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Comment by gabaix | Hacker News Reader

This can happen to any web site that allows user generated content.

How come we don't see Youtube, Yahoo, Facebook suspended? Do they have procedure in place? Does that mean that you're much weaker if you're small? What are the legal safeguards for UGC startups?

There should be equal rights for all companies. Right now it seems the US government is picking those it can easily bully.

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> How come we don't see Youtube, Yahoo, Facebook suspended? Do they have procedure in place?

Yes, they do. And if you allow users to post content, you should too. You need to formally register as a hosting company and have a DMCA process published and usable.

First, register here:

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/

If you've done it right, you'll get one of these:

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/a/auganllc.pdf

Then post a notice on a Policy page linked from every page of your site. For example:

In compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”), please send DMCA notifications of claimed copyright infringements to: Advection.NET c/o Jonathan Band PLLC, 21 Dupont Circle NW, 8th Fl, Washington, DC 20036, with electronic copy by e-mail to...

Pursuant to the DMCA, Advection.NET will terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Advection.NET will cooperate fully with any civil and/or criminal litigation arising from the violation of this policy.

wow - didn't know you had to find a designated agent to register. It must be simpler than it actually looks. Definitely very hidden. Thanks for pointing out this.

EVERY .com, .net and .org website should do this, whether you support user generated content or not (e.g. remember, user comments on your blog are user generated). Without it, you are risking this kind of thing happening.

Even the suggestion that 'everyone should sign up' for this is a big flag itself.

What if I'm not an American company, I just happen to use a .com domain?

Better safe than sorry?

Congratulations, .com is considered part of America (in the same way that .ly is Libyan). You are now doing business with the US Government.

I had no idea that this existed and was about to ask whether you knew if there was a place online that consolidated the many legal considerations one must take to start an online business, but then I found this page on the Citizen Media Law Project ( http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/legal-issues-consider... ), which covers both DMCA-related issues and how to pick hosting providers that will fight for your rights. The entire site seems to be a treasure trove of information about things like this. I'm posting this here in case it could help anyone else.

I notice the linked guide mentions DirectNIC as the US registrar with the most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspensions. Consider this a +1 recommendation.

We've used DirectNIC for nearly a decade and never had a problem even when Echostar (improperly) tried to make them take us down because of one of our clients. We also recommend http://www.puregig.com/ as a web hosting colo for the same reasons along with their distance from natural disasters.

They do have a proper procedure in place, but they have a lot of other advantages. First of all, they're all multi-billion dollar companies, and can afford a great legal team. Secondly, average people use these sites, so if they were taken down, a LOT of people would be angry. Jotform might have a few thousand users, but that's not enough to get people angry at the Feds. For Facebook, Youtube etc., which has probably at least millions of American users who use at least one daily, it would be a HUGE deal, and would cause a great outcry. Plus, it would be covered by a lot of news. The US government doesn't want to cause that much PR damage, thus it is only targeting sites that most people don't care about.

yes there should be but unfortunately that's not how the world works. In politics (which this clearly is) you always pick a fight with someone you know you can beat. It's hard to beat facebook or youtube.

They're not dumb enough to use godaddy...

But yeah your point about fairness is loud and clear.

Godaddy can seize your domain even if they're not your registrar.

How so?

Here's http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/11/court_oks_priva... an example court order giving "an injunction against the top-level domain name registry, directing it to change the registrar of record for the domain names to GoDaddy".

In that case it looks more like Chanel convinced a court to sieze a domain; GoDaddy had little to do with it.

Well it's a pretty funny coincidence how whenever there's domains to be seized they always seem to end up at GoDaddy.

Well, according to some data I found[1], GoDaddy has 36 million registrations, while the next closest registrar is Enom at 9.7 million. In fact, GoDaddy has more registrations than the next six most popular companies combined. So, it probably makes sense that most of the registration-relation things you hear about involve GoDaddy.

[1] http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/fastest-growing-regist...

To be clear, these are instances of domains specifically being moved to GoDaddy.

When I have spot-checked lists of seized domains in other cases, domains registered with GoDaddy were serving the ICE seizure page while domains with other registrars were simply down.

Explain?

When you are your own domain registrar and hosting provider, the government calls you directly and you can handle the user-generated content yourself.

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