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!

Comments

Well, to the publishing companies anyways...

[sconeu]

To the publishing companies, ANYTHING freely available is terroristic content.

Re:Well, to the publishing companies anyways...

[UnknownSoldier]

That's why the publishing companies invented Copyright -- to stop other publishers!

The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," particularly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who frequently gave grants of monopolies in articles of common use, such as salt, leather, coal, soap, cards, beer, and wine. The practice was continued until the Statute of Monopolies was enacted in 1623, ending most monopolies, with certain exceptions, such as patents; after 1623, grants of Letters patent to publishers became common.

As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms, and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild, and thirty years later the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." The right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. The French crown also repressed printing, and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546. As the English took control of type founding in 1637, printers fled to the Netherlands. Confrontation with authority made printers radical and rebellious, and 800 authors, printers and book dealers were incarcerated in the Bastille before it was stormed in 1789. The notion that the expression of dissent or subversive views should be tolerated, not censured or punished by law, developed alongside the rise of printing and the press. The Areopagitica, published in 1644 under the full title Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, was John Milton's response to the English parliament re-introducing government licensing of printers, hence publishers. In doing so Milton articulated the main strands of future discussions about freedom of expression. By defining the scope of freedom of expression and of "harmful" speech Milton argued against the principle of pre-censorship and in favour of tolerance for a wide range of views.

Embarrass the EU

[Tablizer]

Just put a message for EU ip addresses that reads something like:

"Due to EU Committee X takedown notice 123456 claiming this site had "terrorist content", we have blocked this content for EU readers. Our internal review of the site found it did NOT qualify for a take-down, but to avoid legal hassles, we decided to block it for now. You can donate to our legal defense fund at [url here]. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Further, publish a list on the Internet Archive site of all take-down requests, including a note marking the dubious requests. The Streisand Effect will then kick in and the EU review committee will end up embarrassed as those who can read the blocked content overseas can know about their poor decision.

Re:Embarrass the EU

[sconeu]

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

Re:They should tell the EU...

[AmiMoJo]

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.

So let me understand this correctly

[3seas]

A few people, some very small fraction of something far less than 1% of a population of 7.5+ billion people are going to decide something that affects/constrains the populations access to a massive amount of information.

Where/When have we seen this sort of act before in our human history? i.e. Library of Alexandria

Re:So let me understand this correctly

[sheramil]

Where/When have we seen this sort of act before in our human history? i.e. Library of Alexandria

That's one hell of a take-down notice. Don't give them any ideas.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Proposed Response Letter

[Thelasko]

Dear Government Authority,

We have reviewed your request regarding the alleged "terrorist" content on our website, and found the request to be baseless and nonsensical. As a result, your agency has been placed on our "incompetent authority" list. All future requests from your organization will be ignored.

If you believe your organization has been placed on the "incompetent authority" list in error, please send a certified letter stating your petition along with a 125 Euro processing fee to our legal department.

Good Day,
The Internet Archive

Re:Proposed Response Letter

[Areyoukiddingme]

We have reviewed your request regarding the alleged "terrorist" content on our website, and found the request to be baseless and nonsensical. As a result, your agency has been placed on our "incompetent authority" list. All future requests from your organization will be ignored.

That appears to be exactly the intent. Someone is trying to poison the well. Considering the 'Terrorist Content Regulation' doesn't exist yet, any demand to take something down by its authority is bogus regardless of the targeted content. This was not an accident, and the Internet Archive was selected specifically because it is known that they resist demand letters reflexively.

It won't change anything though. Big content owners have money and money buys politicians. End of story.

Re:Internet Archive is evil.

[darkain]

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!

That story is strange

[aepervius]

Firstly it was corrected to not say "EU" but "French national Internet Referral Unit" for which I can find no reference beside that article. There IS an EU IRU, but no french national IRU I can find of. So baring a proper reporting I am viewing that as dubious.

Re:Internet Archive is evil.

[Shikaku]

You ever look into history? The reason we write things down is because it is or was important. "On the internet" doesn't change much with writings except the method of writing.

Just like what another poster said, the Internet Archive respects robots.txt and will retroactively delete a site if you set it that way.

Also even though the written texts are on a different medium, digitally versus paper, some writings will hold huge historical value; to suggest otherwise would be akin to burning books because they're "blasphemous" or something similar, and while you might want that for your own data most people would want this historical backup, especially scholarly sites like Wikipedia and the public domain books that can be distributed freely forever.

An different from the US?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it very strange, how ALL countries got so paranoid and totalitarian and just plain nuts and evil since between 1998 and 2006.

Those countries look like they couldn't be more different. Yet the somehow all follow the same path.
Seriously, what the hell?

Yeah, I put on my tin foil hat, with its perfect parabolic concentrator shape. ;)
But you face what is *really* just a plain verifiable fact of reality, and verify it for yourself, in exchange.

Re: AOC and the Dems and Eurostyle

[jedidiah]

So far Republicans aren't advocating "punching commies" or trying to take down Project Gutenberg.

Re:Internet Archive is evil.

[Graymalkin]

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.