It's understandable to ban the site given it does break Vercel's terms, but the allegation that Vercel hasn't let the owner transfer the domain away is a serious concern. Removing a customer is always hard but you have to do it in a way that ends in a clean break between your business and the customer. Keeping a domain fails to achieve that in a big way.
Of course an account running a site based on violating copyright is eventually going to be suspended. Any service provider in US jurisdiction will do the same. It's not a matter of opinion or policy for Vercel, or unusual terms of service. It’s critical for Vercel’s business continuity.<p>Services are protected from copyright claims under the DMCA “safe harbor” laws as long as they pass along copyright notices to their users, and take down content if the user is unresponsive. Otherwise Vercel would become liable for the copyright violation in addition to the user.<p>If Vercel doesn’t honor the DMCA safe harbor requirements, then Vercel’s providers will shut down Vercel itself. AWS could suspend Vercel’s use of Lambda/EC2, Vercel’s DNS provider could stop answering DNS queries for hosted domains, etc.<p>I’ve worked twice at service providers protected by DMCA safe harbor (first at UC Berkeley’s ISP, now at Notion) and can tell you that for service providers the consequences of losing DMCA safe harbor are just as severe than the consequences for the user. Early in my days at Notion, we missed a DMCA takedown notice for a public page, the copyright holder escalated to Amazon, and Amazon threatened to terminate the EC2 instances running our service.<p><a href="https://www.copyright.gov/512/#:~:text=Overview%20of%20Section%20512&text=The%20safe%20harbors%20shield%20qualifying,content%20and%20meeting%20certain%20conditions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.copyright.gov/512/#:~:text=Overview%20of%20Secti...</a>
> Worst yet, they took down all my projects and confiscated all my domains<p>Never put all your eggs in one basket.<p>Keep your domains at one company. Your DNS with another. Hosting, a third.<p>If you have activist-type projects that might attract the attention of powerful people or companies, keep those segregated from your more banal projects in their own isolated accounts.<p>It sucks seeing people learn this the hard way.
Tangential, but I quite like the error page. Informative, concise and avoids any confusion as to what is going on.<p>> This Deployment has been disabled.<p>> Your connection is working correctly.<p>> Vercel is working correctly.<p>> If you are a visitor, contact the website owner or try again later.<p>> If you are the owner, please contact support.
Sounds like it’s resolved. Author just got angry after getting back from holiday, and seeing their access to every site they own is cut. Which is reasonable given it seems Vercel doesn’t have site level granularity of restricting access.<p>Which is worrisome.<p>What other level of granularity are they missing? Do I need to worry about security and access controls?
It is online at 1ft.io<p>I read that from recent magnolia commits, it falls back to {12,1}ft for some websites (apparently, some techniques cannot be done on client-side, perhaps, they require proxies in particular countries or google network to impersonate googlebot better)
The top reply is from Vercel:<p>> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses.
> Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.<p>The poster immediately misunderstood them and thought the hundreds of hours were for talking to <i>him</i>. But they also sounded reasonable afterwards.<p>> I’ve received 4 emails from vercel support in 2023, I don’t think that constitutes hundreds of hours of work
> But tbf I get it if you want to be an opinionated hosting provider and not host 12ft. No worries here, just restore my other projects and give me my domains back and we chill
DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED<p>Saw this in the HTTP response yesterday. 12ft.io had not been working correctly for months anyway, e.g., for ft.com.<p>Now I just use on.ft.com URLs and find FT articles syndicated on other sites. Works fine.
I wonder if this is the first time the author has heard from Vercel.<p>I suspect Vercel never wanted to host this persons content given the amount of legal requests they likely had to deal with.<p>It probably would have been better business from Vercel to reach out and say,
“Hey, it costs us too much money in legal fees dealing with your content. We’re not Amazon. Can you move somewhere else?”<p>Asking the question and not waiting until it’s too late to deal with it would have been the way to go.<p>Vercel has known about this site for a long time. Seems a weird way to deal with it, and tells me that their CS team don’t do much proactive support.
I was wondering where I had heard of that domain name. Then it finally clicked. First time I am hearing about vercel. What would constitute as breach of TOS? Is it because he is providing it as a service (free/paid not sure exactly)? I also thought it was based on cached content!? Also, did he not have any backups elsewhere? I could never solely rely on the cloud services. They can change their TOS anytime and screw you over.
> But tbf I get it if you want to be an opinionated hosting provider and not host 12ft. No worries here, just restore my other projects and give me my domains back and we chill<p>Why would you want to continue to do business with them? Unless of course you built your site in such a way that they are your only (practical) hosting option, which seems like a bad approach no matter apps you're building.
For an iOS/Mac alternative:<p>I made a shortcut called Trebuchet that pulls up the archived version of articles and opens up in reader mode.<p><a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0df29c2c9aba44d48de1025fc8efbc90" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0df29c2c9aba44d48de1025fc8e...</a>
> confiscated all my domains<p>Please always separate registrar from DNS provider!<p>The reason is this:<p>* Registrars are your legal contract partner regarding the domain name.<p>* DNS providers are you technical partner for making something available under the domain name.