While most Internet-savvy people are at least casually familiar with 4chan — the online forum where a lot of the Web’s most popular content gets its start — the site has been pushed into the spotlight in recent days because of users who posted stolen nude and personal photos of several female celebrities. After years of relying on its self-erasing format that automatically removes old content, 4chan has now instituted a formal policy for people to request removal of copyrighted content.

For those unfamiliar with 4chan, the site’s various boards are set up so that older content expires. In some of the more active boards, threads can vanish after only a very short time. Some argue that this automated pruning process is actually more efficient than established procedures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for ridding the site of content that may violate copyright laws. After all, by the time a DMCA takedown notice is received and acted upon, the allegedly offending content may have already been pruned.

But the folks at TorrentFreak noticed that 4chan added an official DMCA takedown policy on Tuesday, days after the FBI said it was looking into the theft and publishing of personal photos stored on Apple’s iCloud.

It’s possible that the introduction of a DMCA policy on 4chan has nothing to do with the stolen photos. Regardless, the addition of a formal takedown policy in addition to the auto-pruning allows 4chan’s operators to distance themselves from the content posted by their users. The DMCA process could be used to remove content that has not yet expired or which is being persistently reposted to keep it from being devoured by the auto-pruning software.

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