People in the US don't have to comply with DMCA notices either. The safe harbor provision of the DMCA does not create new obligations, it creates a "if this then that" situation:
IF a service provider receives a notice of infringement AND promptly disables access to the content, THEN the service provider is granted immunity from liability for that infringement.
If you ignore the notice then this provision simply doesn't apply. You haven't "violated the DMCA" or anything like that, you simply don't gain the benefits offered by meeting the conditions of that section of the law.
Why would an entity outside of the US choose to comply with those notices? Because they may be sued in a US court, and when in a US court, the judge is going to apply US law -- including the protections of the safe harbor provision.
Why would an entity outside the US care about the result of a trial in US court? First, because international treaties mean they may be extradited to the US for violating these particular laws, and second, because the officers of the company may wish to be able to travel to the US -- at which point a sentence against them could be carried out.
What you're saying makes no sense. Can Iran extradite me for writing software to upload pornography to the Internet? (It's a capital offense there.) Of course not, because that's not how laws work. They can try to extradite me, of course, but no reasonable country would ever assist them. Similarly, it makes very little sense to extradite programmers at Megaupload. Sure, Megaupload is probably illegal in the US. But we're not in the US, so it doesn't matter. (They got the extradition by saying that Megaupload is laundering money, among other things. This is like extraditing a coffee shop owner in Amsterdam for selling pot. It's illegal in the US, after all, and he's laundering his ill-gotten money by pretending to sell coffee.)
This is garbage and I can't believe any court in the world would uphold this extradition. I'm appalled that they even got a US court to issue a warrant for such obviously-trumped-up charges. This is truly unprecedented.
generally extradition treaties, out of common sense, require something to be illegal in both jurisictions.
World powers are pretty much on the same page when it comes to money laundering. Following the money, as they say.
Your dutch coffeeshop owner hasnt committed a crime in the us by any stretch of the imagination, and is operating according to the wishes of his government (even if the weed is technicLly still illegAl, the current setup is ok, and the coffee shop owners are not hiding their profits... so its not mney laundering.
The internet changes the landscape drastically.... and using current laws to deal with real issues involving it is often dificult to useless. That doesnt mean we shold justify things that are wrong, nor should we make bad law.
ignoring the international issues.... just because a site could be used for copyright infringement is noreason tomtake it down. but lets be realistic, there a many sites out there where the owners knew damn well that their primary customer base were copyright infringers, and they catered to it fairly directly. sure some people used it for other things..... but if the primary revenue stream hosting and serving unlicensed work and you darn well know it.... you are asking for trouble.
The issue I have is with the money laundering charges. When you do something legal and put the money in your bank account, that's not money laundering. So while running Megaupload in the US might lead to money laundering charges, running it out of Hong Kong doesn't. They aren't hiding the source of their money: it comes from people paying to download pirated content. It's China, they don't really care about piracy there.
IF a service provider receives a notice of infringement AND promptly disables access to the content, THEN the service provider is granted immunity from liability for that infringement.
If you ignore the notice then this provision simply doesn't apply. You haven't "violated the DMCA" or anything like that, you simply don't gain the benefits offered by meeting the conditions of that section of the law.
Why would an entity outside of the US choose to comply with those notices? Because they may be sued in a US court, and when in a US court, the judge is going to apply US law -- including the protections of the safe harbor provision.
Why would an entity outside the US care about the result of a trial in US court? First, because international treaties mean they may be extradited to the US for violating these particular laws, and second, because the officers of the company may wish to be able to travel to the US -- at which point a sentence against them could be carried out.