Are Cease & Desist letters necessary? I own a blog, and I want to have a Copyright Infringement section where companies that think I violated their rights can contact me. At first I thought this fell under the DMCA, since I heard the phrase being used around before, but I quickly realized that was only for ISP's and companies like YouTube.
So my question is, if a company wants me to stop infringing their rights, what is their required plan of action? Do they have to notify me first and give me a chance to take it down (a cease & desist letter) or are they allowed to go straight to the lawsuit? I just want to have reliable information on my Copyright section.
Also, I don't host this on my own server: I buy hosting from a company. So would they be required to file a DMCA notice only if they wanted to sue my host, but not if they were going to sue me?
The "required" action to stop any infringer is to file a lawsuit with the US District Court in the district in which the infringer lives/operates or can be found (since this is an internet case, the "can be found" language gets a bit hairy). No cease-and-desist letter is actually necessary, but it is the general practice to send one because it looks good in a complaint opening litigation for plaintiff to be able to say "We tried; we sent a C&D letter but got no response."
The injured party has absolutely no obligation to contact you in the manner in which you want to be contacted.
The DMCA protects hosting services against suit for hosting an infringer. Thus, the infringed party would contact the host and demand that the infringing material be removed; the host then has a set period of time (and it's a pretty short time) to investigate and remove the allegedly infringing material; if they don't meet those time constraints, then the injured party can sue the host in a copyright infringement action. A DMCA notice can be sent whenever allegedly infringing material is found online, no matter what the intent to sue may be at the time.
If you post material that could infringe the copyright of others, you need to have a copyright attorney on retainer, because you are very likely to be sued and copyright law has teeth.
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