Piracy/DMCA Hypothetical...

[Toby]

Situation:
- A surfer forum, posting links to files with 'stolen' content.
- Sample images from said content collection posted to free hosting site such as imagevenue.
- thumb images of those samples posted to the surfer forum, hotlinked from the free image host along with link to a file sharing host, such as rapidshare, for the full collection of images.

Question: Obviously the file sharing host and free image host must comply with a DMCA to remove those files. Would a DMCA also apply to the forum host? The images are published on a page on the forum, even though they're not hosted on the same server.