That's the bad news. And actually, it's not new news, as it's been going on for several years. The good news, however, which some may not know — is that they're transparent about it, and each instance points to more case information at chillingeffects.org. A BoingBoing reader who prefers to remain anonymous says,
Try to search on Google for
olly hits snake
[Ed. Note: do not place quotes around those three search terms.] Scroll down all the way to the bottom of the page, where you'll read the text
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."
Originally this was found by one of the fravia's board members — ollydbg is a debugger (like SoftIce), but i think it has nothing to do with the complaint.
Another Boing Boing reader familiar with the issue says DMCA takedowns from Google search results — with this accompanying notice — have been going on since march 2002. A case involving anti-Scientology website xenu.net and the Church of Scientology led to Google instituting the notice: Link.
Wendy Seltzer at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and chillingeffects.org says
You posted a story to BoingBoing on Google's DMCA-based removal of links. While it's unfortunate, at least Google is being transparent about the process by sending the takedown notices to Chilling Effects and linking over there when it removes a result from its search. We hope more search engines will do the same!
You can find more than 1000 takedown demands sent to Google here, and more background on the DMCA here.
Reader Comment: Anonymous says,
You'll notice that a great deal of the takedown demands to Google are for child pornography. Over the past several years of searching for child pornography there have been only a few cases where these takedowns actually prevented me from finding the specific page for which I was looking. My guess is that most of the successful takedowns were against American sites, whereas most child pornography is hosted in Europe and Asia. I would be interested to hear whether non-American users of Google encounter similar filtering.
