[tahoe-dev] Proposal for DMCA compliance facility for Tahoe

[Kevin Reid]

On Jun 22, 2011, at 10:03, Shawn Willden wrote:

> The interesting variation with Tahoe is that it's not necessarily easy for the operator of the on-line service to take down specific pieces of information without just shutting down the whole thing.

Perhaps we should add a feature to gateways to blacklist specific capabilities, refusing to download that particular file. The shares would still exist in the grid, but without a cooperating gateway they're useless. Furthermore, if it seems necessary, the same format of blacklist could be used to direct storage servers to discard shares of the file.

A refinement would be for the blacklist to contain justification annotations, in this case consisting of (a Tahoe cap or URL for) the DMCA notice itself; this would allow grid participants to review the validity of the blacklist entries if the file is not already dead. (Note I am *not* talking about reviewing "is this infringement" as hosts need to stay out of that, but rather reviewing "is this document in fact a valid DMCA notice referring to the content designated by this cap".)

The blacklist could consist of a mutable directory object (or perhaps one specialized for appending with a long history?) where the names are the blacklisted caps and the referents are the justifications; or for more fine-grained attribution, a tree of such directories.

None of this prevents the original uploader from re-uploading with a tweaked file or different convergence secret, but it should be sufficient for DMCA compliance as I understand it (IANAL).

I just *might* be interested in working on implementing this at some point in the future.

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>