DMCA-ignored hostingA notice is a claim. Only a court makes it an order.
Title 17 §512 is United States law and none of our eight companies are inside it. Notices are read, answered and passed to you in full — and nothing comes down on the authority of an email.
The commitment
Four rules, and we do not have a fifth.
These are the same four printed on the front page. They are repeated here in full because a policy that is easier to find than to read is not a policy, and because you will want to be able to point somebody at them.
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01
The DMCA has no force here
Title 17 §512 is United States law. Our companies, cabinets and carriers sit outside its reach, so a takedown notice arriving by email is correspondence — not an instruction. We file it, we answer it, and nothing is removed on its authority alone.
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02
A competent court, or nothing
Content is removed when an order issues from a court with actual jurisdiction over the hosting entity. Foreign judgments are not self-executing; they must be recognised locally first. We do not treat a lawyer's letterhead as a substitute for a judge.
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03
You hear from us before anyone else
Except where an order expressly forbids it, you receive the complaint in full, with the complainant named, and fourteen days to respond or migrate. We do not suspend first and explain later.
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04
Nothing retained means nothing to surrender
No identity documents, no payment trail beyond an on-chain transaction you chose to make, no access logs past 24 hours, no IP history. A request for records we never created is answered on its merits: there is nothing to produce.
What actually happens
A notice arrives. Here is every step after that.
Most hosts have one procedure for this and it is called suspension. It is fast, it is cheap, and it makes the host’s problem go away by giving it to the customer. Ours takes longer and costs us more.
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01
Hour 0
It arrives and it is read by a person
Every report reaches a human. Automated notices are read too — they are simply read with the knowledge that nobody wrote them.
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02
Within 1 business day
You get it, in full, with the complainant named
Not a summary and not an anonymised extract. You cannot answer a claim you have not seen, and you cannot answer a claimant you cannot identify.
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03
Days 1 – 14
You answer, or you move it
Fourteen days to reply, to take the content down yourself, or to migrate it somewhere else. We will help with the migration even when the complaint is nonsense.
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04
Day 14 onward
Nothing happens unless a court says so
A complainant unhappy with your answer has the same remedy they always had: a court with jurisdiction over the entity that hosts you. Correspondence does not become an order by being repeated.
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05
On an order
We comply, narrowly, and we tell you
To the letter of what the order requires and no further — the named material, not the account. You are told unless the order forbids it, and an order that forbids it is an event this canary reports.
A notice and an order are not the same document
The industry treats them as interchangeable because treating them as interchangeable is cheaper. They are not, and the difference is the entire product.
An email arrives
A notice
- Read by a person and filed
- Forwarded to you in full, complainant named
- Answered, in writing, on its merits
- Fourteen days for you to reply or migrate
- Nothing removed
- No suspension
- No strike, no record against your account
- No disclosure of who you are — we do not know
A judge signs
An order
- Checked by counsel in the jurisdiction served
- Tested for jurisdiction over the entity that hosts you
- You are told before anything happens, unless it forbids it
- Complied with to the letter, and no further
- The named material comes down
- The account is not terminated as a bonus
- Other material is not touched
- Records that were never created still cannot be produced
A foreign judgment is not self-executing. A ruling from one country must be recognised by a court in the country of the entity that hosts you before it binds anything — that is ordinary private international law, not a position we invented. Where you sit is a decision about which court a complainant has to convince, which is why the jurisdiction page is written the way it is.
If you are the one complaining
You will get a real answer from a person, which is more than most hosts manage. Here is how to make that answer useful rather than procedural.
- Identify the entity
- There are eight companies, not one A notice addressed to “DediPrivacy” reaches somebody, but an order has to name the company that actually hosts the material. The register for each is on the law-enforcement guide.
- Be specific
- URLs, not domains A notice naming an entire host, an entire IP range or an entire customer cannot be forwarded usefully and cannot be acted on by any court either.
- Expect to be named
- Your notice is forwarded in full Including who sent it. Anonymous accusation is not a thing we operate, and a complainant unwilling to be identified to the person they are accusing is telling us something about the complaint.
- Know what a notice buys
- A reply and a forward, not a removal If the material is unlawful where it sits, a court there will say so and we will comply. If it is only unlawful somewhere else, that is the question the court has to answer, and it is not one we get to answer for it.
- The two exceptions
- Acted on immediately, without an order Child sexual abuse material and material that finances, directs or incites terrorist violence. Verified and terminated the hour they are confirmed. See the acceptable use policy.
- What we will not do
- Volume does not change the answer Ten thousand automated notices get the same reading as one. Repetition is not escalation, and a bot is not a plaintiff.
The questions this policy raises.
Is ignoring the DMCA legal?
There is nothing to ignore. §512 is a safe harbour in United States law: it offers American hosts protection from liability in exchange for a takedown procedure. A host outside the United States is not inside that bargain and gains nothing by pretending to be. What binds us is the law of the country each entity is incorporated in, and we follow that law exactly.
So copyright infringement is fine here?
No — it is unlawful wherever it is unlawful, and a rights holder has the same remedy against you here as anywhere: a court. What changes is that the remedy has to be obtained rather than asserted. We are not a party to your dispute and we do not decide it by pressing a button on receipt of an email.
What happens if I ignore the forwarded notice?
Nothing happens on our side. After fourteen days the matter is between you and the complainant, and it stays there until a court with jurisdiction over the hosting entity says otherwise. We do not suspend a service because a complainant is still unhappy.
Will you tell the complainant who I am?
We could not do it usefully if we wanted to. There is no identity document, no legal name and no address in the account — the inventory of what exists is published on the privacy page, and it is an email address you chose and a ledger of amounts. A subpoena for your identity produces the observation that we never collected one.
Do you count notices against my account?
There is no strike system, no counter and no threshold at which an account is closed for having attracted complaints. A number of notices is a measure of how contested your material is, not of whether you have done anything wrong.
What if a court in my country orders removal?
Then it orders removal from a party it has jurisdiction over, which may well be you. It does not bind an Icelandic or Panamanian company that has never appeared before it. To reach the host, the order has to be recognised by a court where that host is — which is a real process with real requirements, and sometimes it succeeds.
How many notices do you receive?
The figure is published quarterly, alongside how many resulted in anything being removed, which is zero on a notice alone. The transparency report has the whole series since 2019.