You're also required to have a good faith belief that the content is actually infringing. Not easy to prove you're not, but it's something.

The EFF's "dancing baby" lawsuit is still going; if they win that will set a stronger precedent for forcing copyright owners to first consider fair use.

These kind of cases make me wonder, what ever happened to the common sense.. The (classical) Roman law was probably the best system the 'makers of law' ever came up to. After that, it only went downhill.

You have to provide contact information any sane webhost is going to check the information is actually valid before taking down the content.

perhaps dmca takedown notices should stipulate that the party should leave some identifying information, so they can be traced back. I suspect credit card info would be a good one.