Anti-Piracy Activist Issues Takedown To Chilling Effects To Take Down Her Takedown Notice To Google

from the stupidity-in-Russian-doll-form dept

Ellen Seidler -- anti-piracy activist and tilter at windmills -- continues down the road to irrelevance with her latest post at Vox Indie. Seidler's film And Then Came Lola debuted in 2010. As of 2015, this remains Seidler's sole foray into motion pictures. Over the past half-decade, she's filled her time with futile anti-piracy efforts and endless documentation of those futile efforts.

Rather than dial back her anti-piracy efforts and put that time and energy towards something more positive, she's decided to explore the limits of her credibility. Her latest post deals with her (presumably futile) effort to take down a takedown notice posted to Chilling Effects.

Earlier this week I sent Chilling Effects a DMCA takedown notice, requesting that the site remove links that lead directly to a pirated stream of our film, And Then Came Lola. How did the pirate link make its way to Chilling Effects? Well, it’s not a new tale. In fact, I’ve repeatedly written about the fact that pirate links reported (and removed) by Google search are routinely reposted on Chilling Effects. Google even goes so far as to provide a direct link to the reposted content so as not to inconvenience its users.

As she notes (and documents), it only takes users a matter of seconds to uncover the link Google removed from its search results and head directly to it to avail themselves of free copies of Seidler's film. (It should be noted that the DMCA notice she's trying to remove links back to Wolfe Video -- home of Kathy Wolfe, who spends "half her profits" on anti-piracy efforts while offering no evidence that this produces any return on investment.)

So, her solution is to issue a takedown notice to Chilling Effects to have the DMCA notice itself removed from the clearinghouse database. I've reached out to Chilling Effects to see if it can provide me a copy of this takedown notice as I'd really like to see the rationale deployed to justify the removal of posted takedown notice.

Unsurprisingly, she had trouble locating where she should send this bogus takedown notice.

Prior to sending my DMCA notice to the good people at Chilling Effects, I attempted to search for its DMCA agent and an email to use. I couldn’t find one so resorted to sending my notice to the only email listed on the site team@chillingeffects.org which I found on the “about” page. Seems to me if you are in the business of sharing links to various sites reported for piracy, in order to comply the actual law, Chilling Effects should list a DMCA agent. It should also publish its removal process policy.

It would seem obvious that Chilling Effects wouldn't need a DMCA notice because it does nothing more than archive takedown notices voluntarily forwarded to it by other sites. Takedown notices have already been complied with before they hit Chilling Effects. In essence, her takedown notice would be analogous to someone issuing a takedown notice to have a legal document removed from a third-party host, despite the fact that the document is actually a matter of public record.

While she admits Chilling Effects can also be a useful research tool, she's more concerned about its secondhand "posting" of infringing links to her content. But that's just it. It can't be useful for research by not posting the notices it receives. And it's a very valuable tool for documenting DMCA abuse which, while far from the majority of takedowns issued, is still prevalent enough it needs to be watched. Simply allowing takedown notices to vanish into the ether after they've been complied with (or rejected) would lead to an increase in abuse. People looking to silence critics or whitewash the internet would be far more prone to do so if they knew their takedown notices wouldn't be archived at publicly-accessible sites.

Seidler stresses how easy it is to go from point A (search results) to point B (Chilling Effects) in order to achieve objective C (infringing content) but rather than see this as the way the web is supposed to work, she sees a conspiracy aimed at uniting pirates with pirated goods in an overarching scheme to stick it to copyright holders.

Filed Under: and then came lola, chilling effects, copyright, dmca, dmca takedowns, ellen seidler, research
Companies: chilling effects

Chilling Effects On Chilling Effects As DMCA Archive Deletes Self From Google

from the transparency-never dept

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak noted that the website Chilling Effects had apparently removed itself from Google's search index after too many people complained.

This week, however, we were no longer able to do so. The Chilling Effects team decided to remove its entire domain from all search engines, including its homepage and other informational and educational resources.

TorrentFreak asked the site about it and was told it was done in search of "better balance."

“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.”

[....]

“As a project, we’ve always worked to strike that balance, for example by removing personally identifying information. Removing notice pages from search engine results is the latest step in that balancing process,” Holland tells us.

“It may or may not prove to be permanent, but for now it’s the step that makes the most sense as we continue to think things through,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Chilling Effects founder, Wendy Seltzer, seems to insist that this was an implementation mistake and that the team never meant to remove the whole domain: So it's a little unclear what happened here. You'd think the folks at the Berkman Center and associated with Chilling Effects know how to properly set up a robots.txt file if they want to just exclude certain pages.

Either way it seems like a massive blow for transparency, and in many ways is a "chilling effect" of its own. It's no secret that many legacy copyright system supporters absolutely hate Chilling Effects and the transparency it brings. Sandra Aistars, of the Copyright Alliance, referred to the site as "repugnant" in Congressional testimony just a few months ago. Yes, providing transparency on censorship is "repugnant." Says a lot about the Copyright Alliance, doesn't it?

Others have made similar statements in the past. A few years ago, a lawyer tried to block Google from forwarding DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, arguing that passing along those notices makes Google "potentially liable for the infringement" in passing on the notices. Others have argued that the takedown notices themselves are subject to copyright and have tried to block them from appearing on Chilling Effects.

The concern, they claim, is twofold: First, the details in the takedown notice often demonstrate where infringing content actually is. That's especially true for notices to Google or Twitter (two of the bigger suppliers of notices to Chilling Effects) who are not hosting the content, but are merely linking to it (i.e. they are "information location tools.") In those cases, the links may get removed from the services in question, but remain on the internet itself. The second concern, as put forth by Aistars, is that people issuing DMCA takedown notices are sensitive little flowers, and publishing the fact that they're trying to take down content opens them up to harassment and abuse.

Neither of these arguments survives much scrutiny. The idea that anyone is trawling through Chilling Effects seeking unauthorized content is fairly unlikely. And, really, if people are, those aren't exactly the kind of people who are then going to turn around and start willfully forking over cash to the legacy entertainment industry for that same content. The Chilling Effects haters, no doubt, would argue that this is why it's important to remove Chilling Effects itself from Google, because people searching on Google might not find the originals, but would then find the takedown notices with links back to the originals. Except, that seems unlikely. First, as has been detailed many times, people looking for unauthorized copies of works tend not to use Google that much, since it's not very good for that purpose, and other tools tend to be much more effective. Second, the kinds of information in a takedown notice itself aren't likely to trigger a high result for someone looking for an unauthorized download. Terms like "free" and "download" are unlikely to be found on such documents.

The other argument -- that being exposed for sending takedowns leads to harassment -- also seems bogus. We've seen little indication that people get that upset about legitimate takedowns. It's the excessive, abusive and censorious takedowns that really seem to concern people. And those are the ones that need transparency the most.

Hopefully, the folks at Chilling Effects rethink this decision and stick by their own stated philosophy of working "to provide as much transparency as possible" about DMCA takedown notices. It would seem that blocking a key search tool from accessing the data goes directly against that principle.

Filed Under: chilling effects, copyright, copyright infringement, dmca, indexing, robots.txt, search, takedowns
Companies: chilling effects, google