On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 09:26:25AM -0500, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
> I recently tightened my exit policy because of a DMCA enforcement
> request by the Entertainment Software Association ("ESA"). I probably
> could have made my case to the people who handle these sort of things
> at MIT, but I chose not to make a stand on bittorrent sharing of
> Starwars games. Hopefully this will give me firmer standing with the
> lawyers if someone ever comes knocking about http or something (well
> atleast not mark me as a "pain")
You operate spoon, yes? I would be more worried that you were serving
as an exit node for Usenet traffic. But of course, we must all choose
our battles. In any event, filtering by port is a heuristic only and is
prone to both false positives and false negatives, as I am sure you are
aware.
> Seems that operating a TOR server should be equivelent to operating a
> public phone, you don't know who's placing the calls or what they're
> saying so you can't be liable if they're making bomb threats or
> planning a robbery. No I have no idea if the Law sees things this
> way...
Regarding DMCA, I recommend that you consider this template:
http://afs.eecs.harvard.edu/research/tor/website/eff/tor-dmca-response.html
(ignore the link to receive the document from tor.eff.org.)
The DMCA safe harbor provisions should actually protect you in this
case, or so EFF believes.
For the record, in response to two DMCA notices, I presented this
template to members of the Harvard General Counsel, and they were
satisfied. I suspect that the reaction of MIT lawyers will be similar.
Remember that Tor is a system with substantial benefits both to research
and to privacy. If institutions such as MIT do not support this, then
who will?
Geoff
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