Over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to work out a reasonable resolution to the DMCA problem with a representative of Rackspace (the parent company of Slicehost, my hosting provider). While they are resolute that the downloading of copyrighted material from my server was a violation of the terms of service, they don’t object to the Tor relay itself, so as long as I take some appropriate measures to prevent further downloading, I’m free to restart the relay. But apparently, port blocking is an appropriate measure… even though it doesn’t actually do very much to prevent BitTorrent downloading. So I guess it’s a question of appeasing the authorities — appearance over function.

I’ve been doing some research on how to respond to the DMCA takedown notice I received a couple of days ago, including going right to the source: the DMCA itself, especially 17 U.S.C. § 512. It definitely seems that Tor falls under the limitations in that section, which means that Tor relay operators are not legally liable for the fact that copyright-infringing data happens to pass through their computers — at least, not directly under the DMCA. But there’s also the matter of the hosting provider’s terms of service, which can make operating a relay difficult even when the law would not.

Last night I started operating a Tor relay on my Slicehost server. But I’ve run into trouble already, having received a DMCA takedown notice for a file that is most certainly not hosted on my server; and with it comes the possibility of being taken offline. What’s a law-abiding sysadmin to do to keep the server connected?