Demaestro - 4:50 pm on Sep 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

Ouchers,

Going to be tough for any webhost to give their customers the benefit of the doubt when a dispute arises.

Yes Louis Vuitton made the host aware of the infringement but the host has to take the word of Vuitton that their claim is valid even without a ruling and they have to shut the site down?

I find this somewhat unfair considering that there are special interest groups out there that are falsely filing DMCA's to remove content that is contrary to their special interest.

You can see this is rampant in Youtube now, unpopular speech is being removed by false DMCA filings, one of the reasons for this is it is easy to file a DMCA, it is hard to convince the host that you aren't infringing.

With a ruling like this it will be even harder to convince a host you are in the right... the price tag for being wrong is too high and most will start to err on the side of caution.

In this case I am not totally sympathetic to the host though that is a lot of money.