Copyright As Harassment: The DMCA Attack On IPFS Gateways
from the fear,-uncertainty,-and-the-dmca dept
The Internet is amazing, but it’s not perfect. There are many aspects that are unsatisfactory – its protocols are inefficient, and it is far from resilient. The InterPlanetary File System, created in 2014, aims to address some of these deficiencies. On its main site it is described as:
A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity’s knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open
Like the Internet itself, IPFS is a technology that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. A post on TorrentFreak from earlier this year explains:
It allows archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. It’s censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.
IPFS is also a perfect match for ‘pirate’ sites. Due to its decentralized nature, IPFS sites are virtually impossible to shut down.
A more recent post on TorrentFreak reveals how the copyright industry is trying to attack IPFS by attacking gateways to it. Specifically, it concerns the IPFS gateway at hardbin.com operated as a free service for the benefit of the online world by James Stanley. In a recent blog post, he writes:
I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books. The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have [the Web server] nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.
Therefore:
Copyright infringing material or activity could not have been found at those locations because in order to find it you must have accessed it, and since my logs show that nobody accessed it, we can infer that Gareth Young, Internet Investigator [who appears to have sent the DMCA takedowns], can not have found it.
Despite this fact, Stanley has decided – not unreasonably – that he has had enough of being harassed for magnanimously trying to offer a service for free:
I have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work
He ends his post by wondering whether the DMCA takedowns he received would be classed as “fraudulent”, and asks, if so, what can be done about it. Sadly, the answer is almost certainly: nothing. There seem to be no penalties for fraudulent DMCA claims, which require simply a “good faith belief” that copyright has been infringed, according to the law. By contrast, counter-claims made by recipients of takedowns must include a statement “under penalty of perjury” that the material was taken down by mistake.
That blatant asymmetry is a great demonstration of how the enforcement system is tilted in favour of copyright companies, and against the general public who so often are framed as its enemies. It means that a constant drip of bogus takedowns can be used to wear down the goodwill and patience of online benefactors like James Stanley until they give up in frustration. We are all the poorer as a consequence.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published on WalledCulture.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, gareth young, ipfs, james stanley
Comments on “Copyright As Harassment: The DMCA Attack On IPFS Gateways”
If, as the site owner points out, the URLs were never accessed, how can there be any good faith regarding what’s available at that URL, and how could a claim of infringement be more completely misrepresented when nobody even looked there?
However, unfortunately, as we’ve seen before, even when such things get pointed out in a 512(f) claim, all the rightsholder has to do is say “oops my bad” and the courts give them a pass.
Re:
Same reason why rightsholders were allowed to claim that being included in a BitTorrent swarm automatically means everyone was responsible for downloading/uploading a file – even if that was never the case.
It took us until the Malibu Media cases before judges finally confirmed that yes, if you’re going to accuse someone of downloading a movie, you need to show that they have a playable movie, not a bunch of 1s and 0s that software can’t put together properly.
Tragic, but that’s how copyright interests got away with it for so long until judges finally had the wool pulled away from their eyes.
Re: Re:
Weren’t they accusing people of uploading stuff?
Re: Re: Re:
Indeed; they were accusing people of uploading parts of a movie, beyond the fair use minimum.
And the “random 1’s and 0’s” bit doesn’t hold water, when it’s provable that the data being uploaded is both labeled as a specific movie, and can be transformed to represent a very specific part of said movie.
Unlike regular people who make “letter of the law” arguments, the courts can generally tell the difference between sharing chunks of the latest Marvel movie encoded in HEVC and sharing a short stream from /dev/random.
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In this case, it’s not provable, because nobody ever asked for the data from this alleged distributor. Maybe they’d have sent the movie when someone asked for it; maybe they’d have sent /dev/random or some other data, and even if it’s labeled as the latest Marvel movie, I’m not aware of any remedy in copyright law for someone who falsely advertises they’ll infringe a specific copyright. (There are trademarks, but there’s no “quick takedown” process for that.) Anyone who used Napster knows that file sharers don’t always send what they promise to.
This isn’t theoretical. Companies have received fradulent DMCA notices saying their printers were distributing copyrighted stuff (and, no, the printers had not been exploited to do so). Or accusing unassigned IP addresses, when there are traffic monitoring systems whose logs can prove they never sent any packets.
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Has it ever actually gotten to court?
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That’s the point – the court allows plaintiffs to cut their losses and run away, so it never gets to a point where the evidence has ever been meaningfully scrutinized.
Claimed...
Yes, back in neanderthal times when the DMCA was forst proposed. the justification for this level of control was “takedown requests are sworn statements made under penalty of perjury for false claims.”
This seems to have been untrue from day 1.
Re: RE: Claimed...
I am patiently waiting for the day someone with lots of money and an attitude does this…
“takedown requests are sworn statements made under penalty of Boldperjury for false claimsBold.”
Re: Re:
That’s already been litigated, I believe. Lawyers went to the phrasing of the statute and successfully argued that the only part of the takedown notice that is “under penalty of perjury” is the statement that you are, or are an agent of, the copyright holder. The claim of infringement is just a “good faith belief.”
Look it up. As much as it sucks, those lawyers are obviously correct. The phrasing is clear and looks intentional, probably to satisfy the music and film people who bought that law.
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Which does, of course, bring into question why that clause passed the sniff test in the first place. If elected officials did it on purpose, it was obviously worded that way to suppress dissent.
When fraud has no cost or risk fraud is what you get
When you’re dealing with a law that is hilariously one-sided, with penalties only on the side of the accused the only surprising part is that there’s comparatively any legitimate claims being made as opposed to the fraudulent ones.