Hello, I have received a notice from the DMCA with some real bullshit in it, I think they have nothing against me actually. One of my websites contains a search engine, for music, it even has a notice that you may not use it for downloading illegal files. The database of the engine is of course updated automatically through lots of different sources, it crawls the internet. Of course, I'm aware of the fact this also brings in a lot of illegal mp3's, but there are just too much files to check them all. The engine doesn't download the files, it just stores the link in its database. We do have a page that contains an alphabetized index of previous searches, and a direct link to the results page of that search. Thanks to that index, the DMCA sent a notice, something about Ashlee Simpson music file. So in the end, the question is simple, can a search engine be illegal by accidentally indexing copyrighted material? I really don't see how Google.com can survive this then, lets not forget they have the biggest database of illegal files of all websites on the internet...
I would contact an actual lawyer on this. There are court cases right now involving search engines that index basically just illegal files, so there claim isn't totally insane. Google does index illegal content, but they will remove the offending content on request. Again I would get some more solid legal advice.
Seek Legal Advice but.... You would probably be okay if you could show that you have made all attempts possible to remove these files. Perhaps a "report an illegal file" link against every search result might be enough, and if anyone does that the file is removed immediatly into a moderation area for you to check. Do you have a disclaimer on your site?
A big problem in lawsuits like this is even though you're not actually hosting any illegal content, it's possible to use your site in connection with illegal downloading. And that's enough that some people (i.e. RIAA, music industry lawyers, etc.) will sue you or at least threaten to. Deleting some links and adding a report button as mentioned above may be all you need to save yourself a huge headache in this situation, if Ashlee Simpson's reps are serious about this. So in general it's a simple question without a simple answer.
Thanks a lot all for your advice; since we don't want to let our users down and also don't want any lawsuit, we have chosen the way in between and just made a new site for the search engine on an offshore server, where the DMCA can go... *bad word* itself. I now have read a lot more and seems like these cases almost never win, so I'm not going to start a fight with them.