I wanted to take a moment to post about DCMA takedowns and their potential effect on steem, steemit and those individuals hosting nodes. I've been doing a little research on this, as I was inspired by 
As many of you are aware, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides a "takedown" procedure, whereby the owner of copyrighted material can serve an official notice on an ISP or other data host about copyright infringement. This was established in section 512 the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act.
What many of you might not be aware of is that this provision was not put in the law to protect copyright holders. As you can probably guess from the name, it was put in the law to protect data hosts and ISP's. In exchange for their expeditious compliance with s512 notices, they were given what amounts to qualified immunity from civil liability and criminal prosecution for copyrighted material that they reproduced or distributed without authorization.
Steem and steemit, however, is in a curious position with regards to this act. Because material is stored on the blockchain, it is not possible to them to fully comply with a s512 takedown.
This isn't a well-explored area of the law, but the net effect of this could not only be civil liability for steem itself, but also for anyone with a node that broadcasts the chain.
Incidentally, lest this be seen as piling on the recent arguments about copyright here on the site, I don't think anything comes even close to potentially provoking a lawsuit.
But what happens when people realize that this is a perfect venue for a torrent index.. even though nothing has yet come close, the format here is a dream come true for people looking to distribute copyrighted music and movies. Even flagging such material would accomplish nothing, as the info would remain on the chain, even if it was invisible here.