Overview

Lumen is a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University archiving and studying DMCA take-down notices, cease and desist letters and other requests for the removal of online content. The project receives copies of notices and other requests directly from their original recipients and senders and archives the notices in an easily navigable database (lumendatabase.org). The cease and desist notices in the database cover a spectrum of topics: ranging from copyright, patent, and trademark infringement to court orders, private information, and defamation. While many of the notices hold a valid legal basis, it is important to note that some may not. The project partners with individual researchers and other academic institutions to facilitate research on the removal requests and to expand awareness of the importance of transparency in such legal practices. As Lumen receives these take-down notices in (almost) real time, the project has the unique opportunity to observe and analyze trends in the database while they form. Using the publicly accessible data and search tools, researchers can analyze trends in notice metadata. The Lumen database categorizes notices by “Topic”, “Sender”, “Principal”, “Recipient”. “Submitter”, “Tags”, “Country”, “Language”, “Action Taken”, and “Date”. Filtering by topic or keywords allows researchers to establish a constant variable and analyze trends within a subset of the notices.

Research Goals

After exploring the database and parsing through notices, repetition of senders, topics, and subjects becomes apparent. Particular topics are more popular than others, certain representative bodies send a notable amount of notices and certain parties receive especially large numbers of notices. Personally, I am particularly interested in the parties or entities receiving large numbers of copyright infringement notices and thus the platforms and mediums through which blatant copyright infringement may occur and which parties attempt to protect their copyrights with take-down notices. Following some independent research on various websites and social media platforms, I became fascinated by Periscope: Twitter’s newest live streaming application. This past summer I wrote a short blog post about Periscope: describing its purpose, relevance in current events, and relation to the Lumen project. In short, Periscope has blossomed over the last year into a huge player in the social media world, at the time of this writing featuring over 200 million posts and over 110 years of video watched live every single day (keep in mind, posts are only available for a 24-hour window). From March 2015, Periscope’s launch date, to March 2016, Lumen received over 25,000 take-down notices from the streaming application, approximately 70 notices per day. Almost all of the notices are categorized as “Copyright” or “DMCA Notices”. Each notice requires serious effort from the party whose rights are being infringed. Every single day nearly 70 copyright-owners, their employees, or computer algorithms search through the temporarily available Periscope live streams to find and report infringing content. This extended effort to protect copyrights sparks a debate of responsibility. Whose responsibility should this effort be: the sharing platform/application or the rights owner? Recently, there has been much discussion over who is ultimately responsible for policing platforms like Periscope and monitoring infringing content. The current law protects service providers (like Twitter/Periscope) from the monetary damages for infringing content shared on their platforms and requires copyright owners to send take-down notices for each piece of infringing content they wish to have removed. A large artist coalition recently sent a letter (to Congress, asking for alterations to the DMCA to modernize it to meet the changes to modern music-sharing, and Congress has recently conducted a series of hearings on the topic of copyright modernization, among other ongoing developments. To compare legislative pushes and statements to actual takedown efforts made by various copyright-owning entities, I decided to study the senders of Periscope notices to see who was took action to protect their copyrighted material being shared illegally on the platform.

Project Methods

From the Lumen website (lumendatabase.org) browsers can search key words and terms to filter specific notices. Similarly, researchers (with a research token) can do similar searches ‘under the hood’ of the database, allowing them to download large sets data into a usable format. Using the Lumen API Documentation, Summer Intern Ryan Brigden wrote a https://gist.github.com/rbrigden/7bf13dea5f9f9b2b836a2118df87cb90”publicly available Ruby script that grabs all notices including a specific search term (in th