When dealing with abuse on the Web, hosts are a critical player. More than just copyright issues, hosts play a critical role in dealing with spam, illegal content and network abuse.

Since hosts control the servers in their datacenter, they are vital in shutting down people who choose to abuse their service and nearly every host has a lengthy terms of service that dictates what their customers can and can not do on their networks.

The problem, however, is that many hosts don’t enforce their own terms. Spammers, infringers and others run wild on their service while people attempting to report them are left out in the cold.

Much of this is due to ignorance of the rules, with the barriers to entering the hosting industry dropping every day, more and more smaller companies, without expertise in this aspect of this field, have been getting into the market, especially as niche players.

However, this poor handling of abuse is dangerous not just to the Web but to themselves. Failing to address abuse issues correctly can open a host up to legal and technological repercussions (such as blacklisting) that can sink a hosting business.

So, if you are a host or work with one, here are the five of the biggest mistakes commonly made when dealing with abuse.

1. Not Having an Accurate Abuse Contact

If someone wants to report abuse to you, who do they contact? There needs to be an account set up for this and it needs to be on your public site.

Likewise, this account needs to be checked regularly and by someone with authority to act. Too many times I’ve tried to report spam blogs or other issues only to find that I have to email the sales or support team to get a response of any variety, even though an abuse account is available.

Likewise, also make sure that the information in your IP whois is up to date as well. Many times I have found IP whois information that points to email address that bounce all incomming messages.

It is crucial for hosts to keep their abuse information up to date, in a location where it can be found and to be monitoring for and acting upon reports as they are received.

2. Not Having an Internal Abuse Policy

What steps does your company take after receiving a spam complaint? After a copyright infringement notices? Etc. Where larger companies tend to have policies for just about everything on the planet, smaller ones tend to eschew them, even in areas where they are necessary.

These policies don’t have to be extremely elaborate, but they do have to detail the steps that one would take from receiving an abuse complaint to its resolution including determining the type of infraction, fact checking the complaint, the steps that should be taken and the appropriate resolution.

Not having these policies leads to confusion and favoritism both of which can lead to problems.

Additionally, it is wroth noting that the policy should not be all or nothing. Some hosts will stand by their customers no matter what, even those who legitimately deserve the boot, others will drop their customers at the slightest infraction. There has to be a middle ground where customers are stood by when appropriate, punished as deserved and dropped when needed.

3. Not Being DMCA/EDEC Compliant

If you are a host within the U.S. or the EU, not being DMCA or EDEC compliant (respectively) may make your host a target for those who wish to set up sites for the purpose of infringing content and may expose you to legal risk as you may be found partially liable for any infringement that takes place on your servers.

For example, being DMCA compliant involves registering a contact with the U.S. Copyright Office and expeditiously removing or disabling access to works after receiving a proper notification of infringement.

Registering a contact with the USCO costs $105 currently and setting up the procedure is effectively free, especially if you already have a good abuse system in place. However, doing this can help you avoid a major potential legal pitfall down the road.

4. Not Communicating

With abuse issues, silence can be deadly. Talk to your customers about complaints that have been filed, talk to the person who filed them about the action you’re taking and, if needed, talk to authorities about any legal activity. At best, silence leaves people frustrated and angry, at worst, it legal and issues, including possibly criminal charges if the violation is serious enough and the silence viewed as deliberate.

Though I understand that hosts don’t like to talk about abuse it is important to be clear and keep all parties informed. To avoid saying things that might harm the company legally, it may be wise to create stock letters that can be customized for various situations.

In addition to avoiding legal issues from saying something inappropriate, stock letters also speed up the abuse process, making it cheaper for you and faster for everyone involved. Though often criticized by those who receive them, especially when they receive one that doesn’t apply, they are an invaluable tool.

5. Not Talking With a Lawyer

Finally, perhaps the most important piece of advice, you need to make sure you are aware of all your legal obligations and the only way to do that is speak with a knowledgeable attorney in your area.

Though this article above covers some of the broad strokes, the specifics are best left to lawyers. Having an attorney do an audit on your polices and practices is key to ensuring you’re complying with all laws specific to your country and region. Also, this will help you understand the kinds of abuse you don’t have to enforce yourself, such as libel in the U.S., and will help you streamline your entire abuse process.

Talking with an attorney may be pricey, but it is well worth it in the long run.

Bottom Line

More and more startups are getting into the hosting game, filling in niches and providing services larger players can’t. However, while many of these companies have a great deal of technical expertise, they don’t always have the legal and abuse background to understand what it takes to keep their service free of unwanted content.

Being smart about abuse isn’t something that one learns while studying networking or system’s administration nor is it in the manual of any reseller hosting account. Rather, it is something you have to work on and study.

Abuse may be one of the most unpleasant aspects of the hosting business, but it is also one of the most important. For that reason, it is worth investing the time and money into getting it right.

The video, which lasts about five minutes, takes the user through the process of finding the host for this site, instructing on the use of the Domain Tools Web site and various features of it.

The video is my first attempt at such a screencast so it is far from perfect. There also seemed to be a minor encoding issue when I uploaded the video to Revver. I might try a different video sharing site in the future.

Please let me know what you think of the video. I’ve embedded it below.

Though the attention to this issue is welcome, many of these guides contain false, misleading or incomplete information. Though they are produced by smart, well-intentioned people, their errors can lessen the effectiveness of their strategies and, in some cases, expose the person following it to legal danger.

For example, one guide I encountered a year ago encouraged people to take their grievances public immediately and post them to a special forum. Not only is this time-consuming and unlikely to succeed in many cases, but it opens up the person doing the posting to a libel suit if their information is wrong.

However, such dangerous mistakes are relatively rare and are usually limited to small and obscure sites. Instead, the most common mistake made when crafting an anti-plagiarism strategy is something much more simple: Forgetting about the host.

As strange as it may sound, the most common omission in many of thse guides is the most effective tactic of all, getting the site shut down.

Skipping a Step

It seems that most guides on plagiarism fighting are pretty good at telling you ways to detect the infringement and to contact the plagiarist. Many provide stock cease and desist letters to send to the infringing Webmaster and advice on how to deal with different kinds of plagiarists.

However, should that step fail, a majority of these guides will then offer advice on how to get the content removed from the search engines or get the site’s advertising cut.

Though targeting advertisers can be a very effective way of dealing with profit-motivated plagiarism, such as with scrapers, neither that nor targeting search engines is as useful for deflecting the potential problems that come with being plagiarized as getting the site or the content removed.

Interestingly enough, many guides will include DMCA contact information and stock letters for contacting the search engine, but will completely omit any information about sending such a letter to the host.

Whenever I see such an omission, I comment on it and, in most cases, it is corrected fairly quickly. I have only seen a few such guides remain for a long period of time without this critical information.

Still, the frequency of this mistake has made me wonder why so many people overlook it. However, it didn’t take me long to think of a few potential answers as to why.

The Hardest Button to Button

The problem with filing a DMCA notice with a host is that it can be a very daunting challenge. Even if you have the template handy, you have to first know how to determine who the host is, then, if they are in the U.S., locate their DMCA contact information and then contact via the means they specify.

That, in turn, requires a level of research many people are not comfortable with. If you are unfamiliar with networking tools, ill at ease reading through terms of use or only have limited knowledge about how the Internet works, sending a DMCA notice to a host can be a very daunting challenge.

Sending notices to Google and the other search engines, by comparison, is very easy. If you have the template in hand, there is only one page you need to know for each search engine. It is pretty trivial, from there, to send out the notices without doing any research and not wading into any uncomfortable waters.

However, this is dangerous for several reasons:

1. Doesn’t remove the content: Though it won’t turn up in the search engines you send the notice to, the plagiarized copies are still available on the Web and other search engines as well as human visitors can still access it.
2. Turns the search engines into the copyright police: This concentrates all of the responsibility for policing copyright into three or four search engines. This was not the goal of the DMCA and it gives those companies too much power and responsibility in this matter. A change in policy of just one search engine could, potentially, have drastic implications on the Web.
3. Can harm innocent bystanders: Search engine DMCA bans work differently from site to site but, in some cases, it is possible that more than the pages than intended can be banned, including pages written by other people.

While there is definitely a place and a time for using search engine DMCA bans, immediately following a cease and desist is not it. Typically, I only turn to search engine bans when everything else has failed and I am prepared to give up.

In my mind, it is a way to do something when it seems nothing can be done at all.

Correcting the Problem

Since fewer people are comfortable with sending DMCA notices to host, fewer people use them. Since fewer people use them, fewer people write about them and that means that fewer people know about their existence.

This in a brutal cycle where more and more people get incomplete information. Not only does this lead people to use less effective tactics, but leads to mistakes down the road when they attempt to contact the host, often resulting in false or incomplete notices.

The key, then, becomes to make sure that more people are aware this method of dealing with plagiarism and push them to take advantage of it. It also means working to ensure that they have the tools available to file a proper notice and send it to the correct person.

If we can do that, along with providing basic copyright information, we can go a long way to reducing the copyright drama that exists on the Web.

Conclusions

The vast majority of people who post anti-plagiarism guides are good, well-intentioned people that are trying to help others. Unfortunately, they are not always right and sometimes that advice can lead people astray.

It is important, when researching an anti-plagiarism strategy, not to just read one guide, but two or three. Don’t take any one person’s word, including mine, as gospel. Seek out other opinions, views and strategies. There is a constant dialog going on and, though I try to report on it, the Web is a big place and I don’t see absolutely everything.

Build your own strategy based upon your needs, time constraints and skills. When appropriate, experiment. If you learn something that works or see something new, share it with others and drop me a note as well.

I am always on the lookout for new techniques and strategies in prevention, detection and cessation that can help myself and other Webmasters. Input and feedback is always appreciated.

Note: I have not linked any of the guides that inspired me to create this story. My goal with this is not to call anyone out or embarrass anyone. These are complicated issues and mistakes are understandable. I want to encourage others to create more guides, not shame people that make simple mistakes. Furthermore, nearly all of the guides that I’ve seen with this error have since been fixed.