I am starting a file hosting service. I am wondering what the scenario would be with regarding if someone were to upload a illegal file and someone claimed a takedown against the file. I have made it clear in my terms of service that uploading illegal files is not allowed and that such offenders who violate this acceptable use agreement forfeit their IP addresse(s) and personal identifiable information to be given to authorities and damaged 3rd parties if requested. In such cases would deleting the file and giving them the IP and email address of the offender be enough to make them go away?
I have the same thing too.. luckily no big company has reported anything yet, I've had about 3 (small) labels contact me with taking the music files down (which I do straight away) and that's all. However with my site I manually go through each file and check its name and ID3 tags to see if it is a labelled artist - if so I remove the file straight away. If I was however contacted by, lets say Sony BMG then I'm sure they'll understand that YOU cannot be 100% responsible for all the files uploaded, but then again they could be crappy and take legal action. I doubt that would happen though.
Technically they could still sue you. Most would probably contact you before filing a DMCA, but it is not required. The attitude they will probably have depends on whether you site is a haven for copyrighted material, or is it something that rarely happens. Youtube takes down copyrighted material when reported and has a pretty strict TOS - but they have been sued several times.