
How the “Mail & Guardian” got taken down - Ap0c
https://mg.co.za/article/2019-09-15-censored
======
mherdeg
I'm kind of amazed at how effective this digital reputation management
technique is:

* publish an exact copy of the offending content on a web site and include something that looks like a datetime which is earlier than the publication date of the offending content * tell the web site's ISP and other service providers that they're violating copyright, pointing to your fake content and using the providers' copyright-violation processes, which you know all about because your reputation firm does this stuff all the time

This also works for search engine deindexing, right?

It's just remarkable to me that (a) we all know this works super well and (b)
it keeps working even though everyone knows about it.

~~~
314
Why not file a counter-claim and then make them attempt to prove their
copyright in a real court?

~~~
SiempreViernes
The counter claim would do noting to prevent your own content from going down:
the service providers very clearly don't care about the legitimacy of DMCA
claims, they just automatically comply and let their customers suffer damages
for all the false claims.

------
lacker
It isn’t really fair to pick on Linode, all US hosting providers work the same
way.

When someone files a DMCA claim, if you want to keep the content up you need
your lawyer to file a counterclaim. Hosting providers are then allowed to
leave it up, and you can fight about it in court.

It sounds from this article like the newspaper didn’t have a lawyer, or at
least not a lawyer familiar with American law. That sucks but all you can
really do about it is to get a lawyer, or use a non-US hosting solution.

~~~
kijin
This is a common misconception. You can't use a counter-claim to keep your
content up. You can only use one to have your content reinstated _after_ it
has been removed.

[https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-
Counterclaim](https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim)

~~~
leeoniya
we've gone through this with linode. they give you exactly 96 hours to remove
the content and then you can go through the dispute process. it took about 2
weeks to work things out.

we had used some images from an mfg's pdf installation manual on a page that
was reselling that mfg's own products which we were buying from their offical
distributor - the only way to get the product. talk about absurd.

some of the media that they claimed was theirs was in fact our own original
graphics/images. it didn't matter, we had to remove everything that was in
their overly broad claim.

the DMCA is no joke, but is also a big fucking joke. it's trivial to
completely destroy someone's business by simply making fraudulent claims (it's
guilty until proven innocent). and it's almost impossible to prove that the
claim was made in bad faith rather than simply in error. these claims are
usually made by some contracted third party that flags everything that smells
off. it's the new patent trolling.

~~~
Moru
Solution: Host your stuff outside of country, don't use cloudflare or other US
based services

~~~
leeoniya
sorry, no. this is a shit non-solution. first, 97% of our customers are US-
based. hosting elsewhere would destroy the site performance we worked hard to
maximize. second, we're a us-based company, subject to US laws, so if the ISP
doesnt take down our server, some other legal means will.

~~~
Moru
Well, you won't have much readers in US if someone starts to systematically
use the DMCA for taking down your whole site. Many people have warned about
this problem when it first showed up but the record companies and big
newspapers were happily behind the new law. Now they get to reap the fruits
they were warned about.

------
potatofarmer45
This is a common takedown tactic to clean up your image online. It's easily
contested with a counter-claim but it works because most orgs/sites don't have
a lawyer or don't want to spend the resources to fight it. I've seen cases
where 80% of "negative" content can be scrubbed with the few remaining (read
larger news organizations with lawyers) then crowded out by astroturf articles
claiming the opposite.

The bar to DMCA style takedowns is much higher in Europe. Hence the decision
to host on Linode for a South African newspaper is ... odd. They should
migrate to OVH/Hetz

~~~
philpem
The problem with OVH is their appallingly bad rep for hosting "troublesome"
content...

In practical terms that means you can send emails but there's a 70% chance
they'll land in the other party's spam bin.

------
adrianmonk
> _Our questioning the veracity of the complaint did not seem to make any
> difference._

Linode is an ISP, not a court of law.

Legally, it's not up to them to make this determination. If they are compelled
to take down a site by law, then their opinion about the veracity of the
complaint is not really relevant. Unless they want to defy the law in order to
go out on a limb to protect a customer. Which is a lot to ask of any business.

~~~
prepend
It’s extremely relevant because they can deny the dmca notice. Linode is
protecting themself over their customer.

This is a strong signal to customers to find a better ISP. One who plans on
legal funds to defend customers against these bullshit dmca notices.

~~~
jen729w
> One who plans on legal funds to defend customers against these bullshit dmca
> notices.

I would _love_ to agree with you, but are you gonna pay someone $20/mo for
Linode’s $5/mo service? Of course not; and therein lies financial ruin for the
ISP.

The system is fucked.

~~~
prepend
Yes I will. I’m a big fan of linode and have used them for years. I’m now
looking for smarter hosts and will eventually move every single thing I
control off linode.

------
tylerl
Maybe, perhaps if you're a serious news organization you might not want to
host your site on Linode.

Not that Linode is _bad_ or anything; I'm super happy with them myself. But
the way a company deals with abuse complaints (including takedowns) reflects
the volume of these that they have to deal with, and the blowback they've
experienced by overreacting.

If the provider is tiny, then takedowns are rare and interesting. They'll
examine each one based on its individual merits. Though small companies don't
have the resources to dump a lot of money into making things right, so they
may just take the cheap route and kick you out.

If the provider is reasonably large, they'll get these all the time, and
they'll have an automated and inflexible solution for dealing with them. It'll
be heavily weighted on minimizing the cost to the provider, and will tend to
overreact just to be on the safe side.

If the provider is huge (like, top N kind of huge) then they'll have started
with the automated overreaction solution, but then they'll have had some
massive disaster because their automated abuse system took down a client like
Sony or the New York Times or something. So then the'll have dialed back their
abuse system a bit and made it more expensive to run, but less prone to being
destructive.

~~~
jart
Yeah, Linode is a scrappy little company from Philly that, sixteen years ago,
pioneered the paradigm shift from things like CPanel to Amazon Web Services,
but never became big like Amazon since there was always a focus on making
their service affordable. But even if they were a big company, it's hard to
make economic sense out of asking your lawyers to focus on protecting $5/month
registrations from dmca legal prowling. The way I like to think of it is, we
get what we pay for. If your hosting costs less than it costs someone else to
hire a lawyer to write letters complaining about your hosting, then the will
of heaven will usually favor the side with more dollars and cents on it.

------
illuminati1911
The DMCA is truly a steaming pile of shit.

Nintendo and other companies are also abusing it to take down fair use videos
by individuals on YouTube.

~~~
Cogito
YouTube take downs are usually done without DMCA, right?

Are you saying that the DMCA is explicitly being invoked by Nintendo and
others, or are you talking more generally and including, for example,
YouTube's Content ID system?

~~~
RandomInteger4
YouTube's content ID system is in place to facilitate DMCA takedowns. Folks
such as Nintendo can go either the route of filing a claim to take the ad
revenue of a video, or filing a copyright strike claim to have the video
removed.

Whichever variation that is used is up to the copyright holder (legitimate or
otherwise), and both are definitely used by legitimate actors for sometimes
the most ridiculous of copyright claims (someone humming a song for instance).

~~~
TeMPOraL
AFAIK Content ID is an entirely extralegal system applied _instead of_ DMCA,
executed as a part of YouTube's TOS. It's used because copyright bullies would
prefer not to involve courts if they can avoid it, and I suspect it exists to
prevent MAFIAA from utterly destroying YouTube, as most of its value (until
recently) came from copyright violation.

~~~
RandomInteger4
The content ID system is just a system for "search by video" or "search by
audio". It doesn't do anything "instead of". Just helps copyright owners find
infringing content. What they do after that is up to them.

~~~
Cogito
In some strict sense that may be true, but in this discussion I think it is
reasonable to read 'Content ID' as including YouTube's copyright strike
system, demonetisation, and re-assignment of ad revenue to the claimed
copyright holder.

These things are all very much extralegal, and used instead of the DMCA in
many situations.

------
nabla9
The economics of DMCA claims is similar to spam marketing. The cost is
disproportionately in the receiving end. The cost of making claims is close to
zero.

You can fix this by adding small cost. If counterclaim is filed and complaint
maker is not moving the case forward, they should pay something. Even small
sum like $1000 per dropped claim would likely stop this madness.

------
AstralStorm
Did they file a counter suit for plagiarism?

What happens when DMCA notice meets another one?

Welcome to Bad Law.

~~~
toomuchtodo
If you’re not in the US, avoid US technology providers subject to US law. This
publication would likely be better suited using a provider out of Europe.

~~~
jachee
What's the non-US equivalent of Linode?

~~~
anonydsfsfs
[https://www.hetzner.com/](https://www.hetzner.com/)

------
rgrs
It's time to move cloud out of US.

~~~
incompatible
It can be worse elsewhere, because without the DMCA safe harbor you can be
sued directly, or at least be threatened with lawsuits, for something a
customer or user does. Defamation law is also enforced more strictly in some
countries.

------
imglorp
Nobody's mentioned any tech solutions here.

First of all, the Wayback machine may have captured the thieving site as well
as the victim one. Of course, if you are going to make false copyright claims,
you'd better set your robots.txt to exclude archive.org first.

Second, if you do manage to dispute and get a day in court, how would the
thief prov they owned the material, if the actual content creator had proof of
the date of authorship? Eg tweet a hash, photograph with newspaper headline,
etc? Can court costs be recovered after proof of a false takedown?

~~~
namibj
This looks like criminal fraud, but ianal...

------
dredmorbius
The publishing business is often seen as merely being one of creating and
publishing content. I've come to realise it's rather more than that.

There are the technical elements -- what many HN readers are familiar with in
terms of development, back-end, front-end, and infrastructure tools.

There is the art of developing the content in the first place, including the
methods in this case of investigative journalism.

There is the whole maelstrom of business models and monetisation, on which
virtually all attempts have been foundering of late.

But there's also the legal side, both offensive and defensive. Pursuing
sources, information, and disclosures. And defending the publisher against
attacks, such as the one described here. The publication of _Permanent Record_
highlights another element, that of contracts and publication risk when faced
with a state-level actor and an alleged NDA privilege. There are famous
battles against defamation or censorship lawsuits. And there is the pursuit of
others who take content without payment or credit, claiming it for themselves.

In many histories of great publishing events and episodes, lawyers (and
publishers with spinal, intestinal, and gonadal integrity) play a huge role,
and publishing houses or newspapers as much respected for their solicitors as
their journalists and editors.

It's not just a business that concerns getting words on a page, or screen. The
words have to matter, the words have to be right, the lights must be kept on,
the words distributed. And, if your business is afflicting the comfortable and
comforting the afflicted, resisting and challenging some very motivated and
extraordinarily capable adversaries.

This is something advocates of "citizen-based journalism", or peer-to-peer or
federated technologies, or DIY technical solutions, of whom I very much count
myself as a former and current member, have long failed to appreciate.

The _Mail & Guardian_'s message here is one to remember.

------
jart
My friends, this is why folks have traditionally colo'd servers at peering
points and signed rental contracts lasting years, sometimes decades. Because
they don't want their business operations to have the same level of legal
protections as a youtube comment.

------
jordanthoms
They're vague in there with if they actually filed a counter-claim - that's
how DMCA works, if someone sends a complaint the content has to get removed
quickly, unless you file a counter-claim, then you work it out in the courts.

~~~
kijin
As far as I can tell, a counter-claim can only be submitted _after_ the
allegedly infinging content has been removed. So it cannot be used to defend
against a takedown notice. The content must be removed regardless of whether
or not you have a valid counter-claim.

Moreover, there's a 10-14 day waiting period before the ISP can allow the
content to be put back online. It's a ridiculous process that allows anyone to
take down any content for up to two weeks for any reason. Two weeks is an
eternity in today's news cycles.

[https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-
Counterclaim](https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim)

------
peter_retief
M&G do valuable work in exposing corruption and really need to be supported.
It is hardly Linodes fault that they got manipulated but there really needs to
be better oversight to protect, already struggling, investigative journalism

------
stanislavb
The question is whether other providers would have done the same. i.e. is it
Linode to blame explicitly or federal law and US Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA)?

------
tibbydudeza
They should have hosted with a non US ISP.

~~~
delta1
It seems extremely obvious. ZA domain, ZA relevant content, predominantly ZA
readers (presumably) - why host in the US?

~~~
vuyani
Load shedding

South Africa has had constant power outages

[http://www.eskom.co.za/documents/LoadSheddingFAQ.pdf](http://www.eskom.co.za/documents/LoadSheddingFAQ.pdf)

~~~
delta1
I'm well aware of that. The question was "why host in the US" \- not implying
that hosting should be done in South Africa.

------
kylemclaren
A good argument for multi-cloud

------
Sendotsh
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't
> editorialize.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The title of this submission should be "CENSORED: How the M&G got taken down".
Linode aren't the bad guys here and the title is flat-out misleading.

~~~
ISL
It is unclear that Linode is acting like a good guy here.

~~~
dom_hutton
Either way that is opinion, best to leave the reader to make their own mind
up.

~~~
ISL
Agreed.

------
megaremote
This is an african newspaper called the Mail and Guardian, not the UK's 2 big
newspapers the daily Mail and the Guardian.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've added some quotation marks above. Higher precedence operators ftw.

------
notafraudster
The title really doesn't represent what happened. It's an interesting story,
though.

Edit: Thanks for updating the title

