Forum Moderators: not2easy
Does the copyright owners fire complaints to those services? My assumption is that they DO but does the hosting service providers have to remove the resource? Is it against the law if they don't? They must have some kind of disclaimer, but does this really disclaim them of the possible infringement of hosting these copyrighted materials?
I know a lot of forums where members share with each other copyrighted ebooks, in this case, will the forum owner be caught in law?
In the U.S., the owner of a sharing platform may seek protection by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) under certain provisions. This act requires certain pre-requisites for protection. The cornerstones are (if I remember correctly):
- the hosting service has to act as a host for user contributed content (i.e. the service may not publish the infringing content itself; the users have to do this!)
- the hosting service may not see a financial benefit from the infringing activity
- the hosting service may not have knowledge of the infringment
- upon getting knowledge of an infringement, the hosting service needs to remove the content object
- upon receiving a "DMCA notification" (pointing to an infringement)from the rightful owner of a content object, the content needs to be either removed immediately, or a strict protocol needs to be followed (notifying the uploader, asking their opinion, and acting as a proxy between the two parties if a conflict exists)
Most commercial services do not meet the DMCA prerequisites as they have clearly commercial use in mind, thus benefiting directly from the infringing activity, e.g. by placing ads around the infringing content.
Some services, however, simply do not care for copyrights just because they have deep pockets (think Youtube).
Personally, I recommend to stay far away from even thinking about publishing commercial ebooks or electronic versions of Amazon books. Just monitor what's going on with [insert name of that Silicon Valley startup that is considered the "Youtube for documents"]. It will be interesting to see if and how they will get out of the copyright infringements performed by their users.
