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Google Publicizes DMCA Takedowns
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."
(Posted AC, so I'm not whoring...don't need it anyways, but I expect the site to die soon)
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.
This is the perfect response from google. It's about time people learned what the internet is all about, and stop whining that their crappy stuff somehow made it on the net in the first place.
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
Anti-DMCA dot org
Thanks to a bright suggestion, I and probably lots of others have started linking to scientology to help bump xenu.net up in the search engine listings.
It's now number 2 in the rankings which is 3 spots higher than a few weeks ago so perhaps this small form of protest is also working!
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
It seems as though Google has realized that the majority of people using their search engine are home users, who want to find good pages with information they want. By telling people that the DMCA has resulted in the removal of said pages, it's informing the average user of what laws such as the DMCA actually mean to them!
I think its a fairly bold statement on Google's part, saying that the end user is more important than the corperate jackasses.
-agent oranje.
Of course, someone will come up and say "a slashdotting is insignificant next to the power of a Google Cache."
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
hmm...we can't seem to get this page taken down or off of google.....let's just send a link in to Slashdot? those uber-nurds will take care of the webserver in no time!
Jesse Newland
The letters from the Church of Scientology are on chillingeffects.org
What a bunch of goobers...
I've been wondering about this for a long time. They cache possibly illegal content, and are certianly distributing some stuff that the authors aren't giving them permission to, as well as possibly linking to sites which violate DMCA (and if they recieve too many letters about this, it could take forever to take down all the sites that are apparently violating the act).
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Does this make google a circumvention device?
You can read the complaints that the lawyers for the church of scientology made to Google here:
1) Complaint #2 -- April 9
2) Complaint #3 -- April 10
And more importantly, go Google for publicizing the links! Yet another reason why Google is the best search engine around.
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.
I love how the publicly available complaint has a complete list of what they want to "block". Oops!
sulli
RTFJ.
Note that Xenu.net includes the infamous OT III text. This tells how the galactic overlord Xenu tricked billions of people into coming to Teegeeack(Earth) for income tax inspections and blew them up. From the text
...
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
I stole this Sig
Hmm. I have read a search for "site:xenu.net scientology" links to the takedown letters. When I try this search, the first hit is www.xenu.net. I wonder if this is because I am redirected to www.google.ca? Anybody have any idea if a search coming from Canada acts differently than a search coming from the US?
My (former) wife had previously been married to some a**hole Scientologist, and they tracked her up to Portland from LA and harrassed us. I wasn't confrontational, at first.
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.
Don't search for "xenu.net Scientology", search for "site:xenu.net Scientology". You have to include the "site" keyword. The notice is at the bottom of the results page.
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?
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
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...
now xenu.net is fighting a losing battle. I work at an ISP and am waiting for their page to load. The site has a lot of links to various public resources, like an alt.religion.scientology archive, the recently de-classified FBI files on L. Ron Hubbard, and various Scientology documents. I guess Scientologists don't want factual information about their group in one easy place for people to see. It also has Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit, from The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark which is an excellent book.
I tried that trick (searching for "xenu.net scientology" in google). The link to xenu.net is up and there was no message about the DMCA.
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.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I'm not sure I could think of any other response that Google could've made that would have been any better. By doing this they protect their interests, provide information to the public about why they've taken the actions they have, and if you read the letters you should be able to figure out what site was removed! They effectively sidestep this legal manuever, expose the twits who've harrased them, and give us enough information to find the site we wanted.
:-)
:-( Score one for my favorite search engine!
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
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Google Query here ya go. The DMCA notice is at the bottom of the page.
-ryanActually, 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! :-)
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
OT I know.
/. continuously, and find it annoying that on a subject I have some decent input, the story is already 2+ hours old, and I might as well not even bother posting comments. They won't get any moderation, and almost never any discussion. That's too bad, because it tends to depreciate the value of /. (not that there's not enough of that these days anyhow... :( )
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!
Try this: send them evangelical Christian tracts.
Being an evangelical Christian, I've learned the hard way (unfortunately) how easily people become uncomfortable when asked about their own spiritual lives. What these folks need, plain and simple, is for you to tell them about Jesus Christ.
It doesn't matter whether or not you succeed in converting them or not - if they convert, they'll stop being jerks, and if they don't, they'll probably get so offended at what you are saying that they'll leave you alone. The notion that an all-powerful, all-knowing God will judge the world is quite scary to many people - especially control freaks.
Granted, had I been in your situation, I might have done the same thing you did. But I believe that threatening them only reinforced their own misguided beliefs ("We will be persecuted... etc..") The knowledge of Jesus Christ is a real danger to the organization, and I believe that you could have done them far more harm by sending back a Bible than a cinder block. When people discover that God loves them, they are emboldened to break out of abusive relationships, and it is these abusive relationships on which Scientology depends for support.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Try finding the voting record for the DMCA. Supposedly, and I've not been able to confirm this, it was passed via VOICE VOTE - no record. However when asked th elawyer who presented on the DMCA in Las Vegas at DEFCON about this he said that it had been passed normally I believe. Anyone know the real answer - and better yet have the real voting record for this damned albatross?! If I find out that ANY of my reps voted for it I can promise they will NOT get my next vote for sure!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Believe it or not, something _very_ similar came up on slashdot about a year ago. Basically, a person had a complaint about his local building code. He made a website and posted the building code for his town. Soon after, he got nasty grams from the Southern Building Code Congress International Inc. The bill in question was copyrighted by the group before it was sent to the local legislature, so the wording of the law belongs to them.
Sadly, 2 judges on a 3 judge panel agreed with the SBCC, and I don't know what happened after that.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
But what's your source? All I've ever gotten has been RUMINT and when I asked the lawyer (Dario D. Diaz* - still have his card) in 'Vegas about it he seemed pretty certain that it was a normal vote. Since he'd researched the damned thing (boat hull design provision?!) and had just given a presentation on it I figured he must know more than me and didn't argue with him. I'd love to get a definative answer on this - and better yet a voting record. Can anyone help with solid info?
:-)
*www.fernandez-diaz-law.com is the URL on his card
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org