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Google Publicizes DMCA Takedowns
Posted by
michael
on Fri Apr 12, 2002 12:42 PM
from the sunlight-is-best-medicine dept.
from the sunlight-is-best-medicine dept.
dmarti writes "In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results."
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Google Publicizes DMCA Takedowns
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The Article (Score:5, Informative)
Attention DMCA lawyers: Try to remove a web site from Google's index and you'll probably just make it more popular.
In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results.
The full text of two new letters to Google, dated April 9 and 10, already appears on the free speech site chillingeffects.org. "I think it's great that they're calling attention to the way the takedown provision can be used to compromise their search results," said Wendy Seltzer, Fellow of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and co-founder of chillngeffects.org.
Google is still choosing to take advantage of the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows web sites to escape liability for copyright infringement if they take pages down in response to properly formed letters.
In a controversial move last month, Google pulled all pages from the anti-Scientology site xenu.net then restored the site's home page amid Internet outcry, just as Linux Journal readers were on their way to visit Google in person to ask for help finding censored pages about the alien warlord Xenu who is a key figure in Scientology's creation legend.
Only the name and telephone number of the attorney who wrote the letters have been removed from the copies on chillingeffects.org. Both of the new letters originate from the Los Angeles law firm of Moxon & Kobrin, where attorney Helena Kobrin has long been Scientology's standard-bearer against church critics on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology and other online fora. Kobrin was not immediately available for comment
The letters are also linked to directly from Google search results. When results would have included a DMCA-censored page, the results page now includes a link to the takedown letter that resulted in the page being removed. A search this morning for site:xenu.net scientology produced the message:
"In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."
Failing to act in response to a DMCA takedown letter is not against the law. "They can always choose not to take advantage of the safe harbor," Seltzer said. However, only by complying with the letter and taking pages out of their index can Google escape a possible copyright infringement lawsuit.
Finally, Google has expanded its DMCA page to include instructions for Counter Notification under the DMCA. A webmaster who believes that a non-infringing page is being unfairly censored can write the proper legal incantations and have the page put back into the index.
Google is then required to forward this Counter Notification to the original notifier, and then put the page back in the index "not less than 10 or more than 14" days after Google receives the Counter Notification. If your site is pulled out of Google and you're confused, chillingeffects.org has a web form that will generate a correctly formed Counter Notification.
Re:The Article (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you mean these?
Ava Paquette
Moxon & Kobrin
3055 Wilshire Boulevard
Suite 900
Los Angeles, California 90010
Tel: (213) 487-4468
Fax: (213) 487-5385
Re:Let me browse SlashDot with a delay (Score:4, Interesting)
The ranking system for stories should prevent modding for say, three hours, so all the really good comments could have fair play for Karma, as well as just good visibility.
It would also tend to depreciate the short "no-brainers" everyone posts in sort of a FP, but semi-thoughtout mentality.
I can't monitor
To recap, prevent moderation on a new story for at least 3 hours after it appears.
I've got some other good ideas at least IMHO too, but I can't remeber them right now.
Cheers!
clueless... (Score:5, Informative)
I mean come on.. google creates a crawler that goes out and finds stuff, they list on their site what they find, and now clueless morons want to make them responsible for having links to that information?????
Security through obscurity.. yeah.. that'll keep em out!
---
" - anonymous
Re:clueless... (Score:5, Informative)
Thank God they still can't hide their voting record, but they sure try to obscure it, with bills and amendments named the exact opposite of what they do. My favorite example: the "Privacy Act" of 1974 requires banks to keep a photocopy of every check you write. How this protects my privacy is beyond me, but would you want to hear that your Senator voted against the "Privacy Act"?
Re:DOH! Crossposted! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Senate passed it 99-0. [senate.gov]
The House held a voice vote, near as I can tell. My search [loc.gov] ("digital millennium copyright" in the Word/Phrase search field) returned:
A search [house.gov] of the House site [house.gov] found no recorded vote on H.R.2281. So apparantly both stories are true: It was a voice vote, but the Senate recorded theirs.Re: Reference to the voice vote (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's a bit of a shame that they are hiding telephone numbers etc. on the letters in question. I understand why - to prevent harrasing calls etc. - but hey the letter is apparently public record why not expose them? Seems fair enough to me!
I applaude Google for doing this, it's just a shame I can't read the article in question
Exposing them... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair, yes. B-) But also an excuse for the Church of Scientology's lawyers to demand the letter be taken down. With the contact info removed they can't hide behind a harassment claim. They must expose their REAL reason for trying to get it down: censorship of any negative information about the behavior of CoS and its members.
I'm glad to see Google standing up in this manner. One of the major problems with the DCMA is that, in order for an anonymous poster to keep his site/links up, he must expose his identity. If the web page is critical of a criminal or gang which will harras the poster with extralegal actions once they FIND him, this requirement has a major chilling effect on anonymous speech.
Google DIDN'T pull the pages (Score:5, Insightful)
WHY???
Because they were following the law to the T...
They are only protected by the Safe Harbor provision if they honor the Notification letter.
And it can be simply reversed by a Counter-Notification.
This REALLY is the most logical way for this to work. It moves the responibility off of the indexer and puts it on the party publishing the information vs. the party claiming the info is copyrighted.
If "the man" ever shows up at Google's offices, they just whip out the documentation from each party and a copy of the law and say "goodday" to the badge.
first result when search google for 'DMCA' is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Go Oogle! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's now number 2 in the rankings [google.com] which is 3 spots higher than a few weeks ago so perhaps this small form of protest is also working!
I heart Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think its a fairly bold statement on Google's part, saying that the end user is more important than the corperate jackasses.
Behold the power... (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, someone will come up and say "a slashdotting is insignificant next to the power of a Google Cache."
-Cyc
scientology's new weapon (Score:4, Funny)
Letters online at chillingeffects.org (Score:3, Informative)
What a bunch of goobers...
Will google ever get into real trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that Google might be breaking some of the current laws, or may break some in the future. IMHO, this is a good thing, because there are so many people who think that Google is an innocent, noble and pure search engine. The law may just be changed so that Google no longer violates it. I would certainly hate to see such a mechanism slip quietly into the night.
Soo.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Soo.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That makes the DCMA warning letter itself a sort of circumvention device.
Ahhhhh, sweet irony...
Re:Soo.... (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds painful.
Read the complaints made to Google (Score:5, Informative)
1) Complaint #2 -- April 9 [chillingeffects.org]
2) Complaint #3 -- April 10 [chillingeffects.org]
And more importantly, go Google for publicizing the links! Yet another reason why Google is the best search engine around.
Obvious response.... (Score:5, Funny)
An even more evil plan would be to send two DMCA complaints for each DMCA complaint published, perhaps one for the first half, one for the second half. The exponential growth of DMCA complaint letters could bring even Google to its knees.
Of course, it'd be hard to generate all these complaint letters. So what you do is, build the Google API into an Outlook virus, which looks for published DMCA letters on Google and sends an automatic complaint. Soon the entire Internet will be crippled by the DMCA deluge...which was sorta the idea from the beginning, I think.
It works, but who the hell searches like that? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think many people are going to see these DMCA notifications, because I don't think that many people search this way. If they know a given site has information on a topic, most of them go straight to the site, don't they?
Re:It doesn't work. (Score:5, Informative)
That's because there is plenty of material at Xenu.net about Scientology that doesn't infringe and wasn't taken down. That, and you did the query wrong. It's "site:xenu.net scientology" to find all pages mentioning Scientology at Xenu.net. Your query turns up mostly other sites and Usenet posts where people are writing ABOUT the Xenu/Scientology battles.
Now that you've got the query right, look at the bottom of the search results list. There's the DMCA takedown notice, with links to the complaints.
Scientology had a point (Score:4, Funny)
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
Part of scientology is to free yourself of these souls. Now does releasing this text not possibly allow a person to rid themselves of these souls by alerting them to their presence? These "special 3d motion pictures" are undoubtedly a technological security measure. The only logical solution from this is that the page is a digital circumvention device specifically disallowed by the DMCA. I believe it is a clear cut issue and that the scientologists are fully within their rights to disallow google to allow people to link to this illegal page. However also keep in mind that scientology didn't enact this security measure, Xenu did, therefore scientology is also in violation of this law. Now if only Xenu can break free of his volcano, come to Earth, and sue the scientologists
What about searches coming from Canada? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about searches coming from Canada? (Score:5, Funny)
Keep quiet, eh? We don't need 'merican Scientologists realizing that google.ca is exempt from the DCMA and all the other anti-free speech laws that come from the US, eh? Then they'll come up here and try to bug us with censorship, make inane threats and worst of all drink our beer, eh?
Soko
(See the AC in this thread for the whys about the ehs, eh?)
Scientology sucks! (Score:5, Funny)
They sent obnoxious mail. I taped it to cinder blocks with "addressee unknown, please return" on their mail. The US PS was happy to charge them $20 or so to return those.
However, when two of them pushed into my my living room without my invitation, I excused myself for a moment and came back with a rifle, which I pointed at them, and I told them to leave my premises and never darken my door again.
Then we got phone calls. I shut that down by calling their office and carefully explaining to them that if I got any further harrassment from them I would personally shoot everyone in their f*cking cult, starting with the people in their downtown office and not stopping until I'd found and shot every f*cking Scientologist in the entire state!
That worked. And that's how Scientologists should be dealt with. It's the only "reasoning" they understand. Tar and feathers are gentle approbation, and very appropriate.
Re:If you really want to get them... (Score:5, Funny)
Problem: there is a chance they might become evangelical Christians as a result. Use extreme caution.
Re:Scientology sucks! (Score:5, Funny)
There are laws, at least in Canada that allow you to do this. (IANAL)
First, they forcibly entered the house without permission - AKA "home invasion".
Second, they did not leave - you ask them twice to leave, if they don't it's tresspassing.
Third, use of a weapon - they invaded his home, they were tresspassing. Using the rifle to persuade them to leave is self defense. If they had charged him, or produced a weapon he could have shot and wounded them (not killed!!)
In Canada you are allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself. If someone uses a 2X4, you can use a baseball bat. If they pull a knife, you can shoot to wound. If you wound them, it self defense. If you kill them, it's manslaughter.
Personally, I wouldn't have shot them. The meat is greasy and the pelts are useless
The best thing about this... (Score:3, Insightful)
The best thing about this is that the general public may begin to become informed about the DMCA and all of the stupid things that can come of it. Hopefully google will make a point to tell people that the DMCA was the reason the links are gone (read: put it at the top of the page). Possibly if enough people get pissed about the abuse of the law, and the abusivness of the law, it can either be over turned or new legislation can be passed to modify it. Or at the very least, become publicly debated and hated. That might lead to something...
first linux journal goes down, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm DMCA madness (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, 2 judges on a 3 judge panel agreed with the SBCC, and I don't know what happened after that.
The definition of Service Provider in this case.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Question: What defines a service provider under section 512 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)?
Answer: A service provider is defined as "an entity offering transmission, routing, or providing connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received" or "a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities thereof." [512(k)(1)(A-B)]
/*Snipped rest for bandwidth*/
While I clearly understand the spirit of the law in this case is to define that the media content is unaltered, this actually reads as the the data transmission is unaltered to me. If this is the case, then it stands to reason that any alteration to the data from the time it leaves the originating server until it is received and rendered by the end-user, would nullify this argument.
While I realize that the spirit is clear, lawyers seem to concern themselves with the letter of the law, as it's easier to exploit than a Win98 box on a cable modem. Thusly, if I am interpreting this correctly, it stands to reason that inline packet alteration would make this definition null and void. Such packet alteration as the NAT from the inside network to the internet-routeable IP, QOS policies, or even VTP/VLAN/Trunking headers being added/stripped during LAN traversal would mar the integrity of the original data packet. Just for fun you could throw in TTL decrementing, MTU packet split, etc...
Just a thought.
Simply Brilliant (Score:3, Interesting)
Simply Brilliant
They might as well put the URL of the "banned" site in neon letters.
If you are doing a search for a topic like Scientology, you are probably going to pay attention to these takedown letters with more interest than your "sanitized" search results.
Being listed on a posted takedown notice will probably drive more traffic to the site.
Another thing Google has done (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for this is simple: Scientology's DMCA attack generated such a tremendous amount of press concerning xenu.net [xenu.net] that this resulted in it being highly linked from pages that are themselves highly ranked, therefore causing it to be more important in Google's PageRank system.
This now-obsolete page of mine [operatingthetan.com] explains the spam strategy the effectiveness of which has been destroyed by Scientology's stupidity.
Sometimes, indeed, stupidity is its own reward. Scientology: making idiots from the bottom up.
Yes this is kinda of topic... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, anyway I just wanted to add my support for a google icon.
Sir, I've copyrighted that murder. (Score:3, Interesting)
By calling up copyrights on all of these documents (take a look at things like dead agenting, the big 'enemies' list, and the infamous 'fair play' directive, all of which are in the DMCA-letter here [chillingeffects.org]) they are legitimizing them, and declaring them official Church of Scientology documents. Which is all fine and dandy, of course, except that these documents include directives to commit illegal activities. Even if they can obscure cases of actual crimes, these documents still prove them guilty of conspiracy. And I bet there's probably something in that spiffy new Patriot Act, at the very least, dealing with conspiracies...
Praise be to Google (Score:4, Informative)
Now that they've done it, I take back any negative thing I may have said. Google has once again confirmed my faith that they are one of the few "good guys" left here in the Valley.
Praise be to Google
this begs the question (Score:3, Interesting)
Helpful (Score:3, Informative)
http://images.chillingeffects.org/notices/232-x
http://www.chillingeffects.org/admin/link.cgi?c
http://www.chillingeffects.org/admin/link.cgi?c
Maybe this DCMA ain't so bad after all...