True confession — many years ago I got a DMCA notice demanding removal of a photo from a certain website I represented. The sender of the DMCA almost certainly did not own the copyright, so I was planning to deny the request on that basis.

However, I also discovered the image in question remained live on a 3rd party news website, so I decided the most sensible result was to simply remove the locally-hosted JPG file and update the HTML so it displayed the image from its original source. Problem solved!

The DMCA sender continued to complain for WEEKS that I had “ignored” the take down demand. No, I replied, I had not….without explaining anything further. It took several more months of increasingly nasty legal demands before they finally figured it out.

So yeah, can we please keep the server rule? It makes perfect sense, which you can’t say about may things in the law these days.