[timtadh]

As other people have said, the real story here is how badly GoDaddy handles DMCA requests. Taking down a site for a single image is like using a bazooka on an ant. Yes it will stop the infringement, however it will probably damage some surrounding property. While that does not necessarily excuse the personal attacks the woman in the story may have made I think it offers perspective for all website operators. "Horror" stories of people sites being taken down (much like her's) have been on HN in the past with great sympathy shown and in this case I do feel sympathetic towards her cause (despite her reaction). I guess the lesson is talk to your registrar and hosting providers about their DCMA process before it bites you.

[dangrossman]

What should GoDaddy be doing instead? If they want the safe harbor protection from the DMCA so that they're not liable for the infringement, they are required to remove the content. There need be no direct mapping between the website URL reported in the complaint and any specific file they can identify on a server's file system; it might be dynamically generated, served by a CMS doing URL rewriting, coming from a database, etc.

So their choices are:

1) Invade your privacy, directly access your private source code and databases, and deduce how to remove the content, potentially destroying your data in the process over what might be a false claim... all of which is completely non-scalable to the millions of customers they have.

2) Edit their web server configuration to not serve that URL, and reboot the service, hundreds of times a day while this server is handling requests for thousands of websites.

3) Click the suspend site button and your site goes back online as fast as you can remove the infringing work, or file a counter-notice.

[drostie]

As low as my opinions of GoDaddy have fallen, the more I think about it, the more I think that Candice was probably trying to cut costs and inadvertently tied GoDaddy's arms behind its back.

The GoDaddy "Deluxe 4GH" plan costs $6/month and could easily hold 14 web sites, and one feature they offer at this stage is "Multiple Web Sites: Unlimited".

At first it sounded like GoDaddy had simply rerouted all of her domain names to null addresses, when they could have just rerouted one of them. But no, they were providing the hosting service. If she put fourteen businesses on one account to amortise the cost among them, then she is responsible for linking them together, not GoDaddy. Presumably GoDaddy would have just shut down one hosting account -- the one that held the infringing content -- but the problem is that she only had the one hosting account.

This is why I try to keep abstraction layers. The people I research with don't hang out with my Ultimate (as in frisbee) friends or my web development colleagues; the Ultimate folks are the only ones I'm letting friend me on Facebook, and I make it a point not to preach my religion to any of the above.

Spolsky is correct that all abstraction layers are leaky, and these are too -- my professor has met my father for example, and the folks at work know that I say something quietly before lunch every day -- but there is a great value in compartmentalising. Robert Frost's neighbour confidently asserts, "good fences make good neighbours" -- I guess it's more that good neighbours respect the fences and use them to lower your own mental stress and drama.

Candice could have used a good fence between her charity and her infringing account.

[pdonis]

> Candice could have used a good fence between her charity and her infringing account.

Agreed, but GoDaddy could have also taken option 2) from dangrossman's post above, which happens all the time with "live" servers anyway, every time people change their own configurations through the web "control panel" for their hosting provider. For the kind of plan it looks like she had, her URLs were most likely being served by the same Apache instance as the URLs for dozens of other customers; so any time any customer changes their setup, the "web server" has to reconfigure itself. That's why servers like Apache do that on the fly, without requiring a restart.