It's much simpler than that. To be protected by the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, a service provider must not only promptly disable access to material upon receipt of a notice, they must also promptly re-enable access to that material upon receipt of a counternotice.
The original author need only send these notices and the blog posts must be put back up if WordPress wants to be protected from being sued itself for distributing the material. In most cases, this entails nothing more than 2 minutes to copy and paste an e-mail from a readily available template, simply adding in your name and URLs of the content you attest you have permission to publish.
The DMCA errs on the side of leaving alleged infringing material online, not the other way around. To force something down, you have to go to court and get a judgement.
The perjury statement is actually weaker than it seems. The wording you see in a lot of copy-and-paste notice templates is stronger than is required by the act. You only have to attest under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act on behalf of the holder of a copyright, not that the contents of your claim are true.
"To get content removed, copyright holder Bob need only claim a good-faith belief that neither he nor the law has authorized the use. Bob is not subject to penalties for perjury. In contrast, to get access to content re-enabled, Alice must claim a good faith belief under penalty of perjury that the material was mistakenly taken down. This allows for copyright holders to send out take-down notices without incurring much liability; to get the sites back up, the recipients might need to expend considerably more resources. Section 510(f) makes the sender of an invalid claim liable for the damages resulting from the content’s improper removal, including legal fees, but that remedy is not always practical.
Furthermore, ISP’s tend to remove allegedly offending material immediately, while there is a 10-14 day delay before the ISP re-enables access in response to a counter-notice. For example, if a website advertised an upcoming labor protest outside BlameCo, BlameCo could send a DMCA notice to the site's ISP alleging copyright infringement of their name or logo a week before the protest. The site would then be disabled; even if the site's owners immediately filed a counter-notice, access would not be re-enabled until after the protest, too late to be useful." [1]
The behavior described above is consistent with many ISPs, Google and Youtube, for example. In fact, with Youtube's stated policy [2] it is not even clear that without consent from the original "copyright holder" that they will restore content (though from DMCA terms alone they are theoretically legally obliged). Wordpress's stated policy [3] is more direct but no less frustrating for victims of malicious takedown notices.
It's a trade-off. There's potential harm to the victim of a false claim, but there's also potential harm to the victim of a true claim in the case of a false counternotice. If the infringement is legitimate, then the law wants there to be ample time for the victim to go to court to get an injunction so further harm isn't done. It allows those ~10-14 days for that to happen -- after which the material has to be put back online for the service provider to retain the safe harbor benefits.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA exists entirely to take away power from copyright holders. It creates an entire class of businesses (internet service providers) who can't be sued for infringing copyrights if they follow certain rules. It makes copyright holders that abuse the provision pay both damages and legal fees of the victim. It enables the legal existence of sites like YouTube despite rampant copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, other provisions of the same act directly benefit copyright holders: prohibiting breaking of anti-circumvention measures, for example. This gives DRM its legal teeth beyond simple breach of contract.
How does this fit into your conspiracy theory? There isn't one single group that this act represents the interests of.
It isn't a conspiracy theory to say that media interests did the lobbying for DMCA. I cannot even find a reference to an ISP lobby that promoted it. Was there one?
To be protected by the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, a service provider must not only promptly disable access to material upon receipt of a notice, they must also promptly re-enable access to that material upon receipt of a counternotice.
Not quite!
There is a re-enabling procedure. But it comes with a mandatory 10 day waiting period before the material can be put back up.
The original author need only send these notices and the blog posts must be put back up if WordPress wants to be protected from being sued itself for distributing the material. In most cases, this entails nothing more than 2 minutes to copy and paste an e-mail from a readily available template, simply adding in your name and URLs of the content you attest you have permission to publish.
The DMCA errs on the side of leaving alleged infringing material online, not the other way around. To force something down, you have to go to court and get a judgement.
The perjury statement is actually weaker than it seems. The wording you see in a lot of copy-and-paste notice templates is stronger than is required by the act. You only have to attest under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act on behalf of the holder of a copyright, not that the contents of your claim are true.