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EU Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is 'Terrorist Content' (techdirt.com)

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: We've been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet. Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority" within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist" content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week. And as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting terrorist propaganda content. [...] And just in case you think that maybe the requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist content!

5 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They should tell the EU... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    From TFA:

    CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europolâ(TM)s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europolâ(TM)s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the national IRUsâ(TM) assessment criteria of terrorist content.

    So it's actually just the French, not the EU.

    --
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  2. Re:Embarrass the EU by sconeu · · Score: 4, Informative

    They're bureaucrats. They have no sense of shame, and therefore can not be embarrassed.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  3. Re:Internet Archive is evil. by darkain · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) robots.txt retroactively will delete things from the archive. Just create one telling the archive to skip certain content, and the archive will obey.

    2) I just spent the past couple weeks digging up over 20 years of my own history thanks to the Internet Archive. All of this was previously published software, some 70 different projects. I've been pulling their archive and a couple others, mixing it all together, organizing it, and republishing a lot of the old software projects online via GitHub so anyone can use them freely. Hell, to be entirely honest, half of these projects I had even forgotten I did! Without the archive, all of this would have been lost. Now that the code is in git repositories, I've been able to quickly and easily mirror it to several places and properly archive it myself. They're a godsend!

  4. Re:Embarrass the EU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    AOC, Bernie Sanders, and all the Dems want to bring a Eurostyle vision of big brotherism to the USA. Censorshop, take down notices, high taxes, gun confiscation, Muslim overlords, and terrorism, are all headed your way thanks to the Democrat Party.

  5. Re:Internet Archive is evil. by Graymalkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Internet Archive's robots.txt policy was amended two years ago. They now ignore robots.txt policies and want people to make a formal request to remove a site's archive. What's been unclear (to me) if this corrected the issue of new robots.txt files making old archives of sites unavailable. What often happen(ed|s) is a domain squatter picks up an expired domain that used to host something, blocked IA, and then IA would make all of that site's archives unavailable. This almost always meant content a previous owner of the domain had hosted.

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