[tor-relays] DMCA letters

Tue Mar 12 18:41:19 UTC 2013

Relevant?

"Often referred to as copyright trolling, speculative invoicing involves sending hundreds or thousands of demand letters alleging copyright infringement and seeking thousands of dollars in compensation. Those cases rarely — if ever — go to court as the intent is simply to scare enough people into settling in order to generate a profit."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/03/12/1449244/canadian-file-sharing-plaintiff-admits-to-copyright-trolling

On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 9:31am, "Matt Joyce" <toradmin at mttjocy.co.uk> said:

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> I think you have probably gotten unlucky here in all honesty given the
> traffic you are pushing over there and having an issue so early on don't
> take it as an indication of expected rates either, I use the recommended
> reduced exit policy on both of my relays on is 20Mbit capacity and has
> been running about 6 months, I've yet to receive anything in the way of
> DMCA or abuse complaints about that one as yet, the newest one is a
> large relay which has actually been running just one day less than your
> one over there, however it's sitting on a 1Gbps connection and as of
> today averaging on the order of around 219.40 Mbit/s (110Mbit each
> direction) having transferred 16.45TiB, in the two weeks since it was
> first activated, the rate has been rising most of that time such that
> 1.87TiB of that transfer was yesturday, 2.21TiB is the estimate for
> today.  I'm so glad it's unmetered xD.
> 
> You can see the traffic stats for it on the relay info page at
> http://torexit2.mttjocy.co.uk/ I hope that helps at least to settle some
> of your concerns that it might scale linearly, were it to do so then
> this bandwidth would be producing them at rate approximately 20 times
> more frequently or around 40 per 16 days ~2.5 letters a day which is
> significantly higher than the 0 actually received.
> 
> So it's either unfortunate luck on your part of they are doing a lot
> more careful checking before sending their random notes out than they
> appear to be and figured out that I'm not the type to scare easy if they
> even had a case let alone when they are blowing smoke.  But I would
> highly doubt that unless they are burning a few hundred doing a detailed
> background check that would actually pick up something like minor civil
> settlements before sending any notices it's not something you would find
> on a casual google, and if they *were* doing that yet apparently still
> not coming up with the simple idea of err type the IP address into
> google and don't waste your time and money when it comes back saying
> it's a tor exit node well that would be going beyond stupid to be fair.
> 
> On 12/03/13 07:41, jvoss at altsci.com wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been running a Tor exit node on my new server for 16 days. Today I received
>> my second automated DMCA infringement notice from HBO. I sent them the
>> boilerplate you see at the bottom of the message both times. My colo provider
>> Hurricane Electric understands Tor, which is awesome. I don't think it'll be an
>> issue, so I'm happy with this. I'm wondering if anyone receives a large number of
>> DMCA infringement notices and whether there was a resolution. It would certainly
>> make my life a little bit more difficult to send more than one of these per week.
>> When I got my first letter I was pushing 5 Mbps (megabits) and now I'm pushing 9
>> Mbps. I've set the RelayBandwidthRate to 5120 KB which should give a max rate of
>> 41 Mbps. If infringement notices increases linearly with traffic, this could
>> become an issue.
>>
>> I'm happy to share the infringement notices if anyone is interested.
>>
>> I followed a few of the tips from https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node ,
>> I got a separate IP address and I reduced the exit policy. I plan to update the
>> reverse dns. I don't feel like reducing the exit policy does anything because
>> BitTorrent was designed to run on any high port. Also, reducing the exit policy
>> blocks researchers who are doing port scans and header grabbing over Tor. That's
>> a point of contention for me because I know legitimate researchers use Tor for
>> that purpose. Does anyone have any data or anecdotes on how exit policy affects
>> malicious use of Tor vs legitimate use of Tor?
>>
>> Btw, my server is 216.218.134.12. I'm running a patched version of tor 0.2.3.25
>> which fixes a few bugs I found in buffer events. See
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7788 for more info. Uptime is now
>> 6 days, 13 days without a crash.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Javantea
>>
>> -------------------
>>
>> Dear Andrew Martin:
>>
>> The IP address in question is a Tor exit node.
>> https://www.torproject.org/overview.html
>>
>> There is little we can do to trace this matter further. As can be seen
>> from the overview page, the Tor network is designed to make tracing of
>> users impossible. The Tor network is run by some 2500 volunteers who
>> use the free software provided by the Tor Project to run Tor routers.
>> Client connections are routed through multiple relays, and are
>> multiplexed together on the connections between relays. The system
>> does not record logs of client connections or previous hops.
>>
>> This is because the Tor network is a censorship resistance, privacy,
>> and anonymity system used by whistle blowers, journalists, Chinese
>> dissidents skirting the Great Firewall, abuse victims, stalker
>> targets, the US military, and law enforcement, just to name a few.
>> See https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en for more info.
>>
>> Unfortunately, some people misuse the network. However, compared to
>> the rate of legitimate use (the IP address in question processes
>> approximately 11 megabits of traffic per second), abuse complaints are
>> rare.
>> https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en
>>
>> This is the second e-mail from you that I am replying to. The only
>> thing that has changed is that I have increased the bandwidth to 9
>> megabits per second.
>>
>> If you have further questions, feel free to contact me at
>>  ------------
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>  -----------
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