[liberationtech] Advice in dealing with potential copyright infringement complaints

[liberationtech at lewman.us]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 09:39:56PM +0200, admin at alkasir.com wrote 3.4K bytes in 82 lines about:
: There appears to be an increasing tendency by movie producers as Paramount,
: Universal, WB, etc. to track IP addresses of people downloading torrents
: and sending complaints to ISPs connecting them to the Internet about
: alleged copyright infringement.

The keyword there is 'alleged'. Unless the allegation is
filed by an organization in the same country as your server,
you can safely ignore them. If you're in the US and receive a
DMCA takedown notice, this template as a response works well,
https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-dmca-response.html.en. It
works as a response to the spam bots that send billions of
takedown notices and to your ISP worried about the billions of
emails they get. My printer has received takedown notices too, see
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/laser-printers-found-guilty-making-available-crime
for an example.

: As a proxy service myself (through alkasir.com), what do you think is the
: right approach if any of those companies complained that one of my IPs was
: tracked downloading/transferring such copyrighted content?

Talk to your ISP. If possible get your ISP to SWIP your IP range to you,
rather than them. The spam bots will email you first, rather than annoy
your ISP. In most cases the ISP just wants to avoid doing more work,
such as having to forward messages to you and create tickets for each
'warning'.

: Am I released from responsibility given the fact that I am merely a medium
: like the cables/technology used to access the Internet? Furthermore, I do
: not keep logs of my proxy server traffic at all, so I can't even track who
: did the download. So what is the legal situation in my case?

This is the same situation as Tor exit relays. We've
developed a whole FAQ section on dealing with this nonsense,
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ExitPolicies, with links to
more advice and experience.

Welcome to the modern clearnet. 

-- 
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475