Fair enough, the real rights owner may have uploaded the books and videos themselves. I just think there's some irony here that Hotfile suddenly cares about copyright.
They care about protecting their own content and using the law to do so where possible - you can not logically infer from that fact that they care about copyright or the law more generally.
I was questioning the assumption that because they use the law this way they are necessarily bothered one way or the other about the laws and regulations as they apply in contexts other than this one.
This is half of the harm WB did: people like me and you started believing Hotfile is somehow evil, disregarding the law and whatnot. We don't know that, we just subscribe to the black propaganda.
Behind WB's ham-fisted tactics may well be conflict of interests: if WB are to distribute multimedia themselves, they sure would consider Hotfile competitors and want to slow them down.
There's no suddenly about it. Did you read the article? Hotfile created the tool WB is using to remove content. Hotfile is not responsible for their users. They are a hoster and under relevant law, DMCA, have specific responsibilities, which they seemed to have complied with.
