Hypnochan: Where did it go?

[Senti Onikawa]

For the last couple of days, Hypnochan has been either down, or access is being restricted. Any attempts to hit the main site fail, as does a google search to enter any of the threads. This has enough cause for concern to be listed in News and Announcements, simply because one would assume at least a quarter of our members are from/go to Hypnochan. If anyone has any information or could provide some insight as to what has happened, it'd be appreciated. Hate to see a site like that go down.

[Vortex421]

The current message on the Hypnochan IRC channel (#hypnochan on Rizon) also suggests that they do not know why it is down.  Since the 27th, this has been their channel message (combined with others):  Hypnochan.org is down. We do not know why.

Web searches have given me pretty much nothing on the situation.  I ran a WHOIS on the off chance that it might be a domain expiration issue but the domain is good through Aug. 11, 2012.  There is no contact information in the WHOIS database - they went through Dreamhost and are using WHOIS masking (all their WHOIS information refers back to Dreamhost).  I will drop an e-mail today with the affiliated proxy e-mail and see if I can get any further information.  Anything I learn I will go ahead and drop here.

[Vortex421]

The site's administrator replied to my e-mail with the following response:

Our host has taken the site down temporarily due to a DMCA request. And due to memorial day weekend they haven't responded to any of my support tickets to bring it back up. It should be back up within a few days. Sorry for the wait.

There's the official statement from them, and the answer to our question.   Now to figure out what it was that caused a DMCA request.

[Senti Onikawa]

The site is back up, but still wondering why it was taken down. From what Wiki says, DMCA is apparently the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Something tells me that unless the site was reported, there would have been next to no reason for this to happen. Oi vey.

[Vortex421]

DMCA notices are issued by the entity which owns the copyrights to the material in question.  While it could be a report by someone to the copyright holder, what is more likely is that a company came along, saw something that belongs to them, and issued the DMCA notice to the webmaster.  While the ISP can disregard the DMCA notice, they do so at their own peril as penalties can be levied against them in court.  The "Safe Harbor" provisions of the DMCA provide an ISP with an alternative to just being taken to court - take the offending material down and have a nice day.

I'll be curious to see if they provide me with information as to what the material in question was.  My guess is probably a small-name porn company or somesuch.  Most everything else there is covered by fair-use provisions of copyright law.