{"id":73666,"date":"2023-06-26T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T09:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=73666"},"modified":"2023-06-26T09:00:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T09:00:43","slug":"publishers-carpet-bomb-ipfs-gateway-operators-with-dmca-notices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=73666","title":{"rendered":"Publishers Carpet-Bomb IPFS Gateway Operators With DMCA Notices"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ipfs-l\"<\/a>IPFS<\/a> is a decentralized network that makes it possible to efficiently distribute high volumes of data between peers while avoiding downtime associated with regular hosting outages.<\/p>\n

The IPFS project describes the system as a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity\u2019s knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open<\/em>. Anyone who values these qualities is invited to come along for the ride using free, open source tools<\/a>. <\/p>\n

IPFS Gateways<\/h2>\n

For those who prefer not to install software but would still like to access content stored on IPFS, web gateways provide streamlined access to IPFS with zero fuss. IPFS gateways tend to be run by supporters and enthusiasts who charge nothing for their time and usually pay all of the bills. <\/p>\n

Examples can be found here<\/a> but in broad terms, public gateways aren\u2019t particularly numerous. As reported in March<\/a>, Cloudflare offers a free IPFS gateway yet despite having nothing to do with the content hosted in the network, still received over 1,000 copyright complaints in the first half of 2022. <\/p>\n

Figures for the second half are yet to be published but if recent events are anything to go by, those numbers could be significantly higher in the next report.<\/p>\n

Avalanche of Copyright Complaints<\/h2>\n

UK-based programmer James Stanley has a project page<\/a> to make any geek smile. It begins with SCAMP, a homemade 16-bit CPU with a homemade programming language, before moving on to a robotic chessboard (accessible via API), and a footwear-based chess computer that allows Stanley to cheat at chess \u201chands-free and without any third-party assistance.\u201d <\/p>\n

Stanley is also the brains behind Hardbin.com<\/a>, an encrypted pastebin-type service that utilizes IPFS. Unfortunately, Stanley took Hardbin down this week after being targeted by an anti-piracy entity demanding the removal of thousands of allegedly-infringing URLs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books,\u201d his blog post<\/a> reads.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Heavily truncated sample notice\"ciu-online-complaint\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Stanley posted the complaints to GitHub, with all three following a similar format; a demand for the immediate takedown of thousands of pieces of content that have nothing to do with the programmer, that he has no ability to take down, even if he wanted to.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s Behind The Takedown Demands?<\/h2>\n

All three complaints (1<\/a>,2<\/a>,3<\/a>) were sent from \u201cnotice@ciu-online.net\u201d but as Stanley points out, it\u2019s hard to say who is behind the notices.<\/p>\n

Each notice claims to have been sent by \u2018Gareth Young \u2013 Internet Investigator\u2019 but where Young works isn\u2019t made clear. Instead, the notices carry the names and addresses of three publishing companies; Wolters Kluwer Health (New York), Knovel, a subsidiary of Elsevier, Inc. (New York), and IEEE (new Jersey).<\/p>\n

Stanley\u2019s research turned up a \u2018Gareth Young\u2019 who apparently worked for law firm Covington & Burling LLP. Young is also the author of a slideshow<\/a> that describes methods and tactics for taking infringing content down and making people\u2019s lives more difficult. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"ipfs-hard-work\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The page above contains numerous options, and just as Mr Young suggested, the 5th option did indeed prove effective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work,\u201d Stanley says.<\/p>\n

IPFS: Technical<\/em> Resilience Against Censorship<\/h2>\n

That Stanley\u2019s work on Hardbin can\u2019t be enjoyed by him or anyone else shows that it\u2019s still possible to have a chilling effect on IPFS, despite its technical resilience to censorship. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that the DMCA takedown notices were sent directly to abuse addresses at the programmer\u2019s host, rather than to him directly. It\u2019s the kind of tactic that\u2019s easily justified when dealing with an uncooperative pirate site but entirely unhelpful when dealing with innocent parties.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the interesting evidence uncovered by Stanley when cross-referencing the 7,350 URLs against his reverse proxy logs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did some bash-fu to extract the IPFS hashes from the emails and grep for them in my nginx logs, and was surprised to find not a single match,\u201d Stanley explains. \u201cNone of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other IPFS Users Targeted<\/h2>\n

Sean Lang has been keeping records<\/a> on the DMCA notices he\u2019s received related to his gateway since February 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cI currently operate an IPFS gateway on ipfs.slang.cx. I don\u2019t publish or pin any content there, it\u2019s only a resolver for content that\u2019s available on the rest of the IPFS network,\u201d Lang writes on GitHub.<\/p>\n

\u201cI get a lot of DMCA requests from running this. Currently I\u2019m blocking 12367 files. They\u2019re almost all books, although I don\u2019t have nearly enough time to go through them manually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lang says that the takedown notices are usually sent by a guy called Gareth Young and have at least one familiar quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe weird thing is, [the system used] doesn\u2019t actually verify that a given file is available through my server before sending a DMCA request. I\u2019ve looked through the traffic logs, and the vast majority of the files listed in these takedown requests have never been requested in the history of my gateway. I haven\u2019t checked all of them, but I\u2019ve checked a lot,\u201d Lang says.<\/p>\n

From: TF<\/a>, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.<\/p>\n

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IPFS is a decentralized network that makes it possible to efficiently distribute high volumes of data between peers while avoiding downtime associated with regular hosting outages. The IPFS project describes the system as a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity\u2019s knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open. Anyone who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/73667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}