Chilling Effects DMCA Archive Censors Itself

An anonymous reader sends this report from TorrentFreak: The much-praised Chilling Effects DMCA archive has taken an unprecedented step by censoring its own website. Facing criticism from copyright holders, the organization decided to wipe its presence from all popular search engines. A telling example of how pressure from rightsholders causes a chilling effect on free speech. ... "After much internal discussion the Chilling Effects project recently made the decision to remove the site’s notice pages from search engines," Berkman Center project coordinator Adam Holland informs TF. "Our recent relaunch of the site has brought it a lot more attention, and as a result, we’re currently thinking through ways to better balance making this information available for valuable study, research, and journalism, while still addressing the concerns of people whose information appears in the database."

Comments

I smell a rat

[Crashmarik]

Just what are they trying to balance ? People's right to know about abuses of the law with ?

Re:I smell a rat

[hey!]

Well, there actually is a legitimate issue here.

Not every takedown notice in the Chilling Effects database is bogus. By putting the text of legitimate notices in a searchable database, Chilling Effects can be used to find infringing content. For example I didn't see "Interstellar" when it was in the theaters near me. Using Chilling Effects I very easily found a number of sites offering bootleg downloads.

If Google removes an infringing link from search result, having the takedown notice copy stored at Chilling Effects appear in Google search result effectively nullifies the takedown. The offending URL is right there in the takedown text.

So what is being balanced here is Chilling Effects' mission -- serving as a database for researching takedowns -- vs. the legitimate copyright interests of the people issuing the takedowns. It won't stop legitimate or illegitimate users of the Chilling Effects database, but it won't guide casual search engine users to infringing content either.

Of course this won't satisfy intellectual property interest groups, whose only mode of operation appears to be "scorched earth".

Censorship is bad. Mmmkay?

[houghi]

Many people think that censorship is only censorship if it is done by the government. That is not the case.

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

So where are all these people who say that free speech is important? So how imporatnt is it for you? Enough to press 'like' on Facebook? Enough to actually talk to people in person? Enough to go on the streets for and demand change? Enough to die for?

My guess it stops at the Facebook stage. I know I am guilty of that.

Re:Not always Free Speech

[DarkTempes]

The "battle" was lost a long time ago.

The war on drugs couldn't even be "won" and that had physical products with high costs and prison sentences.
How does anyone possibly think they can stop information, right or wrong, on a system that is designed to facilitate moving information?

It's honestly a waste of time and humanity would be much better served spending the resources/time/money/man hours elsewhere.

Is there such a thing as a P2P search engine?

[Karmashock]

Because we appear to need one. And I don't mean an engine that search P2P torrents or something but rather one that is like google or Bing but run P2P sort of like Tor or something.

It doesn't need to be fast. It just needs to work.

Re:Is there such a thing as a P2P search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is. See here: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

Chilling Effects Firefox extention?

[lhaeh]

Seems like a firefox extention would be a good way to solve this.

Re:Not always Free Speech

[allo]

Piracy Links are free speech.

an illegal download ... is illegal.
But a link to this download on the google page per se is free speech. Now a DMCA censors this free speech of google to link this page for the correct search terms. That's what chillingeffects records.

Somebody should mirror the site

[russotto]

Mirror the site, add links to each page back to the original, and make the mirror indexable. The site can't be so fast-changing this is impractical.

Re:Not always Free Speech

[fustakrakich]

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. First off, there's big profits in prohibition. Second it provides pretext for the police to raid your house and kill your dog. Think of them as 'speed traps' for revenue.