> would I reasonably be able to take legal action against them if they deny me the service for what turns out to be a frivolous DMCA claim?
The point of the DMCA Safe Harbour provision is that the OSP is protected if they don't involve themselves and just proxy claims assuming their are in good faith/correct. So no. You may have a claim if the OSP does not restore service after a counter-notice with no followup legal action from the claimant but they're allowed 10-14 business days for that one so you may be out for 3 weeks without any recourse, but OSPs can also rely on their TOS to make that moot and even ignore the counter-notice altogether.
You probably won't even have a claim against the originally alleged copyright owner: the notice of copyright infringement only requires "good faith belief" under no penalty of perjury.
> You probably won't even have a claim against the originally alleged copyright owner: the notice of copyright infringement only requires "good faith belief" under no penalty of perjury.
That you don't have a specific DMCA-derived or declaration-under-penalty-of-perjury-derived cause of action doesn't mean you don't have a standard defamation-based cause of action.
The point of the DMCA Safe Harbour provision is that the OSP is protected if they don't involve themselves and just proxy claims assuming their are in good faith/correct. So no. You may have a claim if the OSP does not restore service after a counter-notice with no followup legal action from the claimant but they're allowed 10-14 business days for that one so you may be out for 3 weeks without any recourse, but OSPs can also rely on their TOS to make that moot and even ignore the counter-notice altogether.
You probably won't even have a claim against the originally alleged copyright owner: the notice of copyright infringement only requires "good faith belief" under no penalty of perjury.