
NRA complaint takes down Surge's 38,000 websites - rmason
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nra-complaint-takes-down-38000-websites
======
kstrauser
If you're going to host controversial, static content then consider
NearlyFreeSpeech.net
([https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)). They
have a legal team that seems to love shredding takedown notices. For example,
this is from their abuse handling document at
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse#civil](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse#civil):

" _A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site is defaming me or otherwise injuring me
civilly, or is infringing my non-copyright intellectual property rights._

Please forward a certified copy of your legal finding from a court of
competent jurisdiction to our correspondence address. If you have not yet
obtained such a finding, a preliminary injunction or court order is typically
also sufficient.

If you are not able to obtain the above, you will need to work directly with
the site operator to resolve your differences. We will have to fall back on
our members' contractual assertion that the content they upload is legitimate
and therefore we will not be able to get involved."

(Not affiliated in any way except as a happy customer. I use them for cheap
hosting for some domains I control.)

~~~
electrograv
It's important to note this is not just controversial content, it's outright
libel claiming false official sponsorship from real organizations. The parody
video says:

 _“Paid for in part by the National Rifle Association of America with
additional support from Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation."_ [1]

Conversely, I could imagine a parody video created by extreme conservatives
mocking Planned Parenthood by happily and cheerfully promoting "baby murder"
and "baby parts harvesting for the good of medical science", and quoting the
text "This advertisement sponsored and paid for by Planned Parenthood."

Independent of your political views, claiming false _official_ sponsorship of
a parody is _wrong_. Slanderous impersonation of a person or organization is
not inherently protected by freedom of speech.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8punyPP-
bs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8punyPP-bs)

~~~
kstrauser
Saturday Night Live has been running parody advertising purporting to
originate from real organizations for decades. I'm not a lawyer, but no one
here has satisfactorily explained why this group running a fake NRA ad is a
different animal from SNL running a fake McDonald's ad.

Also, assume nothing about my political views. I'm not an NRA member, but I
have spent a couple of nice Saturdays shooting skeet with my son and his Boy
Scout troop. My position would be exactly the same if this were a Planned
Parenthood parody or if it spoofed any other politics-heavy organization.

~~~
electrograv
Satire is and should continue to be protected by Freedom of Speech, but you
should understand there are lines satire can cross to become libel, and
illegal.

When a corporate or person's name/trademark is used explicitly and
intentionally, freedom of speech does _not_ automatically inherently protect
the publication or media. In such a case, damages (if any) are resolved on a
case-by-case basis, generally depending on the content and how
indistinguishable it is from the real thing (and whether it's potentially
damaging).

Saturday Night Live and The Onion are protected because both are widely known
and clearly labeled as comedy/satire content. Neither is the case for this
video, and as a result it's extremely likely they would fail at defending a
lawsuit from the NRA if they did decide to prosecute.

P.S. My post assumed nothing about anyone's political views. The planned
parenthood example was meant to provide balance via an analogical example from
the other stereotypical political side.

~~~
splawn
Its such delicious satire too. It has forced a lobby group that has an
unyielding view point on the 2nd amendment to clash directly with the 1st
amendment. Which in turn causes me to question my own unyielding view on the
1st amendment... Hilarious and brilliant stuff IMO, assuming this was all in
the design of the satire.

~~~
hga
_It has forced a lobby group that_ is perceived to have _an unyielding view
point on the 2nd amendment_

The NRA's stance is very much exaggerated, e.g. every piece of Federal anti-
gun legislation passed with their approval until the 1994 AW ban, and since
the passage of the Brady Bill the year before, which eventually set up the
National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), their baby, you
might say, they've supported and are right now supporting legislation that
uses the NICS to prevent people from buying guns from FFLs (gun stores).

To cover a bit more of their relationship with the 1st Amendment (which after
looking at the Wayback Machine copies of the website, I'm not so sure is
implicated, e.g. it does not come off as satire unless you know enough about
the NRA's stolid style), they fiercely opposed McCain-Feingold, since it
banned a lot of their political speech before elections (this was resolved in
their favor in the _Citizens United_ case).

------
20years
Update: Digital Ocean sent a statement.

"We received notice on behalf of a trademark holder that a customer of
DigitalOcean was hosting infringing content on our network. DigitalOcean
immediately notified our customer of the infringement, and the customer was
given a five day period to resolve the issue. The infringing content was not
removed within the specified period even though several notifications were
issued. Per DigitalOcean’s terms of service, a final reminder was issued to
our customer and, when no action was taken, access to the content was
disabled. The infringing content was subsequently removed by the customer and
all services were restored in less than two hours."

5 days seems to be ample amount of time.

~~~
hristov
The content is not infringing. There is a fair use exception to trademark law
to protect product criticism, works of art, irony, etc. You cannot use
trademark law to silence all criticism of your organization.

~~~
Mithaldu
Fair use is a _defense_. You can preemptively declare it as that, and hope
that whoever you're parodying will see the light, but it doesn't give you
immunity. Once a DMCA notice is served, and not obviously invalid, the content
has to be taken down by the carrier. In exchange for having to do that, the
carrier isn't liable. That is safe harbour. Simultaneously the content
uploader can either get the supposed owner to retract their notice, or inform
the carrier they'll hash it out in court. And only then, in front of a judge,
does "fair use" come into play.

~~~
mgleason_3
Oh come on - just as fair use remains a defense in court, the NRAs claim must
also be proven in court. Unlike a DCMA, the compliant does not require DO to
take down the web site.

Clearly DO choked and hurt free speech in the process.

~~~
Mithaldu
> Unlike a DCMA, the compliant does not require DO to take down the web site.

Does it? Please link to the legislation describing the specific complaint
made.

~~~
gpm
That's not how law works, everything is permitted until it's forbidden. So
given the absence of legislation they do not have to.

~~~
Mithaldu
You're assuming it is a formless complaint, as opposed to a complaint
conforming with specific legislation. If you know it is a formless complaint,
can you please point to the source of your knowledge on that?

~~~
gpm
As far as I'm aware the complaint has not been made public. But unless you can
point to a single piece of "formed" legislation for this, I'm certainly going
to assume it is formless. Both because every trademark complaint I've seen has
been formless, and it is impossible to disprove that a law exists in America,
only the converse.

------
mattbee
The UK has a pretty fierce reputation for plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and
hosting companies get loads of dodgy complaints. At Bytemark we got sick of
them a few years back and spent _thousands_ taking advice from Carter-Ruck,
the UK's go-to libel experts.

I wrote an old rambling blog post here ->
[https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-
libel-o...](https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-or-why-
i-wont-read-your-forum) but in summary, hosting companies aren't as liable for
their customers' content as most solicitors would like you to believe!

Since 2010 we demand very specific standards for legal complaints (more than a
typical "scare letter"), or a court order - and most complainants drop away
before actually doing things properly. Typical exchange might be:

them: "Huge sections of this site are defamatory to my client! I demand under
enormous penalty that you take the whole thing down"

us: "We've not read it, do you want to tell us where the defamatory statements
are?"

them: "It's blazingly obvious, and we'll take you to court if you don't
comply"

us: "We don't know your client, or their reputation, and we don't read our
customers sites, so you'll need to tell us about these defamatory statements
in more detail."

Very occasionally the solicitors _will_ do the work, and we're on notice at
that point, but we then talk to the customer, explain the situation and ask
them take down just the statements we've been notified about.

The other strategy that works very often is to ask both parties if we can put
them and our customer in touch, then let them sort it out.

None of this is a free-speech thing, just the climate we found ourselves doing
business in. We've always found it perfectly possible to respond to legal
complaints across thousands of customers without pulling the plug in a panic.

------
jMyles
The particulars of this content (and the action by The Yes Men) aside for a
moment, this is just another illustration that the current shape and function
of the internet is highly censorable. This is a fixable technical problem.

There needs to be an easy, low-friction way for groups like The Yes Men to
publish content such that no single actor can subsequently be pressured to
remove it. Whether it's federated web, P2P, blockchain, onion routing, some
other tech, or a combination of all of the above, this needs to be an
increasing priority so that viable civic discourse can continue and blossom.

~~~
tomjen3
That is basically what Freenet does.

Freenet is also infamous for being mostly child porn, because it is the one
place where you can't find the person who uploads it and you can't censor it
either.

~~~
dublinben
Child exploitation content is an unfortunate canary in the coal mine for free
speech. If a service or network is robust enough (in terms of censorship
resistance and anonymity) for them, then it will be good enough for you too.
On the other hand, if whatever platform you are publishing to is free of this
objectionable content, then yours isn't safe either.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I don't agree, and I don't think most people do either. The sane approach we
would like is to have an internet where harmful and illegal content like child
porn can be censored and the criminals behind it identified and prosecuted,
but where legal forms of free speech are strongly protected from censorship.

There isn't really a slipperly slope here. Very few forms of content are
banned in this way, and the list is unanimously agreed upon and changes
extremely infrequently. No one is trying to ban extreme-but-consensual-among-
adults porn. No one is trying to ban extreme graphical violence. Etc. etc.

The only area where there is a problem, as this case illustrates, is with
copyright and trademarks. The correct solution to this problem is to implement
more sane copyright laws, internet or not.

~~~
jMyles
If it's possible for the arm of the law to reach particular speech, is that
speech really free?

We need an internet were speech isn't protected because the government blesses
it and decides not to censor it. We need an internet where the government is
wholly unable to censor it. Then we'll see what actual free speech looks like.

...and the matter of what speech is permissible is far from unanimous. The
list of content that various governments deem taboo is enormous and growing.
In the USA we have it much better than most places, but even here we have a
very robust system of denial-of-service via DMCA and other legal means,
including the trademark at issue here.

There's little doubt in most people's minds that the kinds of actions that The
Yes Men execute are protected by the first amendment, yet here we are.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Analogy: think of the police system. Yes, in a dysfunctional society, police
can beat you up, demand bribes at random, even kill you. Yet we all agree that
police do useful work.

Is the correct solution to this problem to introduce a technical system where
everyone can hide perfectly from the law if they spend some time and effort?
Or is the correct solution to implement a system where the powers of the
police are clearly and strictly limited and where the punishment for
transgressions is severe?

~~~
jMyles
> we all agree that police do useful work.

What a strange conclusion to which to jump. While I happen to agree that
police are a benefit to society, their placement as a tool of the state is
something that I hope to see changed, maybe even in my lifetime.

Professional police are a very new thing in common law society; still in an
experimental stage in my view. And with the emergence and eventual maturity of
the internet, I (and I think many of us through the open source world) think
that it's totally plausible that police-as-a-service-of-the-state will be
judged to be more trouble than it's worth.

> Is the correct solution to this problem to introduce a technical system
> where everyone can hide perfectly from the law if they spend some time and
> effort?

We aren't talking about "hiding perfectly from the law," at least not if the
law in question casts no shadow over speech based on its content. Being able
to publish content without any possibility of destruction of that content
seems, at least to me, an entirely orthogonal venture to that of exacting
violence or theft of some kind (ie, the more natural implications of the law).

If the state is made unable, in a physical and technological sense, to reach
out and eliminate particular bytes-on-the-wire deemed illegitimate, I assert
that the law will grow stronger, not weaker, precisely because we won't have
to concern ourselves in the political realm about what to and not to censor.

------
jbenz
I guarantee I never would have heard about this video (which sounds hilarious)
if not for this news story.

Pretty sure the NRA knows who Barbara Streisand is. There were all upset about
her movie, The Long Island Incident. Maybe they are not as familiar with her
Effect.

~~~
alexbock
Let's ignore the topic of the video itself since gun control is quite a
controversial issue. If you start producing political videos (and despite
being a parody, it's certainly political) that contain libelous "paid for by"
messages you are going to have problems regardless of the subject. There's a
reason you see these messages in every political ad that airs in America,
people take them very seriously.

To the anonymous downvoters, note that it is _illegal_ (and not just a civil
issue) to falsify this kind of statement in some states. I'm not sure what
people are disagreeing with since nobody has left a dissenting comment, so
I'll just ask this: if the target here was a parody video encouraging mothers
to abort 104-week-old fetuses that claimed to be "paid for by Planned
Parenthood" would you have the same opinion? If not I think you're letting
your opinion on guns get in the way.

~~~
IvyMike
> (To the anonymous downvoters, note that it is illegal (and not just a civil
> issue) to falsify this kind of statement in some states.)

Can you say more about this--can you give some example state laws?

Note that Google apparently is comfortable leaving the video up on youtube
with the "Paid for in part by the NRA" notice intact.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8punyPP-
bs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8punyPP-bs)

~~~
alexbock
The states I've checked all have a law against misrepresenting the origin of a
political advertisement that advocates (even indirectly) for/against a
candidate or party, and sometimes ballot measures are included too. Some of
them are more strict than others, this is from Texas for example:

    
    
        A person commits an offense if, with intent to
        injure a candidate or influence the result of an
        election, the person enters into a contract or
        other agreement to print, publish, or broadcast
        political advertising that purports to emanate
        from a source other than its true source.
    

It's hard to say this is a traditional political advertisement. Whether you
could convince a judge that an ad purporting to be from the NRA (and
presumably making Republicans look bad) is intended to influence an election
is questionable. If they had included mention of Hillary or Trump in the video
this would be pretty clear cut, but as is it's harder because the link between
supporting or attacking candidates through political entities they do or don't
support without actually mentioning them by name is a case law issue.

~~~
spangry
_' It's hard to say this is a traditional political advertisement. Whether you
could convince a judge that an ad purporting to be from the NRA (and
presumably making Republicans look bad) is intended to influence an election
is questionable.'_

This seems to be the key issue. It seems unlikely that a prosecutor could
achieve a conviction under these laws, given the specific meaning of some of
the terms used (as defined in §251.001). I haven't seen the video, but it
sounds like it was a general parody of the NRA?

At any rate, a prosecutor would have to prove that:

1\. The creator of the video has _specific intent_ to harm a _particular
candidate_ , or otherwise influence the election result.

2\. The latter part of #1 (influence result) seems to be made irrelevant by
the definition of 'political advertisement': _"...means a communication
supporting or opposing a candidate for nomination or election to a public
office or office of a political party, a political party, a public officer"_
[§251.001 (16)]

~~~
ExpendableGuy
This issue is murky for two reasons:

1\. The Yes Men is assumedly not paying to promote this video (so it's not "an
ad"), 2\. The message is not electioneering.

We're used to seeing, "paid for by" and "I approved this..." messaging in
electioneering ads that are regulated by the FEC. The NRA, a 501(c)(4), has to
play by different rules to keep its status.

IANAL, but I'd assume that the NRA would need to argue that the video puts
their 501(c)(4) status at risk to warrant legal action outside of just playing
the copyright/damages card.

~~~
hga
The NRA, as a 501(c)(4), is most certainly able to do electioneering, although
there are of course constraints (I think it's limited to members?).

But it also has a PAC, the Political Victory Fund, which is quite able to do
the usual stuff, here's their first TV ad for this election they just cut,
I've set the time to the last 5 seconds where they claim it per the law:
[https://youtu.be/SIl20jItjHY?t=25](https://youtu.be/SIl20jItjHY?t=25)

------
jjnoakes
When people ask me why I lean toward hosting my content on infrastructure I
control (as far as I can), I point then to articles like this.

I get that it isn't for everyone - you have to know what you are doing and you
have to have the time (at least initially) to do it - but if you can do it,
you avoid all manner of third party unreliability.

The trend to blindly rely on tens or even hundreds of third parties for stuff
like web sites is a direction I'm personally not comfortable with. Just one
issue can take everything down.

The lower level your dependency (like an ISP vs a hosting company), the harder
it is, intentionally or accidentally, to be affected like this.

~~~
codezero
How much of the infrastructure can you control though?

~~~
geggam
all of it but the network connectivity and that can be changed

~~~
codezero
You're unlikely to be able to control the root name servers for the domain, or
SSL certificate authority, though that might be nit picking.

------
AaronFriel
This is a fairly awful policy for cloud hosting and VPSes. Microsoft's policy,
and I suspect Amazon's and Google's, are to forward legal requests to the
company or client using their cloud services and wash their hands of the
matter.

For DigitalOcean to intervene here seems strange.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I am not a lawyer...

That is partially correct, but the host (DO), still needs to ensure the
content was removed. If they pass it on and the account owner ignores it, DO
could potentially be liable.

~~~
ultramancool
Yeah, but I'm on DigitalOcean and I got a takedown just the other week for
something a user uploaded. I removed it and informed them within the hour and
all was good.

It's possible they ignored this type of thing or that they just didn't want
the mess...

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
That's how most places handle it in my experience, but it does depend on the
scope. I've received some from large companies with big legal teams and then
our hosts' legal counsel gets very involved in the process. Given this is the
NRA, it might have to do with that, or it could simply be some overzealous
staff member.

------
Steeeve
It's irresponsible for a service provider who outsources server management to
a cloud company to not know and meet that vendors contractual requirements.

They were given notice, they failed to respond to that notice. Then they tried
to make it seem like Digital Ocean was the bad guy.

If anybody looks bad here, it's Surge. They lost 37,999 websites because they
couldn't resolve a problem with 1.

~~~
sintaxi
Please know more facts before passing judgement.

We told Digital Ocean that we were open on the issue and that we would rather
take down the site than risk having all our customers disabled.

We asked for one of two things either 1) we be sent a takedown notice from the
trademark holder OR 2) Digital Ocean be sent a takedown notice from the
trademark holder

Digital Ocean took down our customers sites knowing full well that they didn't
have to.

~~~
Steeeve
I appreciate your response, but you have done a disservice to your customer
base. If you're going to risk the status of 37,999 websites on principal, you
have a duty to notify those site owners of your predicament and of the risk
you are placing them in.

You _could_ have worked out a firm deadline for resolving this issue ahead of
the shutdown.

You _could_ have complied, then taken your business elsewhere or come to a
meaningful resolution without risking 37,999 sites.

When coming to my conclusion, I read your side of the argument and I read
Digital Ocean's. You chose not to tell the whole story in order to put Digital
Ocean in a bad light. Bad decision after bad decision.

------
rm_-rf_slash
All they had to do was not use the NRA name and logo and call it something
else like the MRA - 'Murican Rifle Association. Then it would have solely been
a parody with no trademark infringement and no legal authority on the part of
the real NRA.

~~~
djsumdog
That's not really the issue. If anything, that's for a court battle to decide.
The issue is that DO took down Surge's entire company, without a DMCA
complaint, and with misleading Surge (see the founder's comment).

We're not even aware of what type of complaint this was. Cease and desist?
That's an angry bullshit letter that holds no legal weight. If DO buckled over
something stupid like that, and mislead Surge as to the nature of notice and
the window of response; well that's just a shitty provider. I wouldn't use
them for anything if that's all true.

------
kyledrake
Hi, I run neocities.org.

If you're hosting other people's content, DigitalOcean instances will only get
you so far. You really need to be a proper ISP and have control of things like
the IP addresses to make sure that these abuse reports go to you directly, and
not to your upstream provider that will eventually get sick of dealing with
you and shitlist you. We used to use DO for the proxy servers, but learned
quickly that this wasn't going to work long term. Throwing CloudFlare in front
of it as we see here doesn't solve this problem.

Having control over your IP addresses adds a ton of bureaucratic and technical
complexity and leaves out a _lot_ of "cloud providers", including most of the
big ones like AWS and Google Cloud. I really have no idea how you could run a
real ISP on top of these cloud services. Without control over the reporting
mechanism, there's no way to automate the process or streamline it. And you'll
be at the complete whim of your upstream cloud provider.

Only after we started down the path of IP control did Neocities stop having
problems with the occasional abuse reports threatening to take down all of our
sites. It took a _long_ time to find the right partners to do this with, but
we finally did.

You can blame the NRA or DigitalOcean or whatever, but honestly at the end of
the day, you're going to get a bunch of these from every random organization.
Today it's NRA, tomorrow it's MLB because someone is using your web hosting to
publish a pirated baseball stream. This isn't exceptional at all - Google
probably gets tens of thousands of reports like this a day. The difference is
that they control their infrastructure, so they decide whether a site gets
blocked or not. As a web hosting provider, that's the position you want to be
in.

I'm available for consulting for anyone that wants to setup a web hosting
platform that can resist problems like this. We also now own an IP block, and
are willing to discuss providing some IP addresses for groups like surge.sh or
anyone that does web hosting of this nature. I can make sure the abuse reports
go directly to you, and if they decide to try to go upstream and piss off the
provider, they go through me instead of indifferent abuse guy at a cheap VPS
provider that assumes you're running a hacked wordpress blog.

------
wmeredith
It's bizarre that a complaint about a single site (no matter the merit) can
take a network of thousands.

------
powera
This is entirely Surge's fault. Surge buys and resells computing resources. If
you're part of a Matryoshka doll of platform providers, your plan _has_ to be
to take down content at the first request of your provider and to put it back
afterwards. The other option is to have your entire site get banned.

Both Google and Amazon have had situations where their entire worldwide
properties have been shut down in various countries because of a single piece
of content hosted on their platforms that they refused to take down.

Surge is expecting special treatment that not even Google and Amazon get by
not taking the content down immediately and complaining about a larger
shutdown. "Due Process" doesn't come into play at all.

~~~
mindslight
Under your theory, every network provider has to shut down for each and every
complaint.

~~~
powera
Yes, if you don't want to get shut down, you have to take down content for
each and every complaint, even the spurious ones, until you file some type of
lawsuit against it. Because otherwise somebody else will do it for you.

It's part of being a middle-man, which is exactly what Surge is. There is no
"due process" here. It's unreasonable for a service provider to ask for it.

------
tshtf
If you have a startup with _any_ user generated-content, keep reports like
this in mind when choosing your service provider.

------
anonbanker
The document in question is fantastic. I'm a lifetime NRA member living in
canada, and I would _love_ to see if there was an increase in violent crimes
by homeless people if they were armed.

I've been witness to a lot of homeless people in my city being killed (often
for sport). Arming the homeless, as Tom Morello advertised, might be in our
best interest as a society.

~~~
hga
I not sure _this_ purported program could include the homeless, for per the
infamous Form 4473
([https://www.atf.gov/file/61446/download](https://www.atf.gov/file/61446/download)
has a 2012 version), you've got to supply your "Current Resident Address",
which cannot be a P.O. Box.

Which doesn't forbid possession, or legal purchase by private sale, just maybe
doing it through an FFL as the mechanism necessarily is detailed in the web
site.

------
makecheck
I don’t care if I agree or disagree with the content, there is simply too much
power in mere “complaints” these days.

We MUST reach the point where every provider is _incapable_ of knowing exactly
what is hosted. In other words: you pay me money for service X, I provide X,
and anything outside that simple agreement is out of scope.

Concurrently, we can address the _likely_ reasons to want a “takedown” by
working on new _authenticity_ technologies: rather than trying to “remove X
from the Internet”, make it so that any copy of X can be compared to a signed
version. This would train people to scrutinize what they read, much like they
sort of know to scrutinize non-padlocked web site forms.

For instance, given any snippet of text X, perhaps a browser has a way to
determine if that matches any signed statements from the quoted person. And
then, if you set up a smear web site claiming that I said X, anyone can use my
official signing key to see if I actually published statements that match your
text. If what you quote can be verified then the browser could indicate that
the information appears to be accurate; otherwise, the browser could warn that
the content is unverified. This concept could be extended to other forms of
media as well.

In order for much of this to work, we need to be able to decentralize all
encrypted content so providers can’t even easily _guess_ who hosted something
(like the firing squad: not every shooter has a bullet but somehow the deed is
done). If the volume of traffic might also be a hint, then winnow and chaff
the volume across providers to the point where you can’t even tell how much
real content is present.

Obviously this anonymity would mean that we can no longer use sledgehammers to
kill ants, for some definition of $UNDESIRABLE ants. To me, that is not only
fine but downright _crucial_ : put the burden/cost of proof back where it
belongs. Or better still, let these people learn to do the digital equivalent
of changing the channel: if you don’t like what a web site said then don’t
visit that web site!

------
intrasight
Isn't is cheaper, easier and safer (from a "network takedown" perspective) to
host your sites on S3? I don't think anyone, not even the NRA, is powerful
enough to take down AWS.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Only if it's 100% static. Most websites are going to want at least some
metrics, maybe a few forms, etc. And I suspect it's not THAT much more
difficult to get AWS to do a more targeted takedown. I mean YouTube's pretty
powerful, but they'll notoriously cave to a DMCA takedown pretty damn
enthusiastically.

~~~
intrasight
The article specifically said these were all static sites.

------
forgottenpass
Considering something similar happened to surge in January, I'm surprised they
haven't worked to mitigate this single point of failure.

Whether it's a failover strategy, negotiating a different business
relationship with Digital Ocean, or whatever. There is a lot more they could
be doing to stay online until they (Surge) are the ones choosing to pull the
plug on a user's site (or are ordered by the courts to do so).

~~~
sintaxi
You're right. I openly accept this criticism.

Steps have already been taken to to get us to the point where a provider is no
longer a single point of failure. To be honest this isn't a problem we had
anticipated.

I expect Surge will be provider agnostic sometime in the close future.

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
It doesn't sound like Digital Ocean handled this very well. You are allowed to
give ample time to the site owner to disable the offending content. And then
the counter-notice process starts to get it back on-line.

Only if the site owner ignores the notice should the VPS be turned off
entirely.

------
paulddraper
A bit off-topic, but that satire was so good it was great.

I support the right to bear arms.

Other than being childish ("dumb laws") and poorly worded (emphasizing "at
risk"), there wasn't much I'd disagree with. I expected satire to have a
little more humor.

------
neom
The CEO of DigitalOcean also tweeted at them:
[https://twitter.com/benuretsky/status/748508252263059456](https://twitter.com/benuretsky/status/748508252263059456)

Seems DO did everything by the book?

------
kmiroslav
The DMCA complaint from the NRA looks legitimate, it's the decision from
DigitalOcean to shut down the entire Surge network instead of just taking down
the offending content that seems disproportionate.

~~~
the_trapper
I don't think you quite understand how DigitalOcean works. They provide you
with an unmanaged Virtual Private Server (they call them "droplets"), which
means that they don't reasonably have the means to go through Surge's
"droplet" and remove this content themselves.

This left DigitalOcean with two options: leave the droplet up and potentially
open themselves up to legal risk from the NRA and potentially Smith & Wesson
as well; or turn off the whole droplet and let Surge sort this mess out.

~~~
sintaxi
We did not force Digital Oceans had by leaving them with only those two
options.

a) We told Digital Ocean that if push comes to shove we will remove the domain
not resist and risk having all our customers sites taken down. We explicitly
stated this.

b) We had reason to believe it was still an open issue and being discussed.
Including filing a counter claim (at their request).

We were fighting for due process, not fighting to prevent the takedown.

------
pessimizer
Isn't this the obvious result, if not an actual goal, of centralization?

------
splawn
They are going to have to take my fake NRA logo from my cold dead hands.

------
dandare
Streisand effect :) (yep I too shared the video on FB)

------
desireco42
This should not be possible. There should be a law to protect hosting
providers. It is not the first time.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
There is a law protecting hosting providers -- it's the DMCA safe harbor
provisions. But in order for those safe harbor provisions to apply, the host
needs to take the content down almost immediately or have the account owner do
it (grey area on how quickly this really is IMO, but it's usually <24 hours).

After the content is taken down, the content owner can file a counter-notice
(basically saying the complaint is incorrect). And then if no lawsuit is filed
by the complainant in a certain number of days, the content owner can put the
content back online.

For the record, I'm no fan of the DMCA because it's rampant with abuse and
trivial to forge notices. It is too easy to silence speech with the DMCA, at
least temporarily, and the repercussions for sending false DMCA notices are a
joke. Plus, anyone can send a DMCA, even foreign entities, which makes going
after the complainant for damages for false reports not even worth the
trouble.

~~~
Karunamon
Trademark and DMCA are two different issues; per DigitalOcean, this was _not_
a DMCA.

