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Sorry, no, that's just wrong. IANAL but it's rather clear that responding to DMCA takedowns is what grants you safe harbor protection, and such takedowns are ma
by seabee 15y ago
Sorry, no, that's just wrong. IANAL but it's rather clear that responding to DMCA takedowns is what grants you safe harbor protection, and such takedowns are made under penalty of perjury. Unless you are outside the US or you're happy to lose your protected status and get sued for copyright infringement whenever a user uploads copyrighted content, you can't just choose to disobey it because you feel like it.
- eli 15y agoYes, that's my point. Respond to a DMCA according to the rules, or you could be sued. Likewise, respond to a C&D or you could be sued. In fact, since the C&D offers no safe harbor, you could be sued even if you do exactly what it asks. The threat in both cases is the same. If anything the DMCA is weaker.
- seabee 15y agoYou're mixing up the weight of the threat (that you could get sued for this) with the weight of the C&D itself, which at best means "I cared enough to pay a lawyer some comparatively small fee to write this for me" and in this case means bunk. You could even pretend you owned the image and that I broke a million laws, if you wanted - it's not legally binding. Besides, sending a DMCA takedown doesn't bar the sender from suing you if you aren't an online service provider (e.g. you're a blogger using Wordpress.com, rather than Wordpress.com itself) or if you knew you hosted the supposedly infringing material in the first place. Both of these apply in this case.