Erroneous DMCA notices and copyright enforcement, part deux: Via Freedom to Tinker.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a deluge of DMCA notices and pre-settlement letters that CoralCDN experienced in late August. This article actually received a bit of press, including MediaPost, ArsTechnica, TechDirt, and, very recently, Slashdot. I'm glad that my own experience was able to shed some light on the more insidious practices that are still going on under the umbrella of copyright enforcement. More transparency is especially important at this time, given the current debate over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Given this discussion, I wanted to write a short follow-on to my previous post.

The VPA drops Nexicon

First and foremost, I was contacted by the founder of the Video Protection Alliance not long after this story broke. I was informed that the VPA has not actually developed its own technology to discover users who are actively uploading or downloading copyrighted material, but rather contracts out this role to Nexicon. (You can find a comment from Nexicon's CTO to my previous article here.) As I was told, the VPA was contracted by certain content publishers to help reduce copyright infringement of (largely adult) content. The VPA in turn contracted Nexicon to find IP addresses that are participating in BitTorrent swarms of those specified movies. Using the IP addresses given them by Nexicon, the VPA subsequently would send pre-settlement letters to the network providers of those addresses.

The VPA's founder also assured me that their main goal was to reduce infringement, as opposed to collecting pre-settlement money. (And that users had been let off with only a warning, or, in the cases where infringement might have been due to an open wireless network, informed how to secure their wireless network.) He also expressed surprise that there were false positives in the addresses given to them (beyond said open wireless), especially to the extent that appropriate verification was lacking. Given this new knowledge, he stated that the VPA dropped their use of Nexicon's technology.

BitTorrent and Proxies

Second, I should clarify my claims about BitTorrent's usefulness with an on-path proxy. While it is true that the address registered with the BitTorrent tracker is not usable, peers connecting from behind a proxy can still download content from other addresses learned from the tracker. If their requests to those addresses are optimistically unchoked, they have the opportunity to even engage in incentivized bilateral exchange. Furthermore, the use of DHT- and gossip-based discovery with other peers---the latter is termed PEX, for Peer EXchange, in BitTorrent---allows their real address to be learned by others. Thus, through these more modern discovery means, other peers may initiate connections to them, further increasing the opportunity for tit-for-tat exchanges.

Some readers also pointed out that there is good reason why BitTorrent trackers do not just accept any IP address communicated to it via an HTTP query string, but rather use the end-point IP address of the TCP connection. Namely, any HTTP query parameter can be spoofed, leading to anybody being able to add another's IP address to the tracker list. That would make them susceptible to receiving DMCA complaints, just we experienced with CoralCDN. From a more technical perspective, their machine would also start receiving unsolicited TCP connection requests from other BitTorrent peers, an easy DoS amplification attack.

That said, there are some additional checks that BitTorrent trackers could do. For example, if the IP query string or X-Forwarded-For HTTP headers are present, only add the network IP address if it matches the query string or X-Forwarded-For headers. Additionally, some BitTorrent tracker operators have mentioned that they have certain IP addresses whitelisted as trusted proxies; in those cases, the X-Forwarded-For address is used already. Otherwise, I don't see a good reason (plausible deniability aside) for recording an IP address that is known to be likely incorrect.

Best Practices for Online Technical Copyright Enforcement

Finally, my article pointed out a strategy that I clearly thought was insufficient for copyright enforcement: simply crawling a BitTorrent tracker for a list of registered IP addresses, and issuing a infringement notice to each IP address. I'll add to that two other approaches that I think are either insufficient, unethical, or illegal---or all three---yet have been bandied about as possible solutions.

• Wiretapping: It has been suggested that network providers can perform deep-packet inspection (DPI) on their customer's traffic in order to detect copyrighted content. This approach probably breaks a number of laws (either in the U.S. or elsewhere), creates a dangerous precedence and existing infrastructure for far-flung Internet surveillance, and yet is of dubious benefit given the move to encrypted communication by file-sharing software.
• Spyware: By surreptitiously installing spyware/malware on end-hosts, one could scan a user's local disk in order to detect the existence of potentially copyrighted material. This practice has even worse legal and ethical implications than network-level wiretapping, and yet politicians such as Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) have gone as far as declaring that infringers' computers should be destroyed. And it opens users up to the real danger that their computers or information could be misused by others; witness, for example, the security weaknesses of China's Green Dam software.

So, if one starts from the position that copyrights are valid and should be enforceable---some dispute this---what would you like to see as best practices for copyright enforcement?

The approach taken by DRM is to try to build a technical framework that restricts users' ability to share content or to consume it in a proscribed manner. But DRM has been largely disliked by end-users, mostly in the way it creates a poor user experience and interferes with expected rights (under fair-use doctrine). But DRM is a misleading argument, as copyright infringement notices are needed precisely after "unprotected" content has already flown the coop.

So I'll start with two properties that I would want all enforcement agencies to take when issuing DMCA take-down notices. Let's restrict this consideration to complaints about "whole" content (e.g., entire movies), as opposed to those DMCA challenges over sampled or remixed content, which is a legal debate.

• For any end client suspected of file-sharing, one MUST verify that the client was actually uploading or downloading content, AND that the content corresponded to a valid portion of a copyrighted file. In BitTorrent, this might be that the client sends or receives a complete file block, and that the file block hashes to the correct value specified in the .torrent file.
• When issuing a DMCA take-down notice, the request MUST be accompanied by logged information that shows (a) the client's IP:port network address engaged in content transfer (e.g., a record of a TCP flow); (b) the actual application request/response that was acted upon (e.g., BitTorrent-level logs); and (c) that the transferred content corresponds to a valid file block (e.g., a BitTorrent hash).

So my question to the readers: What would you add to or remove from this list? With what other approaches do you think copyright enforcement should be performed or incentivized?

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