to incur cost from taking down versus ignoring. In some cases the balancing act is due to the nature of the outcomes: on the one side if you do nothing it's unlikely (low probability) but you could land-up in court and incur millions, versus on the other side refunding a customer their annual subscription and taking a reputation hit - it's the asteroid crash problem. It's notable that they asked their customer for a response and didn't get (what they consider) a satisfactory one. Who knows the specifics in this situation, but they won't have done it just on a whim!