Re: lots of DMCA request's... (1/day)

[Geoffrey Goodell <goodell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 06:34:41PM -0400, Brian Puccio wrote:

[many interesting points cut]

> What if my hosting business were to expand? What if my 500 became 50000? 
> I'd have 500 people running exit nodes (the same 1%) and I'd need to 
> spend hours every day keeping up with takedowns. In fact, I'd need to 
> hire some extra help to respond to all of them, I'd need my own legal 
> department. How would I pay for this? Not by increasing my rates, no, 
> that's unfair to the 99% that don't make me deal with all these 
> takedowns. No, I'd charge the 1% a legal recovery fee. They would pay the 
> attorneys and secretaries who respond to each takedown.

I think that we need to take a step back and understand more about the
complaints being served to ISPs.

1. Some are clearly DMCA takedown notices.  Are these the vast majority?
What other kinds of abuse notices are served to Tor exit node operators,
with what frequency and in what proportions?

2. To what extent are ISPs legally bound to respond to the various
different kinds of notices?  For each of the various kinds of abuse
complaints, surely some ISPs will say "this is an anonymizing relay, go
away", while others will engage in an expensive investigation process,
and still others will just shut down their customers without further
questions.  ISP staffers and counsel might not like the idea of being
served legal requests, but it is critical that we understand the extent
to which they are legally bound to respond, and the space of potential
responses.  If the points in this document [1] do not provide a simple,
consistent, effective way for ISPs to respond without significant
thought, then the document should be amended -- but it is not clear to
me that ISPs are significantly burdened by abuse complaints in the
general case.  I would like to see evidence to the contrary.

[1] http://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en