The short answer is they don’t do anything. Except send back snarky replies.

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

If you’d like a good laugh, head over to The Pirate Bay’s legal threats page. For anyone who doesn’t know, The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which tracks various torrents, many of which allow one to download copyrighted content (a good basic summary can be found here on Wikipedia).  While those who run The Pirate Bay are actually currently on trial (that’s another story, however),  they clearly haven’t been deterred by legal threats in the past. Judging from their legal threats page (linked to earlier), it would seem they actually enjoy getting–and subsequently ignoring–takedown letters.

Most of the letters seem to be in the format required by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which protects those who host websites from liability for hosting copyrighted content provided that, among other things, they respond to takedown notices from copyright holders by removing the potentially copyrighted material in question. A fair number of them mention the DMCA, and some the specific section that creates the takedown system, § 512. Take this excerpt from this letter (great URL, btw) to The Pirate Bay from Microsoft:

This letter serves as notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512, or equivalent notice provisions of your local law,
that content currently residing within your computer system infringes on the
copyrights of Microsoft Corporation.

It seems, however, that the DMCA, being U.S. Federal Law, doesn’t really apply outside of the U.S., and, at least according to The Pirate Bay, there isn’t a Swedish equivalent. They point this out to in their response to another takedown notice (this one from Dreamworks claiming Pirate Bay was infringing on their copyright of Shrek 2):

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States
of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.
Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

I’d love to post more of that particular response,  but parts of it are somewhat vulgar, and I don’t want to offend anyone. That said, it’s pretty funny, and I suggest reading it if you’re not easily offended.

These takedown notices and the way in which The Pirate Bay responds to them illustrate an interesting point about the DMCA, namely that it is inherently somewhat limited in scope. Despite the many complaints people have about the DMCA, it does a remarkable job of protecting the interests of copyright holders while still allowing the internet to flourish (Fairly recently, Wired, of all magazines, actually published an article praising the DMCA, particularly the takedown system created by § 512, as “the law that saved the web.” I highly recommend reading it.)  What Pirate Bay’s legal threats page illustrates, however, is that the DMCA–or, for that matter, any U.S. Federal law–may only protect copyright holders from infringement by other actors in U.S. While I’m by no means an expert in either copyright or international law, my intuition leads me to believe that The Pirate Bay is correct in asserting it isn’t bound by U.S. law, unless there are treaties that make it so in this particular case. Given the internet’s inherently global nature, the fact that members of one country are not bound by others’ copyright law is a potentially huge hole in any single nation’s attempt to make copyright law applicable to the digital era.

Can (or, for that matter, should) this loophole be closed? One could imagine a treaty that acted as an international version of the DMCA, but I believe that would take far too much international cooperation to be at all likely. Alternately, the U.S. could pressure countries like Sweden into changing its copyright laws, but that’s unlikey to work. As this blog post suggest, Swedes don’t seem to like the idea of other nations influencing their laws. Furthermore, lenient copyright law seems to be the norm in Sweden: they’ve even got a political party known as the Pirate Party. Besides, as this excerpt from Pirate Bay’s response to a takedown notice indicates, at least some people (e.g., those at The Pirate Bay), like Sweden’s copyright laws the way they are:

Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you're in, we have
sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the
streets and attacking people  .