Bureaucrat 'bo1024, you are technically correct --- the best kind of correct! Following the strict letter of the DMCA does not in fact guarantee that nobody will make a mistake or fail to stop someone abusing process.

What this has to do with the meat of the comment you're responding to, I'm less sure of; that comment was useful in that it corrects an extremely common misconception about the DMCA (that if you simply have a process to honor takedown requests, you're a service provider immune to prosecution).

Regardless of your opinion about copyright or the DMCA, it remains an under-appreciated fact that if you do the things Kim Schmitz was discovered to have done (it's spelled out explicitly in the Mega emails), you're violating the DMCA whether or not you honor takedowns; further, you're not simply committing individual infractions by doing so, but instead (potentially) forfeiting all your protections as a service provider under the DMCA.

If you look at the comment that was responding to, it was a quote from dotcom on how the DOJ is going around the DMCA to illegally take down legitimate sites. My comment was on-topic, but the parent comment, while technically correct, was misleadingly off-topic. It implied that, if you stick to the letter of the law, you'll be fine. That's not true, and that's what the original quote was pointing out.

It would be very bad advice to site operators with expose to US law to ignore that law because it is capriciously applied.

For one thing, its application is much less capricious than the echo-chamber would like you to believe; there's a cascading availability bias at play, because it's hard for Techdirt and Torrentfreak to drive page views with stories about sites that play by the rules and don't have a problem with takedowns. You only hear about the dramatic cases, but the fact is that the boring cases are much more common.

For another, regardless of whether you can be taken down by accident or malice when you follow the rules, you will, if you're popular, be taken down, sued, and potentially prosecuted if you run a site the way Kim Schmitz ran his.

I'm less interesting in refuting you or any other commenter on this thread than I am in being clear about what the situation is. There is a widespread belief on HN that the takedown of Megaupload was unlawful because Kim Schmitz and his team responded to takedowns. Whatever technical or even Constitutional issues may or may not have tainted the case against Megaupload, we now know that Megaupload was in fact a conspiracy to evade copyright law.

We can dispute the legitimacy of the prosecution, but it's no longer possible to credibly dispute the underlying facts. And, back to this thread: those facts are instructive. There is more to US copyright law for service providers than accepting takedown requests.

If I'm not mistaken, your first example was a case where 1 website made in on a list (a list with 100s of other entries) BY MISTAKE. And the bureaucratic process took over.

What happened to that website was an exception, not the rule.

On your second point, the evidence was so overwhelming clear on MU being a criminal enterprise, that when combined with KimDotCom's long criminal history, it was quite clear what was going on.