How do upstream providers here deal with DMCA violation reports? When several tiers separate the backbone from the end customer, should everyone respond? Should the top tiers pass it down to their customers to deal with?

The DMCA itself seems pretty vague here, how are you guys dealing with this, and how have your respective legal teams interpreted who needs to get involved?

When I was at SBC as the legal mumbo jumbo man: If it was our direct customer like DSL/Dial-Up/DS3 and we billed that individual ourselves......we sent the notice to them and gave them a deadline to cut the MP3 FTP server off or clear whatever DMCA problem was there before we handled it permanently. If this was a reseller of our bandwidth (ISP) and it was their customer, then we asked the DMCA to contact them with the notice. We asked for proof of the violation so we could verify it ourselves. We usually didn't involve to many lawyers except for retaining records and when the DMCA couldn't give us enough proof and wanted to draw blood for us not taking their word....our policy (abuse) teams handled everything else. I think they sort of cover this under Limitation for Transitory Communications in TITLE II: ONLINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT LIABILITY LIMITATION. "In general terms, section 512(a) limits the liability of service providers in circumstances where the provider merely acts as a data conduit, transmitting digital information from one point on a network to another at someone else's request. This limitation covers acts of transmission, routing, or providing connections for the information, as well as the intermediate and transient copies that are made automatically in the operation of a network." "In order to qualify for this limitation, the service provider's activities must meet the following conditions: The transmission must be initiated by a person other than the provider. The transmission, routing, provision of connections, or copying must be carried out by an automatic technical process without selection of material by the service provider. The service provider must not determine the recipients of the material. Any intermediate copies must not ordinarily be accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and must not be retained for longer than reasonably necessary. The material must be transmitted with no modification to its content." --------------------------- Dennis Dayman What goes up, must come down. Ask any system administrator. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------