I’ve been running an IPFS gateway for a few years at ipfs.slang.cx and I’ve recently gotten some DMCA take down requests. I’ve posted the ones I’ve gotten here: GitHub - notslang/ipfs-gateway-dmca-requests.
Personally, it seems kinda dumb to comply with them, since I’m only operating a gateway to the IPFS network and blocking access through my server does nothing to remove the content from the network. I’m not the one posting those files and I don’t even know who’s using my gateway to access them. However, I don’t want my hosting provider to kick me off, so I’ve gone ahead and added location rules in nginx to return 451 on all those URLs.
Is there any better way to handle these requests? I assume that I’m not the only gateway operator getting them.
Should I be reporting these somewhere like the Lumen Database, or is that only for big tech companies?
Is there a way to block these files without needing to add to my nginx config and reload nginx each time? It looks like nginx is what the “official” gateway is using, but it would be nice to know if there’s something better: infra/denylist.conf at master · ipfs/infra · GitHub