“Piracy never stopped the movie Avatar from making nearly 3 billion dollars. Cassette tapes never killed the recording industry and VHS never killed cinema. The real truth to this story is big money trying to squeeze every drop possible out of our last great frontier. Does piracy really kill that many jobs? How many companies have stopped making records and movies? Are they going to fire thousands of people because they took a 3% loss in profit to privacy? No. The one percent needs one hundred percent control of all their pennies no matter the cost of human  rights and communication. SOPA supporters can burn in hell.”

JustinDurham

Copyright infringement is successfully protected now when the web host or datacenter housing the infringing servers willing complies - which is universal within the U. S.

If the web host or datacenter are not willing to comply, no matter what is done, workarounds will be created to bypass the filtering mechanism.

I own a small web hosting company. What follows is how we do it. Other web hosts have similar procedures.

As it is now, we are not liable for content on our customers' websites unless we are aware of it. We do not look for infringing content, but when we do notice it, we take action to get it removed or shut the site down.

However, what usually happens is that we get a phone call or email from someone who says their copyright is being violated by a customer. We evaluate this informal request and the content. Then we contact our customer who owns the website in question. If it is obvious to us that the content is in violation, we tell the customer they must remove the content or their website will be shutdown until they comply. In all of these cases, the website owner removes the content and we assist them by getting the content removed from search engines, to the extent that can be done.

If it isn't obvious that the content is in violation, we tell the complainant that they must provide a formal DMCA demand letter, which has penalties if they are making false claims. It's easy to submit a DMCA demand letter. We require this because we could be sued by the website owner if we took down content that isn't actually infringing.

If a DMCA demand letter is submitted, we look at it and if it is now obvious that infringement exists, we take the above actions.

At this point we ask the website owner to document that the content is not infringing. We provide this to the complainant, etc. This has always resolved the issue in our experience.

If it still isn't clear that there is a violation, then we discuss it with the web site owner and require that they execute a document stating they are not in violation, that they will defend any lawsuits, and that they have the financial resources to defend a lawsuit or criminal charges, including funding our defense as the web host.

Usually, we resolve the issue when we receive an informal complaint and only occasionally require the complainant to file a DMCA demand letter. When this happened, it was always defamation claims. In some cases, the website owner removed the content and in the others, the complainant backed down.

INTERESTINGLY: We pursue copyright infringement on behalf of our customers and other clients whose copyright has been violated. They hire us to do this for them because we have been 100% successful in resolving these complaints without getting attorneys involved or taking legal action. The feedback we get is that they've always had to get attorneys involved, which is much more expensive than what we charge for this service. We also regain control of hijacked domain names for clients.

All of this is to say that the system works now.

oldbrit

Wed Jan 18 08:06:24 PST 2012