Chilling Effects removes itself from search engines | Hacker News Reader

Chilling Effects removes itself from search engines

torrentfreak.com

189 pointsjarcane27 comments

This is just further proof of how broken the system is.

The DMCA notices are to take down Google search results. These results are not the infringement (the search page is not displaying copyrighted data, just linking to a site that does) and the site with the infringing content is still there.

This flaw means that correct DMCA notices, even when acted upon, will contain links to infringing material that is still up because the notice is not to take down the infringing material, just links to it.

Normally correct notices should be fine to display and index after they've been acted upon because the content is gone and similarly incorrect ones should be fine to display because the content is not infringing.

The very premise of Google removing search results is flawed and results in this sillyness.

It's more than just sillyness.

This is your second one-liner in this thread. Please elaborate on your points, otherwise we're all just arguing against the wind.

I don't know the exact details, but I was pretty sure that since they linked to but don't host the content, they don't have to abide by DMCA requests for that content? Something about a Microsoft v TicketMaster case?

Does anyone know enough about this to help me out?

They are effectively required to though.

If you listened to the SOPA hearings, for example, not a one of the lawmakers understood that Google was not hosting the pages. They all think of Google as basically the internet.

If Google does not make an effort, as they do, then it would be a PR disaster.

I think this is meant to be a demonstration of how ineffective removing something from search engines is. Even if you are using Google, you will still get the Wikipedia page and other pages that link to it, so it's now just two clicks instead of one. It doesn't really hide the page, but it shows the flaws in the censorship system. I think it's a good move.

Has anyone done an audit of the content of Chilling Effect? Because while ...

> Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars describe[s] the activities of the Chilling Effects projects as “repugnant.”

... I think it's pretty repugnant that companies can spew malformed incorrect DMCA requests and let other people pay the costs of fixing the resulting mess.

The Chilling Effects robots.txt file [1]. Does anyone know what the user-agent "Google-Legal-Removals" is for?

Returning to the subject at hand, what are they trying to do by making themselves non-index-able? If I search something on Google and a link has been removed, I still get linked to the DMCA request on chillingeffects that still has the removed url on it. If I go to the chillingeffects website, they still offer a search feature.

[1] https://www.chillingeffects.org/robots.txt

on the same week that its usefulness was shinning all over by displaying abusive take down notices on github[1]? The MAFIAA lawyers are a quick and smart bunch, i will give them that.

[1] https://gist.github.com/Psycojoker/69c00d0d11f26a46ac93

Indeed, I don't think it's coincidental. There was previous HN discussion on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848544

There's been a long-running effort by the copyright lobby to muzzle Chilling Effects. Participants in that effort include Sony, Disney, NBCUniversal, Viacom, BSA, Universal Music, the Entertainment Software Association, and two of my previous employers (before I left to found http://recent.io/), CBS and TimeWarner. They're all members of the Copyright Alliance, which has previously had this to say about Chilling Effects:

The activities of chillingeffects.org are repugnant to the purposes of Section 512. Data collected by high-volume recipients of DMCA notices such as Google, and senders of DMCA notices such as trade associations representing the film and music industries demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices sent are legitimate, yet the site unfairly maligns artists and creators using the legal process created by Section 512 as proponents of censorship. Moreover, by publishing the personal contact information of the creators sending notices (a practice which Chilling Effects only recently discontinued), it subjects creators to harassment and personal attacks for seeking to exercise their legal rights. Finally, because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet. (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/11355726599/copyr...)

It would be interesting to know how much influence the copyright lobby has had on Chilling Effects' decision to self-censor.

For now, though, if Chilling Effects has chosen to remove itself from search engines, then presumably some enterprising soul might want to mirror the takedown notices posted on that site. That would continue to shed light on abuses of copyright, such as the demands recently made to get Github pages yanked from search engines.

Note it's often copyright lobby lawyers sending these takedown nastygrams, and those lawyers could claim their letters are copyrighted (and, I suppose, even try to get search engines to de-index the mirror site). While they have been unwilling to sue Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford law schools, they may be more likely to sue an individual running a mirror site, even if that lawsuit were spurious.

So if such a mirror site were to be created, it might make sense for it to be hosted overseas where the local law permits and operated by someone living overseas. The domain chilledeffects.org is available...

What is scary about this level of censorship is that it shows just how much power these big corporations have over what people can find on the Internet. "If I can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist" is what the majority of users think, and they're exploiting that sentiment.

I think there is no better time than now for the development of new search engine technologies that could be resistant to censorship by being widely distributed, much like how protocols such as BitTorrent revolutionised file sharing.

Oddly enough, if I do the query "site:chillingeffects.org" with Google right now, I get the same single result as shown in the article, but also a "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed." message, and if I click that link there, I see "About 1,720,000 results" (of which a very small number are actually accessible), some of them being notices.

Chilling Effects is still listed on DuckDuckGo. They didn't remove themselves from there.

DuckDuckGo utilizes Bing, Yandex and other sources

Not removed from all search engines. Just Google. Bing works just fine. So do the little guys, like DuckDuckGo. "robots.txt":

    User-agent: Google-Legal-Removals
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Googlebot
    Noindex: /
    Allow: /pages

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /
    Allow: /pages

That /robots.txt does tell the other bots to not crawl most of the site. These results are unlikely to stay.

The other sites probably just haven't processed the robots.txt change yet and will in the near future.

Can we mirror the site using a domain CNAME'd to CE?

If we managed to get a bunch of them, and if those get removed, we could use another new domains.. It's a never ending game that guarantee we win -- except they take down the site.

a cname wouldn't work because it would also have the CE robots.txt, but if you used a sufficiently intelligent proxy that stripped robots.txt and rewrote links then it probably would work, but I don't think that's a good idea regardless.

Surely their next step is to try and get Google to sensor this page.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/

as it will provide links to all of the pirate websites that hosts infringing content?...Time to get parsing those CSVs.

All the data from removals can be found here. http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

So you can't search chillingeffects.org using the "site:" syntax on Google?

Big deal!

The site has its own self-powered search box.

Also, the self-censorship only means that pages from that site won't be in the Google index (and others). Pages which talk about the site and link to it will still be there. It's not some kind of complete blackout.

This is a joke, right?

Honestly, that was inevitable.

Wait, why?

Well first it was ridiculous enough search engines were being censored when we're so against the concept of the Great Firewall of China.

To console the people, they started the Chilling Effects project to "stick it to the man". Once enough time had passed, and the hearts had quelled, they'd eventually contest the Chilling Effects project.

Mission accomplished.

Yeah I agree with that, the internet has gone to shit in the last few years with this. The system is a bit messed, your going to have to sign up for three services minimum Netflix, Hulu and Amazon just to get about half of the TV shows.

In the UK however we have ISPs blocking domains, but people just keep putting up ore and more domains to curcumvent it. It won't stop.

That's clever. Evil, but clever. Had never considered this use. Sneaky bastards.

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