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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
A US-based hosting company, Profreehost, has suspended a developer's account over what pretty much boils down to the use of the word "torrent" in the name of one of the packages uploaded to the service.
The developer, identified as "Maurerr" by TorrentFreak – who are reporting about the case -found out that his account had been suspended for "prohibited activity" shortly after uploading a package with the LibTorrent library to his repository containing open-source Linux software.
Neither BitTorrent itself as the protocol, nor the library in question – a building block used in a number of torrent clients – are in any way illegal, even if they are widely used for peer-to-peer sharing of pirated material. Yet despite this association, it's a curious move, to say the least, to effectively ban anything with the word "torrent" from a hosting platform.
"Torrents and torrent related content is strictly prohibited on our service," TorrentFreak said it learned from Profreehost.
Source: https://reclaimthenet.org/profreehost-ban/
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @11:32AM (1 child)
Leaves you exposed to liabilities for damages. It's the whole safe harbor thing...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:01PM
IANAL, but under the "safe harbour" provisions of the DMCA in the United States, that seems to be true for "(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications", which apply when a service provider acts as a medium between two communicating parties. For such communications, indeed the provider must ensure that "the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider" to benefit from the save harbours. It also seems to be true to a lesser extent for "(b) System Caching." which is basically a provider doing (a) but also storing data that transits the network.
However, that's not the type of communication at issue here. Instead they are actually hosting material that users upload, which would presumably fall under category (c) of the safe harbours: "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." Under this category, there appears to be no prohibition on any kind of filtering or curation by the service provider, provided they don't continue to host material for which the service provider has actual knowledge of copyright infrigement.