Quote:
Originally Posted by cmbs
I have found some file hosting sites that will delete the illegal downloads and close accounts if it continues. But a lot of these sites don't care and won't remove them even when it's obvious the downloads are illegal. So you can't count on websites to do any policing either. There are sites I trust, but you have to assess them for yourself, again. You can't just assume this is a big well known website so they wouldn't allow anyone to use it illegally.
|
I certainly think that a site that hosts content (be it books, music, pictures, or whatever) has a responsibility to remove hosted content once someone points out a problem with it. Personally, I think that ought to take the form of trying to follow up and see if the complaint is valid. And if the complaint turns out to
not be valid, the site operators should back off.
That's pretty much what we try to do here: if someone points out a file that seems suspicious to them, we remove it from being downloadable and try and figure out what the story really is with the book in question. Once we do that we proceed accordingly.
As it happens, when we realized that we had an issue vis a vis U.S. copyright law with a chunk of our uploads we split the hosting to one server in Canada and a second one in the U.S. so that we could host the most content we could in compliance with the relevant laws as best we could figure them out, great murky mess that they are.
At the time we mods actually divided up the uploads between us, and checked them to see which server they belonged on. That was quite a mess, and we had a lot fewer books then than we do now.
At the same time, I don't really feel that it's a hosting site's responsibility to go through everything that's uploaded to it and check for legality -- there's just too much to do that with if the site has any quantity of content at all.
