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Kevin, your thoughts are correct, but they aren't matching up to the legal realities of the day.
When the DMCA act was created, it was suppose to stop copyright violation and make it easy to get stuff taken down. But because the law was poorly written and gave offenders too many ways out without penalty, it has actually become a major obstacle in the efforts to stop torrent and tube sites from stealing content. Essentially, if a site has valid contact information, and moved to remove content when they are informed of it, they are actually pretty much in the clear.
Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube / Google seeks in a sense to get the courts to create a "super offender" status for sites that remove content when notified, but allow that content to be re-added over and over again.
As for adult content, 2257 gives us some interesting potential to work with the government to shut down "user generated content" sites that have adult material (or even material that dwells on covered private parts). Sites like Youtube try to say "we are just a host", but in reality they provide services far beyond hosting, and actually do manipulate, categories, represent and republish content in ways that the submitter cannot control. It goes beyond the definition of hosting, and I am hoping that they new 2257 rules will very, very narrowly construe what is hosting. If they are not considered hosts for 2257, then potentially they could be considered not hosts for DMCA, which would put them in a much weaker position for that sort of thing.
One of the things I highly recommend to all content producers is to send DMCA notices to Google (there is a proper fax number specifically for this) which can get SERPs removed. That would go a long way to protecting your content and your affiliates, as it would make it harder for end users to find your content for free.
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