Tumblr Stole My [Subdomain] At The Behest of A Corporation
This happens on Shopify all the time now. Since we moved our servers to the United States we are being hit with DMCA related infringements almost weekly.<p>If we get normal trademark disputes they are usually easy to deal with: we simply put the two parties into direct contact and they can figure it out. However, if the requester uses the DMCA method everything changes: We get an ultimatum from our hosting company (Rackspace) to resolve the conflict within 7 days or they will unplug our servers, which would disconnect many thousands of e-commerce stores and millions of sales. Obviously we cannot allow this to happen. Rackspace does this because they need to stay a "safe harbor" under the DMCA and this is how they pass the buck to us.<p>Luckily there have been precedents where false DMCA claims have lead to hundreds of thousands of dollar in damages to the plaintiffs. Our only recurse is to point this out to the  originator of the claim before forwarding it to the affected store. In most cases this leads to them dropping the complaint and/or pursuing the (correct) copyright/trademark avenue instead.