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How the “Mail & Guardian” got taken down
- AstralStorm 7y agoDid they file a counter suit for plagiarism? What happens when DMCA notice meets another one? Welcome to Bad Law.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoIf you’re not in the US, avoid US technology providers subject to US law. This publication would likely be better suited using a provider out of Europe.
- jachee 7y agoWhat's the non-US equivalent of Linode?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoOVH or Hetzner off of the top of my head.
- anonydsfsfs 7y agohttps://www.hetzner.com/ https://www.hetzner.com/
- elygre 7y agoHow does this work with European instances of large providers, e.g. the Ireland versions of Azure and Amazon?
- ac29 7y agoThe EU is not without its own controversial copyright laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
- notafraudster 7y agoThe title really doesn't represent what happened. It's an interesting story, though. Edit: Thanks for updating the title
- jordanthoms 7y agoThey're vague in there with if they actually filed a counter-claim - that's how DMCA works, if someone sends a complaint the content has to get removed quickly, unless you file a counter-claim, then you work it out in the courts.
- kijin 7y agoAs far as I can tell, a counter-claim can only be submitted after the allegedly infinging content has been removed. So it cannot be used to defend against a takedown notice. The content must be removed regardless of whether or not you have a valid counter-claim. Moreover, there's a 10-14 day waiting period before the ISP can allow the content to be put back online. It's a ridiculous process that allows anyone to take down any content for up to two weeks for any reason. Two weeks is an eternity in today's news cycles. https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim
- lacker 7y agoIt isn’t really fair to pick on Linode, all US hosting providers work the same way. When someone files a DMCA claim, if you want to keep the content up you need your lawyer to file a counterclaim. Hosting providers are then allowed to leave it up, and you can fight about it in court. It sounds from this article like the newspaper didn’t have a lawyer, or at least not a lawyer familiar with American law. That sucks but all you can really do about it is to get a lawyer, or use a non-US hosting solution.
- kijin 7y agoThis is a common misconception. You can't use a counter-claim to keep your content up. You can only use one to have your content reinstated after it has been removed. https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim
- leeoniya 7y agowe've gone through this with linode. they give you exactly 96 hours to remove the content and then you can go through the dispute process. it took about 2 weeks to work things out. we had used some images from an mfg's pdf installation manual on a page that was reselling that mfg's own products which we were buying from their offical distributor - the only way to get the product. talk about absurd. some of the media that they claimed was theirs was in fact our own original graphics/images. it didn't matter, we had to remove everything that was in their overly broad claim. the DMCA is no joke, but is also a big fucking joke. it's trivial to completely destroy someone's business by simply making fraudulent claims (it's guilty until proven innocent). and it's almost impossible to prove that the claim was made in bad faith rather than simply in error. these claims are usually made by some contracted third party that flags everything that smells off. it's the new patent trolling.
- rosser 7y agoWe get DMCA claims all the time — most often from our customers' own counsel. Even so, the explicit, as automated as can be policy is to pull the content, and let the lawyers sort it out amongst themselves. It is very much a joke, and not a joke.
- potatofarmer45 7y agoThis is a common takedown tactic to clean up your image online. It's easily contested with a counter-claim but it works because most orgs/sites don't have a lawyer or don't want to spend the resources to fight it. I've seen cases where 80% of "negative" content can be scrubbed with the few remaining (read larger news organizations with lawyers) then crowded out by astroturf articles claiming the opposite. The bar to DMCA style takedowns is much higher in Europe. Hence the decision to host on Linode for a South African newspaper is ... odd. They should migrate to OVH/Hetz
- philpem 7y agoThe problem with OVH is their appallingly bad rep for hosting "troublesome" content... In practical terms that means you can send emails but there's a 70% chance they'll land in the other party's spam bin.
- rgrs 7y agoIt's time to move cloud out of US.
- incompatible 7y agoIt can be worse elsewhere, because without the DMCA safe harbor you can be sued directly, or at least be threatened with lawsuits, for something a customer or user does. Defamation law is also enforced more strictly in some countries.
- adrianmonk 7y ago> Our questioning the veracity of the complaint did not seem to make any difference. Linode is an ISP, not a court of law. Legally, it's not up to them to make this determination. If they are compelled to take down a site by law, then their opinion about the veracity of the complaint is not really relevant. Unless they want to defy the law in order to go out on a limb to protect a customer. Which is a lot to ask of any business.
- prepend 7y agoIt’s extremely relevant because they can deny the dmca notice. Linode is protecting themself over their customer. This is a strong signal to customers to find a better ISP. One who plans on legal funds to defend customers against these bullshit dmca notices.
- jen729w 7y ago> One who plans on legal funds to defend customers against these bullshit dmca notices. I would love to agree with you, but are you gonna pay someone $20/mo for Linode’s $5/mo service? Of course not; and therein lies financial ruin for the ISP. The system is fucked.
- prepend 7y agoYes I will. I’m a big fan of linode and have used them for years. I’m now looking for smarter hosts and will eventually move every single thing I control off linode.
- zbuf 7y ago> Linode is protecting themself over their customer. Is there any business that would not do this, or would do the opposite?
- mherdeg 7y agoI'm kind of amazed at how effective this digital reputation management technique is: * publish an exact copy of the offending content on a web site and include something that looks like a datetime which is earlier than the publication date of the offending content * tell the web site's ISP and other service providers that they're violating copyright, pointing to your fake content and using the providers' copyright-violation processes, which you know all about because your reputation firm does this stuff all the time This also works for search engine deindexing, right? It's just remarkable to me that (a) we all know this works super well and (b) it keeps working even though everyone knows about it.
- incompatible 7y agoI didn't realise people bothered to put up fake websites. I thought a plausible-looking DMCA notification was sufficient to get a provider to take something down.
- strogonoff 7y agoIf it were so easy and cheap as many comments on this page imply, why aren’t we seeing this often used against large well-known businesses in bad faith? E.g., someone creates a puny single-person LLC, and files DMCA notices against New York Times, Amazon blog posts, Apple press releases, et cetera. According to claims I see here, the content will have to be down for 10-14 days regardless of how quickly the counter-claim succeeds, which if used at the right moment could cause significant damage to the target/substantial profit to the attacker. If this was happening, I’m sure the regulation would be fixed promptly with powerful lobbying from the aforementioned big players—perhaps by imposing a fee for issuing DMCA takedowns, increasing legal cost of a successful counter-claim, etc. Such cases would’ve definitely be noticeable to the public, so I can only assume that they don’t happen because either (A) no one have thought of it yet, or (B) there’s some non-obvious cost to DMCA takedowns or successful counter-claims. EDIT: Removed shady source for DMCA counter-claim info.
- joe_the_user 7y agoIf it were so easy and cheap as many comments on this page imply, why aren’t we seeing this often used against large well-known businesses in bad faith? Because medium sized companies know not to mess with large companies but don't care about small companies?
- stanislavb 7y agoThe question is whether other providers would have done the same. i.e. is it Linode to blame explicitly or federal law and US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)?
- Sendotsh 7y ago> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The title of this submission should be "CENSORED: How the M&G got taken down". Linode aren't the bad guys here and the title is flat-out misleading.
- ISL 7y agoIt is unclear that Linode is acting like a good guy here.
- dom_hutton 7y agoEither way that is opinion, best to leave the reader to make their own mind up.
- ISL 7y agoAgreed.
- Cogito 7y agoTitle has now been updated, FYI. Was previously 'Linode Shut Down a Newspaper'
- illuminati1911 7y agoThe DMCA is truly a steaming pile of shit. Nintendo and other companies are also abusing it to take down fair use videos by individuals on YouTube.
- Cogito 7y agoYouTube take downs are usually done without DMCA, right? Are you saying that the DMCA is explicitly being invoked by Nintendo and others, or are you talking more generally and including, for example, YouTube's Content ID system?
- RandomInteger4 7y agoYouTube's content ID system is in place to facilitate DMCA takedowns. Folks such as Nintendo can go either the route of filing a claim to take the ad revenue of a video, or filing a copyright strike claim to have the video removed. Whichever variation that is used is up to the copyright holder (legitimate or otherwise), and both are definitely used by legitimate actors for sometimes the most ridiculous of copyright claims (someone humming a song for instance).
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAFAIK Content ID is an entirely extralegal system applied instead of DMCA, executed as a part of YouTube's TOS. It's used because copyright bullies would prefer not to involve courts if they can avoid it, and I suspect it exists to prevent MAFIAA from utterly destroying YouTube, as most of its value (until recently) came from copyright violation.
- RandomInteger4 7y agoThe content ID system is just a system for "search by video" or "search by audio". It doesn't do anything "instead of". Just helps copyright owners find infringing content. What they do after that is up to them.
- peter_retief 7y agoM&G do valuable work in exposing corruption and really need to be supported. It is hardly Linodes fault that they got manipulated but there really needs to be better oversight to protect, already struggling, investigative journalism
- nabla9 7y agoThe economics of DMCA claims is similar to spam marketing. The cost is disproportionately in the receiving end. The cost of making claims is close to zero. You can fix this by adding small cost. If counterclaim is filed and complaint maker is not moving the case forward, they should pay something. Even small sum like $1000 per dropped claim would likely stop this madness.
- tylerl 7y agoMaybe, perhaps if you're a serious news organization you might not want to host your site on Linode. Not that Linode is bad or anything; I'm super happy with them myself. But the way a company deals with abuse complaints (including takedowns) reflects the volume of these that they have to deal with, and the blowback they've experienced by overreacting. If the provider is tiny, then takedowns are rare and interesting. They'll examine each one based on its individual merits. Though small companies don't have the resources to dump a lot of money into making things right, so they may just take the cheap route and kick you out. If the provider is reasonably large, they'll get these all the time, and they'll have an automated and inflexible solution for dealing with them. It'll be heavily weighted on minimizing the cost to the provider, and will tend to overreact just to be on the safe side. If the provider is huge (like, top N kind of huge) then they'll have started with the automated overreaction solution, but then they'll have had some massive disaster because their automated abuse system took down a client like Sony or the New York Times or something. So then the'll have dialed back their abuse system a bit and made it more expensive to run, but less prone to being destructive.
- jart 7y agoYeah, Linode is a scrappy little company from Philly that, sixteen years ago, pioneered the paradigm shift from things like CPanel to Amazon Web Services, but never became big like Amazon since there was always a focus on making their service affordable. But even if they were a big company, it's hard to make economic sense out of asking your lawyers to focus on protecting $5/month registrations from dmca legal prowling. The way I like to think of it is, we get what we pay for. If your hosting costs less than it costs someone else to hire a lawyer to write letters complaining about your hosting, then the will of heaven will usually favor the side with more dollars and cents on it.
- megaremote 7y agoThis is an african newspaper called the Mail and Guardian, not the UK's 2 big newspapers the daily Mail and the Guardian.
- dang 7y agoOk, we've added some quotation marks above. Higher precedence operators ftw.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- buyx 7y agoThe newspaper used to be called the "Weekly Mail", but there was a short-lived tie-up with the UK Guardian in the 1990's, and a renaming. I remember eagerly reading the UK Guardian stories in the M&G in the pre-internet era.
- jart 7y agoMy friends, this is why folks have traditionally colo'd servers at peering points and signed rental contracts lasting years, sometimes decades. Because they don't want their business operations to have the same level of legal protections as a youtube comment.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoThey should have hosted with a non US ISP.
- delta1 7y agoIt seems extremely obvious. ZA domain, ZA relevant content, predominantly ZA readers (presumably) - why host in the US?
- vuyani 7y agoLoad shedding South Africa has had constant power outages http://www.eskom.co.za/documents/LoadSheddingFAQ.pdf http://www.eskom.co.za/documents/LoadSheddingFAQ.pdf
- delta1 7y agoI'm well aware of that. The question was "why host in the US" - not implying that hosting should be done in South Africa.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kylemclaren 7y agoA good argument for multi-cloud
- imglorp 7y agoNobody's mentioned any tech solutions here. First of all, the Wayback machine may have captured the thieving site as well as the victim one. Of course, if you are going to make false copyright claims, you'd better set your robots.txt to exclude archive.org first. Second, if you do manage to dispute and get a day in court, how would the thief prov they owned the material, if the actual content creator had proof of the date of authorship? Eg tweet a hash, photograph with newspaper headline, etc? Can court costs be recovered after proof of a false takedown?
- namibj 7y agoThis looks like criminal fraud, but ianal...
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe publishing business is often seen as merely being one of creating and publishing content. I've come to realise it's rather more than that. There are the technical elements -- what many HN readers are familiar with in terms of development, back-end, front-end, and infrastructure tools. There is the art of developing the content in the first place, including the methods in this case of investigative journalism. There is the whole maelstrom of business models and monetisation, on which virtually all attempts have been foundering of late. But there's also the legal side, both offensive and defensive. Pursuing sources, information, and disclosures. And defending the publisher against attacks, such as the one described here. The publication of Permanent Record highlights another element, that of contracts and publication risk when faced with a state-level actor and an alleged NDA privilege. There are famous battles against defamation or censorship lawsuits. And there is the pursuit of others who take content without payment or credit, claiming it for themselves. In many histories of great publishing events and episodes, lawyers (and publishers with spinal, intestinal, and gonadal integrity) play a huge role, and publishing houses or newspapers as much respected for their solicitors as their journalists and editors. It's not just a business that concerns getting words on a page, or screen. The words have to matter, the words have to be right, the lights must be kept on, the words distributed. And, if your business is afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, resisting and challenging some very motivated and extraordinarily capable adversaries. This is something advocates of "citizen-based journalism", or peer-to-peer or federated technologies, or DIY technical solutions, of whom I very much count myself as a former and current member, have long failed to appreciate. The Mail & Guardian's message here is one to remember.