[tahoe-dev] Pubgrid is back

[David Triendl]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the long delay until answering to this post. I am currently rather
busy with university and work. First, let me give an overview of what happened
so far:

* On June 3rd I asked for someone to take over hosting the pubgrid introducer
  and web interface[1]. Charles Wyble stepped forward[2] and we exchanged some
  mails since then, but unfortunately we have not yet started the transfer. I
  will write another mail to him soon so that we can get forward on this.

* On June 20th I received notice on IRC from secorp that he recieved a takedown
  notice for a file on the pubgrid. Apparently the rightholder of the file did
  not notice that insecure.tahoe-lafs.org resolves to a completely different
  host. However, it is my understanding that I am obliged to remove copyrighted
  files as soon as I know of them, which is why I disabled all access to the
  pubgrid, before even receiving a takedown notice on my own.
  I waited the next days to receive an actual takedown notice, but apparently
  they noticed my fast reaction and decided to not send me one.
* A few minutes ago I re-enabled the webinterface. I removed the offending file
  from my storage node and blocked access via the web interface using nginx.
  Thanks to the lessons learned from this incident, I do now have the
  infrastructure in place to block specific files instead of shutting the whole
  web interface down.

I have read the discussion on this mailing list and would like to give the
following statements:

* It is still my goal to step down as pubgrid provider. I hope that I will be
  able to arrange a transfer to Charles Wyble in the near future. If this
  doesn't work out, feel free to step forward if you are interested in taking
  over.
* I am from Austria, thus I do not care about the DMCA or other US laws.
* While copyright issues within a distributed file system are an interesting
  topic, the takedown was not for a file in some distributed storage grid, it
  was for a file that was served via my web interface. No matter which nodes
  actually provided the file, the rightholder saw that my webinterface was
  serving that file and asked me to take it down.

All the best,
David

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1: http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-June/006409.html
2: http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-June/006414.html