Responding to Copyright Infringement Reports

Over the past few months I've been working with UCISA's Networking Group to develop a set of standard templates that Janet customer organisations can use, if they wish, to respond to copyright infringement reports. This supplements Janet's existing guidance on how to handle copyright complaints in accordance with the Janet AUP. We hope that this will save organisations some effort in writing their own replies; it should also give rightsholders clarity that their reports have been dealt with or, if the report was insufficient to allow action to be taken, explain what they need to do to make future reports effective. There are three templates, reflecting the three most likely outcomes of a report:

• The responsible user has been identified and dealt with in accordance with the Janet AUP;
• The information provided was insufficient to reliably identify the responsible user;
• The information provided does not match our records (e.g. of authentications or traffic flows).

Although the templates were written for use in e-mail messages, we hope they are also short enough to be pasted into the web forms that some reporting agencies use for responses.

Responding to copyright infringement reports is, of course, covered by the Digital Economy Act 2010. However we don't expect Janet or its customer organisations to fall within the class of Qualifying ISPs who are required to follow the Act's processes. Nonetheless, in the interests of clarity for rightsholders, our template notices do follow the spirit of the draft implementation Code that was published for consultation in May 2010. When the final version of the Code is published, we'll review the templates to see if any changes are required.