Write Your Own Disclaimer (in your spare time)

By popular demand, I give you: do-it-yourself disclaimers.

Okay, first I'd like to offer a disclaimer about this post. I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't consulted with one in writing mine. I'm planning to have a lawyer member look over/rewrite our own disclaimer. Well, a member that is ostensibly a lawyer—see my previous comments on judging online character.

Anyway, there are a number of important points to cover. I know Demonoid has 34 pages of text in their disclaimer, which apparently contains some amusing points for those with the attention span to read through it. I guess they figure the length is a deterrent to people actually reading it, but lawyers are renown for their long attention spans. I think it's more important to make your point in a concise manner that your friends can understand as well as your enemies.

Basically, you need to address the following points:

No "uploaded"/copyrighted material is stored on this server. It's not. Only metainfo files (.torrent) are stored on the server, and they only contain SHA1 hashes which describe the material. All material is located on individual users' computers, so you're perfectly safe in making this argument.

Given that part of the disclaimer, for the love of god don't use your server as a seedbox. That'll just increase your culpability in this sort of thing and will make the bit about copyrighted material a total lie. What's more, running it as a seedbox can have all manner of detrimental effects on your server's performance, not just in terms of bandwidth but also drive speed. I know you probably have a 10 or 100 Mbps line with very low utilization, but resist the temptation.

The site cannot be held accountable for the behavior of its users. It is merely offers an indexing service. It's true. You can make the analogy to Google potentially indexing child pornography sites, but that's a little extreme. The point is that you merely provide a service.

It is the responsibility of the users to ensure that they hold the copyright or attain proper permission prior to uploading material. You may want to hide this statement a little, since some members will inevitably take it to heart. I've definitely had some concerned posts to that effect, to which I've given some rather tongue-in-cheek responses. Obviously, the idea is to turn one big fish into a whole lot of little fishies, reducing your own culpability without greatly affecting the masses.

Finally, you will comply with any and all formal copyright notices sent from the proper jurisdiction (where your host is located, since they shouldn't know where you are personally located). Obviously, you're not hosted in the US... are you? The idea is to make a hell of a lot of work for anyone that would attack you, encouraging them to go after other sites. You also need to provide a clear email address for copyright complaints. Better that they go whining to you than to your web host, which will always have contact information prominently displayed and will (with some exceptions) likely take you offline if a copyright owner says "boo".

It's doubtful that this will do a whole lot of good, but you never know. Once I get some better legal advice, I'll make another post correcting any glaring mistakes...