Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Can a custom ASN protect the hosting provider from DMCA?
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Can a custom ASN protect the hosting provider from DMCA?

I have a few questions about custom ASNs and IPs

  1. If I purchase an ASN from a sponsoring LIR I can then buy IPs and tie them to that ASN? Those IPs will contain 100% my own information on whois requests?
  2. As I understand I would need to find a hosting provider that could announce my custom IPs. Correct?
  3. If I then host copyrighted content the actual hosting provider wont get in trouble or receive any DMCA emails, right? All emails will be sent to the whois information on the IP which will be my own personal.

Am I understanding this correctly?

Comments

  • It depends. Most abuse reports will be sent to you and to you only. Some rare ones might be sent to your upstream too.

  • Whether you have a LIR acc and IPs if you are in ARIN - America then you are bound to follow DMCA else someone can take legal actions against you and ... a ton of problems.

    Just go out of DMCA Coverage => Europe ? and lease/buy a IP block (if needed).

  • I already planned to do that in Europe. But even in USA, technically the hosting provider wouldn't have any issues even if I ignored 100% of the DMCA requests (in theory), correct?
    Because only my personal information would appear everywhere

  • @sanfee said:
    I already planned to do that in Europe. But even in USA, technically the hosting provider wouldn't have any issues even if I ignored 100% of the DMCA requests (in theory), correct?
    Because only my personal information would appear everywhere

    People would really sue you for your theory -,-
    As much i can tell, you are "bound" to follow DMCA if you are hosting inside USA else companies would start sending legal notices to you.

  • Thats not the point here. The point is that the hosting provider would not be responsible or even aware of the issues, correct? Because only my information is public and not for example Softlayer's or Hetzner's....

  • AndreixAndreix Member, Host Rep

    @sanfee said:

    You (and those who share your thoughts) have to understand that we have to respect each other.
    Your upstream is most likely to have other upstream from USA (such as Level 3), that must comply with USA laws. If you announce, via your provider, ip space that is used for hosting dmca-protected resources, your upstream may get kicked out from the global routing table.

    Of course they won't risk such a think for a customer, and they'll kick you out from their routing table, before any of their upstreams will kick 'em.

    So, it doesn't matter if you own an ASN and some IPs, you have to comply with international common-sense laws.

    Have a great day! :)

  • It depends what you mean by "DMCA". For insttance:

    Example 1: Download torrents all day - nobody will know, nobody will care as long as you pay for the bandwidth. Thousands of gigabits of torrent traffic passes through the networks of Level3, Cogent, etc. every day and they don't care. Their job is to move the traffic, not to care what it is.
    Example 2: Create some bank phishing sites or send bomb threats from your address space - your provider might receive visits from men with suits and will definitely care in this case.

    Thanked by 2Zappie zafouhar
  • Mahfuz_SS_EHLMahfuz_SS_EHL Host Rep, Veteran
    edited December 2015

    @sanfee said:
    Thats not the point here. The point is that the hosting provider would not be responsible or even aware of the issues, correct? Because only my information is public and not for example Softlayer's or Hetzner's....

    This depends on how much Money that company / person has ! They will send their first notice to you & if it doesn't resolve (I mean you don't pay heed to it), they will send the second notice to your upstream & of course, your upstream will go through the rule & kick you out from their routing. Again, this costs money if they have enough money to spend on this type of issues then !

  • sanfeesanfee Member
    edited December 2015

    I am not talking about hosting phishing or viruses. Or even movies or anything of super high value owned by big corporations.

    So technically its much harder to contact the actual hosting company if you have your own ASN and announce it through them, correct? It would require contacting the actual upstream provider which is not as simple as going to https://whois.domaintools.com/ and sending the email to abuse@

    My current hosting provider already ignores all DMCA takedowns because they dont apply to their country. What I want is to take the provider out of the equation (forwarding emails) and simply get the emails myself.

  • In this case it should work. The emails should be sent to you (to the contact of the IPs / ASN).
    Some rare idiots like IP-Echelon (or whatever their name was) send reports to random people for random IPs they don't control. That's a different matter that's not really your problem.

  • You have to add your hosting provider's route object into your IP objects. They can trace back to your hosting provider and still file DMCA.

    lol

    Thanked by 1doughmanes
  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider

    @GIANT_CRAB said:
    You have to add your hosting provider's route object into your IP objects. They can trace back to your hosting provider and still file DMCA.

    lol

    Not in the ARIN region.

  • sanfee said: So technically its much harder to contact the actual hosting company if you have your own ASN and announce it through them, correct?

    It is harder but not that much harder.

    As most takedown system are automated, you'll receive the emails. (But most serious provider will forward those to you automatically too) but if someone WANTS to find your provider and a way to contact him it won't be that hard. But it might need some little extra work that probably won't be done by most abuse dealing companies. (Even though it seems like there are ways to offuscate that, as TPB did)

    If you want to respect the DCMA (I advise you to!) and get the emails directly without any hassle on your provider, it's probably a good way.

  • GM2015GM2015 Member
    edited December 2015

    It might save your server at moronic providers who take clowns like bitninja seriously.

    If you also send out spam ,then the "abuse" emails were most likely end up in your inbox.

    Correct me if I'm wrong.

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • One thing though, Say you have an ASN etc in the US but are based in Europe, what can anyone in the US legally do to you if you do not comply with DMCA complaints?

  • rds100 said: Some rare ones might be sent to your upstream too.

    Seen a lot of stuff, including some of the most common spam stuff, get blasted immediately to upstreams

  • sanfee said: Am I understanding this correctly?

    Something to consider- lets say some complaints come to you which they will. Anything from spam complaints, to Bitninja, to Spamhaus, etc. What are you planning to do to keep Spamhaus off your back because they'll complain to your upstream who will stop routing your IPs. I've seen this happen. You have to anticipate this and have a good relationship with your provider.

  • sanfee said: If I then host copyrighted content the actual hosting provider wont get in trouble or receive any DMCA emails, right? All emails will be sent to the whois information on the IP which will be my own personal.

    Bottom line, you can't stop people from sending emails wherever they choose to send them. If they don't get the response they want from you (actual taking down of infringing materials), they may well e-mail your upstreams.

    Yes, having your own ASN and IP blocks with your contact info should help to direct first-line takedown attempts to your e-mail.

    zafouhar said: Say you have an ASN etc in the US but are based in Europe, what can anyone in the US legally do to you if you do not comply with DMCA complaints?

    If they are very determined, they can get a presence in your country and sue you locally. You have copyright laws in your country, right? This does not work well against mere consumers in Europe but it really ought to against website operators.

    sanfee said: So technically its much harder to contact the actual hosting company if you have your own ASN and announce it through them, correct?

    Not really, there are lots of easy ways to find that out. Either the actual hosting company has it's own ASN in the AS path, or the data center's is, I would guess these two possibilities cover 95%+ of setups.

  • singsing said: Not really, there are lots of easy ways to find that out. Either the actual hosting company has it's own ASN in the AS path, or the data center's is, I would guess these two possibilities cover 95%+ of setups.

    99.9% even, someone must provide transit in the end unless the peer is private, which would still give away the last peer on the left of the AS before the private peer.

  • William said: 99.9% even, someone must provide transit in the end unless the peer is private, which would still give away the last peer on the left of the AS before the private peer.

    Well, I was thinking if someone connects with their own ASN directly to a Tier1s at a carrier neutral DC, then there might not be any obvious info in the AS path indicating which DC they are operating from. But of course still possible to home in on it by pinging the host from different points.

    For DMCA purposes however, it's actually good to have as many upstreams in the chain as possible. This is because the level of clue of what to do about a DMCA takedown notice decreases as you go up the chain. In 2009, Hurricane Electric shut down an entire connection due to (as far as we know) a single DMCA complaint of dubious merit. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/chamber-of-commerce-stron_n_332087.html Since there was a "middleman" ISP in this case, it resulted in a lot of websites being taken down. Of course, HE's response was a little irrational. Legally speaking, if we can assume this was a colo deal with the middleman ISP, HE is only a "mere conduit", and does not store data beyond the minimum necessary to forward it through the Internet. HE would only have to act if/when they notice repeated/persistent infringement that their customer ISP does not address.

Sign In or Register to comment.