I'm ashamed to admit that I was worried at first--I didn't stop to consider that that's not the way it would happen: copyright violation is a civil not criminal violation, so a process server would have delivered to Max and Dick and Susan subpoenas, perhaps accompanied by an injunction ordering they shut down the DB immediately under threat of contempt of court. They'd be ordered to keep it closed until it was purged of all except music for which they could establish a prima facie case that it was unchallenged public domain. The forum would also have to be expunged of anything which may have any, however doubtful, claim of authorship by any publisher or performer. Then, holders of copyrights of anything that has been transmitted to or from the Mudcat would start filing claims against Max, Dick, Susan, and all of us who have submitted such material, asking for real and punitive damages...the plaintiffs, having vastly greater resources than all of us put together would win any trial and the appeals courts would uphold the verdicts and Max, Dick, Susan, and John and Jane Does numbers one through five thousand would find our paychecks garnisheed and our instruments taken for public auction, our homes alread mortgaged to the hilt to pay our lawyers through the first stages of the proceeding (the funds would have run out long before the trial began). The ACLU would be unable to take up the Mudcat's cause, already being involved in the case on behalf of some songwriters too poor to have their property rights protected by the big firms... --seed