DMCA Stance

Summary

The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 512) is United States law. We are incorporated in the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and our infrastructure is hosted in Iceland, the Netherlands, Romania, and Switzerland. None of these jurisdictions give DMCA notices legal force.

We therefore do not act on DMCA notices. We log each notice received against our warrant canary for transparency, reply politely to the sender, and otherwise take no action against the customer's content.

This is not a loophole. It is a deliberate positioning decision taken in full awareness of the trade-offs, shaped by the specific legal regimes of the countries we operate in.

Why we don't act on DMCA notices

1. Extraterritoriality

US Congress cannot legislate for courts in Saint Kitts, Iceland, the Netherlands, Romania, or Switzerland. A DMCA take-down notice is an instrument under US civil procedure that only carries meaning for service providers subject to US jurisdiction. We are not subject to US jurisdiction.

2. Process

Even in the United States, the DMCA safe-harbour provisions are an optional protection for providers who choose to participate — not a mandatory take-down regime. A provider outside the US gains nothing by complying and forfeits the customer trust that underpins our business model by doing so.

3. Precedent in our operating jurisdictions

• Romania — courts have repeatedly declined to enforce unilateral US take-down notices in the absence of a local court order.
• Netherlands — Dutch civil procedure requires a court order for content removal; the 2015 Hoge Raad ruling specifically constrained the old EU data-retention / blanket takedown framework.
• Iceland — the 2010 IMMI parliamentary resolution and Article 73 of the Constitution explicitly limit pre-publication restriction of expression.
• Switzerland — content removal requires Swiss court review under Swiss civil procedure; foreign orders are unenforceable without a Swiss judicial exequatur.

What we do when we receive a DMCA notice

1. Log it — the notice, sender, timestamp, and claimed infringement URL are recorded in our warrant canary category "DMCA notices received, not actioned".
2. Reply politely — a form response citing this page and our governing-law clause. We don't ignore senders; we decline them on the record.
3. Do nothing else — the customer's content remains untouched; the customer is not notified (there is nothing they need to do).

Around 600 – 900 DMCA notices reach us monthly. All are handled this way. Statistics are published in the semi-annual Transparency Report.

What we DO act on

We act on genuine judicial process under the law of the relevant operating jurisdiction. Specifically:

• Saint Kitts and Nevis court orders — our home jurisdiction. Any order from the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court (ECSC), High Court of Justice (SKN), or Magistrates' Court in Basseterre.
• Local court orders in the datacenter jurisdiction — only where the order is issued by a court of competent jurisdiction under the laws of Iceland, the Netherlands, Romania, or Switzerland, and names infrastructure physically located in that jurisdiction.

Upon receipt of a valid order, we:

1. Verify authenticity with the issuing court registry.
2. Notify the customer (unless the order specifically prohibits — in which case we note it in the canary under "gag-ordered requests" and the customer learns on renewal).
3. Scope compliance narrowly — we provide only what the order demands, not more.
4. Publish counts in the Transparency Report.

If you are the customer being targeted

You don't need to file a counter-notice — we haven't taken anything down. If the sender subsequently obtains a court order in one of our operating jurisdictions, we will contact you and help you prepare a response within the court's procedure.

We do not maintain a "repeat infringer" register based on DMCA notices. Customers accumulating large volumes of spurious notices are not penalised.

Warrant canary

Every Monday we publish a PGP-signed statement at /canary confirming:

• The DMCA notice volume for the prior week (aggregate, anonymised).
• The court-order volume for the prior week (aggregate, per jurisdiction).
• That no gag-ordered request has been received since the canary was last updated.

If the canary goes stale for more than 14 days without a corresponding infrastructure incident, assume something significant has changed and act accordingly.