TorrentFreak reports that Quote Unquote Records has had their site pulled because their ISP demanded copyright registration forms for their music.
Around a week ago, the label was notified by its webhost that it had some copyright music files on its server, which was no surprise to them since they were tracks by Arrogant Sons of Bitches, one of the label’s bands. The tracks the webhost referred to were actually written by Jeff himself. Jeff spoke with someone at the host on the telephone, explained that they were his own tracks and was informed this wasn’t a problem.
Three days later the labels site went down completely, due to Jeff hosting his own copyright files on his own site – a claimed violation of the hosting company’s Terms of Service. In order to solve the problem, Jeff would have to send his copyright registration forms to the host by mail, to prove he held the copyright, a problem in itself, explains Jeff:
“I called the company to explain that a lot of this material was NOT in fact registered with the US copyright office, instead we did the ol’ poor man’s copyright. The music that was copyrighted was done so under a Creative Commons License, which is a digital copyright that cannot be viewed if the website where the files are posted is down.”
I can imagine their ISP potentially losing their immunity in copyright lawsuits for preemptive strikes like this,. I’m pretty sure the DMCA says that ISPs are to act only when notified of infringements on their services, not before.