Matirion Foreign entities have been found guilty of US copyright violations and punished for it. If you think the DMCA can't be enforced on foreign entities, you need to study up some more.
Of course foreign entities can be held liable for DMCA violations. It's just exceedingly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, and is not guaranteed to work even part of the time.
Foreign corporate entities have been found guilty in the past when sued by domestic corporate entities to the tunes of millions or billions of dollars in damages and legal fees, as well as potential international sanctions at the behest of these corporate entities by the federal government.
However, this doesn't stop the millions of "Chinese knock-off" producers that steal intellectual property from US companies and individuals and produce lower-quality, cheaper copies, even when doing so is overtly theft and both the original IP owner and the federal government send cease and desists to the thieves. If you think DMCAs and intellectual property theft concerns are actively respected by the Chinese legal system on a consistent scale, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Coach, Nike, Reebok, AMD, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, McDonalds, etc. would all like a word.
Things only get worse for smaller entities who don't have the means to enforce their DMCA. And that's assuming the Chinese government doesn't just step in and protect the company being accused from legal action.
Matirion There is legal precedent for this and foreign websites have been taken down for ignoring DMCA requests, even ones from China.
Again, via the efforts of massive American corporations with the full backing of the US government to the tunes of millions or billions in cost.
And yes, the site will be blocked in the US. Sure. Except the overwhelming majority of Qidian's money and userbase come from non-American sources, and those sources won't be affected by the site being blocked in a specific region. And again, it being blocked doesn't serve to resolve the issue at hand, which is intellectual property theft of writing that will still be live on all non-American access channels.
Matirion China has signed international agreements to, among other things, assist in enforcing international copyright infringement judgements.
Yeah. Okay. Ask Intel how well that's working out for them.
Again, the term I used is "functionally useless", not non-existent. And for the vast majority of people, especially individual citizens without lots of clout, resources, and time, DMCAs against foreign companies are frankly in most cases a waste of time, in spite of all of these "protections". That's my only point.
You're not wrong about how the rules as written should and sometimes do operate. I'm simply asserting that how things "should be" is rarely how things actually are.