This kind of thing makes the US horribly dangerous to internet businesses and now that you have done it to a much bigger shark than yourself, they will be gunning for you.
Imagine it the other way around, perhaps on something much more innocuous that is easy to miss. Would you rather a court case to decide an appropriate action against you, or your site ripped off the net, requiring you to then go to court to get it reinstated?
The speed that was so helpful to you as a startup in this instance is what will leave you dead in the water if you mess up, even accidentally, in the future (I am not suggesting that what was done to you was accidental, although many of their management may not have understood the details).
Getting your site reinstated is as easy as the other person having it taken down: a one-page counter-notice sent to the same contact at the service provider attesting that you are not infringing the other person's copyright.
For the service provider to have "safe harbor" from liability, they must also put your content back up just as quickly as they took it down. Now the other party has to actually take you to court to take your content down again.
Point still stands though, there should be at the very least an accountable, transparent public third party (ideally a legal court) that deals with both parties involved, before content that isn't explicitly criminal is removed.
Like reading Kafka. This guy will be crying about the dmca when they use it to remove things such as listings from his site.
Also, the company is in Canada, i was ignorant of this reach. Til
I think you might be right on the parallel here, we'll see over time if it plays out into an irony filled bureaucratic tragedy for them.
[edit] I think of the DMCA as being something of an area weapon, and startups usually have a much smaller surface area than everybody else.
Where the DMCA is widely reviled is in its other parts, most particularly the anti-circumvention provisions that, when the law was drafted, made things like security research or reflashing a consumer device criminal acts (c.f. the Skylarov case). It should be noted that this nonsense, while it's still in the law, has been significantly dilluted by a bunch of regulatory exemptions enacted by the executive branch.
Although this one was a success story, it has largely been ineffective in stopping copyright violation in many other scenarios. Youtube, the biggest video platform on the net, still continues to host thousands of copyrighted videos, many owned by people who are notoriously aggressive about enforcing their copyright. I don't think the takedown scales really well. It's basically you vs. the internet and you are going to lose :)
This is a terrible title, and "I was thankful for one benefit of DMCA" is not the same as "I love DMCA."
I hope they don't really believe the DMCA is a wonderful thing just because it was beneficial to them in this one instance. I realize they pointed out that it has some horrible parts, but I get the feeling they don't feel that any reform is necessary.
Copyright reform is only becoming more necessary as time goes on.
To me, the real LOL part of this was the image sprite...Sutton didn't even bother to change the name of the file! Just shows that they were totally thumbing their nose at Estately and the law.
Here's the screenshot of that: http://blog.estately.com/assets/Estately-images-on-Sutton_s-....
