I would be willing to grant that they had a good-faith belief that something was infringing if someone had mislabeled or ambiguously labeled it such that it could reasonably refer to something they hold the copyright on, even if the content in question was not infringing.
I would not be willing to grant them that much credit for all the examples cited in the article where they simply didn't bother to check the output of their search programs and stop them from returning garbage.
I simply don't believe that the good faith requirement means anything if they can get away with requesting a takedown of the file "http://hotfile.com/contacts.html and give them the details of where the link was posted and the link and they will deal to the @sshole who posted the fake." repeatedly and get away with it.
God help us if some RIAA artist decides to get clever and name their next album something like "THE." I can only imagine what sort of takedowns they might issue.
So suppose I write a script that removes Cascading Stylesheet tags from web pages, and replaces them with inline style tags. Suppose I call it DeCSS.pl
What right would the MPAA have for believing this has anything to do with Content Scrambling System? You know, they could download and look at the file before assuming it is infringing.....
If I were allowed to decide how the law should be, I would still allow actual damages against them, if any, in such a case. And I'd only allow their confusion as a concession, rather than allowing the good faith requirement to be meaningless.
They'd be much better off if they accepted the inevitable and learned how to provide value to their customers (like Steam, for example). I just don't actually expect them to do that.
As long as actual damage includes:
1) Attorney fees
2) Business disruption costs
3) The time I have to spend away from work to carry the suit forward (in other words, the longer they drag it out, the more the damages are)...
4) Interest on all the foregoing.....
I would not be willing to grant them that much credit for all the examples cited in the article where they simply didn't bother to check the output of their search programs and stop them from returning garbage.
I simply don't believe that the good faith requirement means anything if they can get away with requesting a takedown of the file "http://hotfile.com/contacts.html and give them the details of where the link was posted and the link and they will deal to the @sshole who posted the fake." repeatedly and get away with it.
God help us if some RIAA artist decides to get clever and name their next album something like "THE." I can only imagine what sort of takedowns they might issue.