Takedown Notices: the precursor to SOPA?

I'm actually really enjoying one of the books that I was assigned to read, a book called Content by Cory Doctorow. It's a collection of essays and articles that he's written with regards to the internet, technology, copyright, and how it all blends together. About halfway through the book, there is an article called "Online Censorship Hurts Us All." You can imagine how that caught my attention, what with all of the stuff going on with SOPA right now. Interestingly enough, it addressed almost perfectly the main issue of SOPA:  the efforts by big media companies and legislators to stop copyright infringement online by imposing laws that enable copyright holders to take action against any website that is(supposedly, at least) infringing on their copyrighted materials. This article was written back in 2007, so obviously the issue of shutting down websites entirely for copyright infringement without due process(the main issue behind SOPA) hadn't come up yet, but even then, copyright holders had the power to send takedown notices to websites that were hosting their copyrighted materials (videos or music, usually) and force them to remove those materials from their websites. I'm sure we've all seen this happen on YouTube and other places, where we see a video once, and then later go back to see it again only to realize that it's been removed for copyright reasons. This issue of takedown notices was kindof the precursor to the sopa issue, as the same potential for abuse was there. All a company had to do was go to a website and say that some of the material the website was hosting infringed on their copyright, and that website had to remove the "infringing" material. I can't remember where I read it, but a good (though somewhat extreme) example of this kind of abuse that I heard about was of a woman's website getting into trouble with some music company because she had posted a video of her baby dancing to a song that this music company owned playing in the background. The company accused her of infringing on their copyrighted song. Mind you, the video was recorded in the woman's home, and the music was only playing in the background, off a a CD that she had legitimately bought.
  Anyways, this article was really interesting to me, and I found it surprisingly relevant to the sopa issue, even though it was written like 5 years ago. Here's the link to the article, if anyone feels like reading it (it's not too long). http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/02/censorship