DISQUS

Princeton S* Network Systems: CoralCDN Lesson: Accepting conservatively and serving liberally

  • Omprakash Gnawali · 6 months ago
    If a site has gone down in response to DMCA take-down notice, can "serving liberally" result in proxies also being subject to DMCA notices? The technical argument here says that the original server did not return the "GONE" response but sending "GONE" response is probably not legally mandated.
  • Mike Freedman · 6 months ago
    Hi Om,

    Well, anytime you appear to be a public-facing proxy cache, you are subject to DMCA notices. And sometimes even when you aren't, like when you are actually a printer. The short response is that yes, we've had to deal with DMCA notices. The typical answer I give appears in our FAQ:


    CoralCDN does not provide archival storage of content, like google.com's cache or archive.org. Much like a web cache or "content accelerator" at ISPs, CoralCDN only keeps data temporarily in its file caches, either until the data expires or it is evicted (as may occur for unpopular data). As described above, CoralCDN will serve data for some maximum fixed period (24 hours) before checking back with the origin website. If the content at that site has changed, CoralCDN will fetch the new content afresh, replacing the old. If the origin site is no longer online or the particular content returns some HTTP error message, CoralCDN will only serve the old data for a short time (24 hours).

    Thus, if you believe that a website is making infringing content available, please direct any notices to that particular website. Recall that CoralCDN's naming method makes it obvious the identity of the origin website: A Coralized URL of the form http://www.example.com.nyud.net/ corresponds to an origin site http://www.example.com/ .

    If/When that origin site complies with the notice, the content in question will naturally be removed from CoralCDN's caches through purely automated technical means in at most 24 hours.


    My understanding is that the DMCA requires that content be taken down with some reasonable time period, which CoralCDN's expiry times satisfy. In the past, this explanation and the resulting system behavior has satisfied content owners.