Nobody making a web-based business should care unless their business relies on showing people a bunch of ads on their way to pirate the latest movies etc.
Putting up a place on your website to receive DMCA takedown notices, having a policy in place, and responding swiftly seems like good practice for any app that accepts user-generated content.
It's a pain in the rear to find a given site because they give you PDFs and they're out of date, so I'm not going to look it up. You can find other hints on finding someone's registered agent here:
So I don't know whether or not YC has one, but you do not get safe harbor protection if you don't have one. That means you can be blamed for something your users do.
Hopefully, HN's users won't make that into a problem, but as a pure business decision, it's unwise not to. Has anyone ever submitted news from the Las Vegas Review Journal? They're going around and suing people right now for that, looking in particular for people who don't have a registered DMCA agent and who can, therefore, be held liable for their users actions. HN links to tons of news sources. If that case pans out for them, I'd expect it to turn into a legal gold rush for enterprising lawyers. $105 to register your site is pretty cheap insurance.
IANAL. This is not legal advice. Copyright lawsuits are very expensive, due to the high statutory damages. Talking with a lawyer is cheap in comparison, so be sure to get proper legal advice before taking any legal action.
Nonsense. Read up on which sites the DHS has been shutting down and the sloppiness of their processes. Any site with any kind of user-generated content should seriously think of basing itself outside of the US.
They're claiming the right to shut down sites that link to infringing content, and using it to shut down hip-hop sites (and others).
From TechDirt:
"The Marketplace radio show from American Public Media spoke to Special Agent James Hayes from Homeland Security, who was apparently in charge of the "raids" (if you can call them that) that involved the seizing of domain names under the legally questionable theory that linking to infringing material is, by itself, criminal copyright infringement. I've yet to find any legal expert who seems to believe that the law actually says this anywhere."
The article you mentioned is real torrentfreak quality - some sexy hyperbole about Google being the biggest enabler for piracy, and an "innocent" victim.
The innocent victim is a link dump for mp3s from Snoop Dogg, 50 cent, Timbaland and a bunch of other artists.
Takes about 5 seconds to see their business model - get the traffic in by providing popular music they're going to have to remove... but not before they've made some money off it.
These guys have got it down to an art too - they actually upload the songs to a site that encourages "artists" to upload "their" songs and pays you when people download it inconveniently for free or conveniently via premium download accounts.
Apparently Snoop Dogg is so incredibly generous he wants them to be paid for giving away his music too - not just from the ads on their site, but from the download service as well.
But maybe these blogs are right and not just churning out fluff that converts well to ad impressions. I could be that jaded, maybe these really are impeccable sites, innocent victims, and not profiteering off piracy.
These sites would have no users if it wasnt for the highly valuable content that millions love and clamor for; content that cost millions to make and even more to market.
Overall by the looks of it, it's going to be increasingly hard to maintain and profit from sites like these. Maybe this will force us back to desktop software like limewire, but a modern version.
There were reports of one music blog where the allegedly infringing files had been provided by the labels themselves. I don't remember what blog it was, but they were reported to have hired a lawyer to fight it.
I have no way to check that, obviously, but it seems to me that it would be a waste of money to hire a lawyer if you had no case when you could simply register another domain outside of the USA for a lot less.
Also, there's the fact that similar accusations were made by Google/YouTube in their litigation with Viacom. You don't have to take Google's word for that, either. You can check the court filings and see that they did, in fact, remove the files that they themselves uploaded to Google from the litigation. Twice.
That was reported on Ars Technica, if memory serves, but I don't have a link handy.
