http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/ One part of this legal talk says that a provider is not required by law to remove, then goes on to say, may face secondary liability... A service provider is not required by law to remove the allegedly infringing material, but upon receipt of a compliant notification will deemed to have been placed on notice of the allegedly infringing activity, and without the benefit of the limitations on liability contained in § 512, may face secondary liability for continuing to host the allegedly infringing material. Please look at the entire website. Would appreciate a summary in english. Thanks
Basically the law gives ISPs a way to avoid trouble for copyright material their users host. Once the ISP is told about it, and if they move quickly to remove the offending material, they will not be liable. That is what section 512 says. However as the section you cited points out says, ISPs are not required to act (it is 100% their decision to remove after getting a notice or not). But, if they don't remove the offending material they lose the protections provided to them in §512 and then can get sued and be held liable.
Ok, I understand. I also thought that site owners was not responsible for 3 party content regardless... after all, look at how many times Ripoffreport.com has been sued, and they are still online... I would think a host would act regardless...lets say I had a forum that had some type of illegal content... who is going to wait for me to remove it, when they will just file a DMCA notice directly with the host to begin with, overall, if you look at it this way, the host is overall in charge, not the forum...so if someone makes a threat against the host with a lawsuit, I see them closing the forum regardless (for their protection) Where do you see ISP? see a lot of "Service Provider" quotes.... The reason I ask all this is because I have run across a company that has been buying copyright stuff, then truning around and filing suits on websites without warning because they have the content on their website. Forums under legal attacks
If a host will respond or not depends on many factors. There certainly are some hosts in some countries that will not respond and remove material that breaches IPRs despite the threat of legal action. Site owners are responsible, as are reseller hosts, as are the genuine hosts (which could be many tiers up) if they are made aware of it. Certainly attacking others for breach of IPRs is an increasingly common practice and many companies are making acquisitions simply to gain the IPR such as that companies trademarks or patents - look at the number of legal actions ongoing in the smart phone market between Apple, Nokia, Motorola and RiM etc. If you could find a source that all your competitors had copied from, you could aquire that sources rights and then in the matter of a few weeks take all your competitors out, wouldn't you if the money was right?