Hi John,

On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 01:08:49PM +0000, John Bourke wrote:
> We got a "Notice of Claimed Infringement" for a torrent download of copyright 
> material by one of the reseller's customers.  We can identify the end 
> customer from logs.
> 
> What is best practice when dealing with these complaints ?

We used to pass these on to the customer for the customer to take
whatever action they think best.

However, one day they sent one that implicated one of our
infrastructure hosts and I could not see any way in which that could
be torrenting, so I asked for more information. Every form of
contact I made resulted in an auto response suggesting that if I am
confused I should ask my network admin about it.

After that, since the reports are provably inaccurate to some degree
and there is no way to work with the reporters, we started to send
them to /dev/null.

> Is there a risk that our public NAT addresses will be blacklisted ?

Unlikely. These companies do not operate any service; they are
contracted to the media rights owners to go out and hunt possible
infringers and intimidate them into stopping.

No doubt they keep records of everything they have found and might
one day take some en masse action to gather the contact details of
the subscribers but it seems unlikely that they are going to feed
all the IPs into some sort of blacklist for a future streaming
service or similar.

> Should we enforce an Acceptable Use Policy ?

If you want to investigate this third party's allegation that your
customer was torrenting something they shouldn't be torrenting, and
then take action compatible with your AUP, that would be your
decision.

As I say, we drew the line at passing the notice on to the customer,
and then after discovering that the reports could be wrong and there
was no way to query them, we started binning them with no action.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

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