Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
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.  |
Yes I do recall reading of accounts being closed simply because someone made a complaint. Common sense is an obvious requirement, and unfortunately you can't depend on it always being used. The idea is to not trample on ANYONE's rights.
A hosting site can't keep track of everything on their site, but if something is called to their attention, they should check it out and take appropriate action. AND they should be sure to make it possible and relatively easy for people to report possible violations.