Christopher Bavitz and  Adam Holland joined an EU meeting to discuss the importance of data transparency in takedown regimes and key learnings from the Lumen Database. 

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The EU is currently conducting a series of meetings and dialog between various stakeholders regarding the national implementations of Article 17, one of the new pieces of EU Copyright law. Art. 17 addresses "Use of protected content by online content-sharing service providers"

The Stakeholder Dialogue (art. 17(10)) is its 2nd phase (3d and 4th meetings): fact-finding about specific practices & tools. Lumen, as an aggregator of copyright takedown notices,was invited to give a short presentation on December 16th, 2019, addressing the project's perspective and experience, along with commentary on observed trends,and highlights of empirical research relying on Lumen data. Other presenters included Facebook, Seznam, Wattpad, Audible Magic, BEUC, GESAC, ICMP (Universal), EPC (Ardito project), FEP, Bertelsmann and Telefonica.

A slightly longer written version of Lumen's remarks, including citations, is below. A PDF of the remarks can be found here, and the recording of the livestream of the day's events can be found here. Lumen's participation begins at approximately 4:00:00 into the recording.

WRITTEN STATEMENT OF ADAM HOLLAND AND CHRISTOPHER BAVITZ EUROPEAN COMMISSION STAKEHOLDER DIALOGUE ON ARTICLE 17 16 DECEMBER 2019

INTRODUCTION

Thank you very much for having us today — we are happy to be able to participate in this Stakeholder Dialogue regarding Article 17 of the European Union Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market. We especially appreciate your being able to accommodate our remote participation from here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

My name is Adam Holland, and I am a Project Manager at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where I oversee the day-to-day operations of the Lumen database project that is the subject of our remarks today. I am here along with Christopher Bavitz, who is the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, one of the faculty co-directors at the Berkman Klein Center, and Lumen’s principal investigator. In these remarks, we plan to offer a short history of Lumen and the ways in which it has served to facilitate transparency in connection with requests directed to websites, by both private sector and government actors, to remove content or links. Using Lumen data, we will offer some observations about the past and current landscape for online takedowns. We will also provide some specific examples of research that has come out of the Lumen database that may be instructive or informative in connection with considerations about implementation of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive in the EU. In brief, the experience of this project tracking takedowns for nearly two decades demonstrates that:

(1) a legal regime that envisions an opportunity for private or public actors to demand that content or links be removed from the web will inevitably have to reckon with errors and abuses of the system;

(2) no purely technological solution that we have seen to date is capable of comprehensively addressing such errors and abuses; and

(3) transparency about who is requesting that content and links be removed, and the nature of and basis for such requests, is vital in the context of implementation and administration of any takedown regime, including as an ongoing oversight mechanism for identifying and addressing errors and abuse.

LUMEN OVERVIEW

Background and History

Lumen is an independent research project that studies, and facilitates the study of the landscape for online content. This includes requests — based on legal or extra-legal theories — to remove materials (or links to materials) created or uploaded by Internet users. Lumen operates a research platform that invites rightsholders, Online Service Providers (OSPs), search engines, and other online intermediaries, as well as members of the general public, to share takedown requests that they send and receive concerning online content. Lumen maintains a database containing millions of such notices that have been voluntarily shared with the project by their recipients and senders, and makes those notices available to scholars, journalists, and others for purposes of research and analysis.1

Lumen was formed as the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse in or around 2001, in the wake of the United States’ 1998 implementation o