Abuse Reporting Guidelines

Contents

General Information

Due to our libertarian Terms & Conditions of Service we allow many things that other hosting companies do not. Consequently, we receive a large number of abuse complaints. Unfortunately, most of them are spurious or non-actionable. This page will help you determine whether to submit an abuse complaint, how to do so, what supporting material you will need to include, and what to expect afterward.

Despite the relatively few restrictions in our Terms & Conditions of Service, there is one particularly important point for abuse issues. When our members upload content to our service, they are asserting two things:

  • That the content is legal in the United States.
  • That they have the legal right to make the content available.

As part of the contractual relationship formed with our members before they upload content, they are legally obligated to adhere to these two restrictions. It is typical for us to receive complaints alleging that our members have violated this contract with a certain degree of skepticism. However, members do occasionally violate our Terms & Conditions, and we react appropriately to such betrayals of our trust.

We will not usually be able to respond in any specific way to an abuse complaint. Our Privacy Policy prevents us from discussing our interactions with our members, including adverse actions we may take in response to abuse complaints.

Please do not assume that we support or endorse all the content posted by our members. We believe that freedom of speech is the inalienable right of all people. Consequently, we do not censor our members on the basis of content, no matter how offensive or repugnant we may personally find that content to be. Our company would have to have a different name if we only allowed members to publish uncontroversial content that we happen to agree with.

Specific Types of Abuse Issues

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site has reproduced my copyrighted content without authorization.

Please see our page of DMCA notification guidelines.

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site is defaming me or otherwise injuring me civilly, or is infringing my non-copyright intellectual property rights.

Please forward a certified copy of your legal finding from a court of competent jurisdiction to our correspondence address. If you have not yet obtained such a finding, a preliminary injunction or court order requiring that access to the material be disabled is typically also sufficient.

If you are not able to obtain the above, you will need to work directly with the site operator to resolve your differences. We will have to fall back on our members' contractual assertion that the content they upload is legitimate and therefore we will not be able to get involved.

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site has content that is illegal in the United States.

If you are not a law enforcement official, keep in mind that neither are we. A thousand TV shows, cartoons, and movies notwithstanding, self-righteous amateurs taking the law into their own hands tend to be much more of a problem than a solution. We're not interested in participating in or abetting vigilantism. Therefore, it is not appropriate to send accusations of illegal activity directly to us. Any such accusations will generally have to be discarded. Report crime to the appropriate law enforcement officials.

If you are a US law enforcement official working on a criminal investigation and you need our assistance, please contact abuse@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. For our fastest response, along with your identity, please provide your office switchboard number and the URL of the agency website where that number can be verified.

So that we can comply with our Privacy Policy, we will need a viable subpoena, warrant, or court order, depending on the specific circumstances, before we can provide any information.

Also, due to our Privacy Policy, we are required to oppose or challenge overbroad requests for information. So we encourage you to contact us ahead of time to discuss your request. We can help you tailor your request based on what information we have available and what we can provide without opposition. We also regularly rotate and delete many categories of information and logs. Contacting us as early as possible may enable us to retain information you will need. However, before we can turn over any information about our members, we will need the final subpoena, warrant, or order to be properly served. (And, if necessary, for any attempt on our part to quash it to prove unsuccessful.)

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site has content that is illegal in my country (not the United States).

As above, your first action if you are aware of criminal activity should be to contact the appropriate law enforcement agency.

If you are a law enforcement official from a country other than the United States, please contact us at abuse@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. If the crime you are investigating is also illegal in the United States, we may voluntarily cooperate. In such cases, you will need to obtain the equivalent of a subpoena for your jurisdiction, and we may choose to voluntarily comply, but all situations are handled on a case-by-case basis.

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site contains offensive content.

At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, we firmly believe that censorship is a dangerous and misguided approach to the problems of society. We believe that the price we pay for the huge number of fantastic sites we host is that there are a few we feel are significantly less fantastic.

We believe that the price you pay for living in what we hope is a free society is that when you encounter something offensive, you must resist the urge to censor it. Instead, research, investigate, and speak out passionately in opposition to it. That is the essence of free speech.

Our MFFAM policy is directly related to the hosting of offensive content.

Please do not send us abuse complaints of this nature. We will discard them.

I received spam that originated from a NearlyFreeSpeech.NET server.

While we passionately support free speech, spamming is not a form of speech. Speech becomes spam because of the way it is distributed: not the what, but the how. Spamming is an action, It is not an action we support or allow.

In most cases, spam that originates from a server we control is the result of one of our members' sites containing an exploitable security vulnerability. In such cases, we react as quickly as possible to disable the affected script and notify them.

Complaints can help us differentiate spam from regular mailing list traffic, so please forward the spammed message in its entirety (including full headers) to us at abuse@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site is hosting a phishing page.

Please contact abuse@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET with the exact URL of the phishing page and the URL of the site being impersonated.

It's incredibly rare for one of our members to do this intentionally. Usually it indicates that their site has an unaddressed security vulnerability. Either way, we will investigate promptly and take appropriate action.

We will not provide specific information, logs, or copies of phishing content in response to email requests. If your organization is being impersonated, we will a way to verify that you are authorized to receive such information on behalf of your organization. If the phishing occurs on a compromised site belonging to one of our members, We will also need to obtain the permission of the affected member to give you copies of any information gathered from their site.