Subject: Protocol Action: 'An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-httpbis-legally-restricted-status-04.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 09:18:33 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles'
  (draft-ietf-httpbis-legally-restricted-status-04.txt) as Proposed
Standard

This document is the product of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Working
Group.

The IESG contact persons are Ben Campbell, Barry Leiba and Alissa Cooper.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-legally-restricted-status/

Technical Summary

This document specifies a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status code
for use when resource access is denied as a consequence of legal
demands.

Review and Consensus

This document started as an individual draft, which the WG discussed and
initially decided to "hold". The primary reason for this was that it
wasn't clear if there were use cases that would benefit from a status
code (as opposed to just using the body of the response), and whether
there was interest in deployment.

Over time, this was clarified; both Web sites and consuming software
demonstrated interest. Importantly, we heard that having an indicator
that an automated client could easily detect would help users like Lumen
<https://lumendatabase.org> (formerly, Chilling Effects).

As a result (and after discussion both on list and in meetings), we
decided to adopt the draft.

Technical discussion involved a broad selection of the Working Group.
There was some back and forth about what the right scope for the status
code's semantics should be (as well as whether we needed more than one),
but we were able to achieve consensus on the current document.

451 has already been adopted by some sites on the Web, and based upon
discussions (mostly private), it appears that a significantly larger
number will adopt it once it becomes standard. On the client side,
interest has been expressed by Lumen, Article19, CDT and others.

Personnel

Mark Nottingham is the document shepherd; Barry Leiba is the responsible
Area Director.

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From: Virgil Griffith <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2015 14:51:45 +0000

I'd like to revive the discussion of the 5xx equivalent of this, (tentative
name, error 551) ?

On my website, onion.link, we use both errors.  We use 451 for cases in
which the client's jurisdiction forbids the transmission of content (the
largest case for us is Russia and it's anti-drug laws), but we use 551 for
cases in which the server's jurisdiction (in our case, USA) forbids the
transmission of content (usually child abuse).

I feel this is an important distinction because the implication is that the
client could can VPN around a 451, while for a 551 no VPN would help.

-Virgil

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2015 10:03:49 -0500

Please: for this discussion, remove all addresses except for the
httpbis working group list, as I've done here (and remove mine as
well; I'll see the messages on the working group's mailing list).
Thanks,

Barry, ART AD