A Note on the Removal of Individual Notices in the Chilling Effects Database from General Search Engine Search Results :: Blog :: Chilling Effects

"A Note on the Removal of Individual Notices in the Chilling Effects Database from General Search Engine Search Results Recently, some people (including writers for Torrent Freak and Tech Dirt) noticed that the Chilling Effects website had disappeared from Google search results. This was entirely unintentional and was attributable to a mistake that occurred while we implemented a more limited removal of individual notice pages from search engine search results. Our intent was for the Chilling Effects home page, Search page, About page, and other informational pages to remain in search engine results. But, individual pages for takedown notices archived in the Chilling Effects database would not – for the time being, at least – show up in general search engine searches for terms that appear on those pages. Searches conducted via some search engines – e.g., Bing, DuckDuckgo, and Ixquick – now simply omit individual notice pages from results, as intended. We are working to fix the issue with Google search results as quickly as possible. The decision to de-index even the site’s notice pages is not a decision that the Chilling Effects team made lightly. We want to take this opportunity to explain the decision, clarify the record, and welcome further input from the broader research community as we think through the project’s next steps. As frequent visitors to the Chilling Effects website are aware, the project serves as a searchable archive of requests for removal of various categories of information from online platforms, including search engines, media hosts, and social networking sites. Although copyright takedown notices (sent pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as embodied in Section 512 of the United States Copyright Act) form a large part of our corpus, the Chilling Effects database also incorporates a wide range of other types of removal requests. These include claims of trademark infringement, requests to remove links to allegedly defamatory content, notices seeking the removal of private or sensitive personal information, court orders, and notices originating from outside of the legal jurisdiction of the United States. We also see a number of requests that do not lend themselves to any easy categorization. Many of these non-DMCA notices are far more likely to have been sent by individuals than by corporate entities. The sheer volume of notices received and archived by Chilling Effects has increased significantly over time. We now typically receive between two and three thousand notices per day ..."