Funnily enough I operate a service to download copyright-expired content.. Only most of the content is still under copyright in the US. Early Elvis works seem to be very popular.

I've banned all non-local IP addresses from the website with a splash page which tells them why they're unable to access content.

This also doesn't stop my local ISP's and hosts eventually giving up on hosting my content as they're sick of reviewing DMCA's from US-based copyright-holders. Many of the smaller ones simply give me 24 hours notice or no notice at all, nobody wants to risk a lawsuit from the big-bad US media companies.

I get several hundred letters and emails a year with copyright holders threatening lawsuits and legal action. I suspect similar issues will arise for non-GDPR compliant services in the form of user support tickets.

Isn't "webhosts that cheerfully ignore DMCA complaints" a large, well-established industry?

Not in my country, and I have no intention of hosting this outside these borders which could get me in legal hot water.

For curiosity, where are you? Are you unable to find a DMCA-proof server in a country where your content would also be legal, or is there a different problem?

It's a different problem - I'm part of the Commonwealth.

I could host it in a country that would ignore requests, but the point of the website is to do everything correctly. If I hosted my content in a country that doesn't care about copyright or DMCA, I'm putting myself at risk if I was brought into court as I've purposefully skirted around laws.

My country has proven we are held to US copyright law - see the Kim DotCom case. What would usually be considered a matter for civil court was brought into criminal court because it crossed borders and unfounded claims were made against the accused (namely money laundering) who's now being extradited.

I simply want to provide a free, legal media service to those in my country. There's no money in it - I don't even run AdSense, I simply pay for hosting. So far, so good.

If I do get dragged into court, I expect a precedence to be set for future cases. This will also open up a lot of free historical media for government-run TV and streaming services, and local media producers.

It's kind of like a weird tech protest against goofy copyright laws.

But does US law actually require you to respond to the DMCA notice? Like, the provider loses its safe harbor, but if there's no violation of US copyright law then why does that matter? That's perhaps a different test case from the one that you intend, of course...

US law shouldn't matter to us at all. We shouldn't need to know what a DMCA notice is. A copyright claim should be made in the host country's format applicable to their laws, that doesn't seem to be a reality to any of the claims I've received.

Where I am, you should receive an IP rights notice and an interim injunction to remove the works. I've never received anything like that.

> What would usually be considered a matter for civil court was brought into criminal court because it crossed borders

Wasn't it criminal because he was doing it as a business and earning money from it?

That's still a civil case in New Zealand. It's copyright infringement, you don't go to jail - you get sued and bankrupted. The fact he was making money from it doesn't change the court, he just gets sued for more (in this case, it would have been everything he owned).