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Censorship Your Rights Online

Google Publicizes DMCA Takedowns 396

dmarti writes "In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results."
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Google Publicizes DMCA Takedowns

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  • by Cyclopedian ( 163375 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @01:51PM (#3330507) Journal
    of this fully operational slashdotting!

    Of course, someone will come up and say "a slashdotting is insignificant next to the power of a Google Cache."

    -Cyc

  • by slhack3r ( 324207 ) <jnewland@gmail.com> on Friday April 12, 2002 @01:52PM (#3330519) Homepage Journal
    hmm...we can't seem to get this page taken down or off of google.....let's just send a link in to Slashdot? those uber-nurds will take care of the webserver in no time!
  • Soo.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by krb ( 15012 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @01:53PM (#3330534) Homepage
    Does this make google a circumvention device?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12, 2002 @01:56PM (#3330544)
    ...send another complaint claiming that the first complaint letter is copyrighted and must be taken down. Google can then take down the first and post the second. Then send a third DMCA complaint about the second letter. Ad infinitum.

    An even more evil plan would be to send two DMCA complaints for each DMCA complaint published, perhaps one for the first half, one for the second half. The exponential growth of DMCA complaint letters could bring even Google to its knees.

    Of course, it'd be hard to generate all these complaint letters. So what you do is, build the Google API into an Outlook virus, which looks for published DMCA letters on Google and sends an automatic complaint. Soon the entire Internet will be crippled by the DMCA deluge...which was sorta the idea from the beginning, I think.

  • by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:06PM (#3330624)
    Note that Xenu.net [xenu.net] includes the infamous OT III text [xenu.net]. This tells how the galactic overlord Xenu tricked billions of people into coming to Teegeeack(Earth) for income tax inspections and blew them up. From the text

    After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

    When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.


    Part of scientology is to free yourself of these souls. Now does releasing this text not possibly allow a person to rid themselves of these souls by alerting them to their presence? These "special 3d motion pictures" are undoubtedly a technological security measure. The only logical solution from this is that the page is a digital circumvention device specifically disallowed by the DMCA. I believe it is a clear cut issue and that the scientologists are fully within their rights to disallow google to allow people to link to this illegal page. However also keep in mind that scientology didn't enact this security measure, Xenu did, therefore scientology is also in violation of this law. Now if only Xenu can break free of his volcano, come to Earth, and sue the scientologists ...
  • by s390 ( 33540 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:09PM (#3330647) Homepage
    My (former) wife had previously been married to some a**hole Scientologist, and they tracked her up to Portland from LA and harrassed us. I wasn't confrontational, at first.

    They sent obnoxious mail. I taped it to cinder blocks with "addressee unknown, please return" on their mail. The US PS was happy to charge them $20 or so to return those.

    However, when two of them pushed into my my living room without my invitation, I excused myself for a moment and came back with a rifle, which I pointed at them, and I told them to leave my premises and never darken my door again.

    Then we got phone calls. I shut that down by calling their office and carefully explaining to them that if I got any further harrassment from them I would personally shoot everyone in their f*cking cult, starting with the people in their downtown office and not stopping until I'd found and shot every f*cking Scientologist in the entire state!

    That worked. And that's how Scientologists should be dealt with. It's the only "reasoning" they understand. Tar and feathers are gentle approbation, and very appropriate.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:10PM (#3330652)
    Do you mean besides adding an 'Eh?' to the end of each query ?
  • by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:19PM (#3330708) Journal
    I second a "delay displaying for xx" option.

    Then, I could set the delay to a negative number and get that elusive first post!
  • by JordanH ( 75307 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:21PM (#3330722) Homepage Journal
    Of course, a slashdotting is insignificant next to the power of a Google Cache.

    Sorry, I had to say, I, I had no choice!

  • by Guns n' Roses Troll ( 207208 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:21PM (#3330727) Homepage
    Sir,
    Thank you for your hypertext markup language link to an enticing image. If I was not at work, I would be yanking my crank. Spanking the monkey. Doing the twist. Shaking hands with the pope. Have a good weekend.

    Yours,
    That Dude Who Stands In The Bus Terminal All Day Leering At Young Women
  • by MegaGremlin ( 216264 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:31PM (#3330780) Homepage Journal
    The more the **AA tighten their grasp, the more IP will slip through their fingers...."
  • by Soko ( 17987 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:36PM (#3330808) Homepage
    SHHH!!!!

    Keep quiet, eh? We don't need 'merican Scientologists realizing that google.ca is exempt from the DCMA and all the other anti-free speech laws that come from the US, eh? Then they'll come up here and try to bug us with censorship, make inane threats and worst of all drink our beer, eh?

    Soko
    (See the AC in this thread for the whys about the ehs, eh?)
  • by Dr Caleb ( 121505 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:48PM (#3330884) Homepage Journal
    I'm surprised that they didn't press charges against you for making death threats. Litigious as they are, you'd think they would do that.

    There are laws, at least in Canada that allow you to do this. (IANAL)

    First, they forcibly entered the house without permission - AKA "home invasion".
    Second, they did not leave - you ask them twice to leave, if they don't it's tresspassing.
    Third, use of a weapon - they invaded his home, they were tresspassing. Using the rifle to persuade them to leave is self defense. If they had charged him, or produced a weapon he could have shot and wounded them (not killed!!)

    In Canada you are allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself. If someone uses a 2X4, you can use a baseball bat. If they pull a knife, you can shoot to wound. If you wound them, it self defense. If you kill them, it's manslaughter.

    Personally, I wouldn't have shot them. The meat is greasy and the pelts are useless

  • Re:Soo.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Amazing Quantum Man ( 458715 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @02:49PM (#3330899) Homepage
    AARRRRGGGH!!!!

    It's "DMCA", not "DCMA"!!!!!!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12, 2002 @03:09PM (#3331009)
    Try this: send them evangelical Christian tracts.

    Problem: there is a chance they might become evangelical Christians as a result. Use extreme caution.
  • Re:Soo.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sab39 ( 10510 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @03:09PM (#3331012) Homepage
    there aren't any Village People songs about the DMCA

    Really? [freesklyarov.org]
  • "No! Google is a peacful website!" Cmdr. Taco: "Perhaps you'd prefer another target, a *nerdly* target? I grow tired of asking, so this will be the last time: Where is the hidden beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman pr0n?"
  • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @03:30PM (#3331119) Journal
    See message
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29802&cid=31 99 931

    I have taken out US patent #9,385,379, "DMCA notification bypass technique" on this and all related techniques. Google has not licensed this patent so I'm going to sue them for $50,000 per use.

    Just kidding of course -- good job, Google.

    Better would have been to ignore those DMCA letters entirely, and argue in court that the DMCA 512(d) safe harbor is redundant; that is, there isn't any valid claim for contributory or vicarious liability for search engines in the first place. But this isn't too bad.
  • by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Friday April 12, 2002 @04:27PM (#3331479) Homepage

    So let me get this straight...by Linking to Xenu.net [xenu.net] we can up its rankings? That's pretty interesting.

  • Re:Soo.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @04:48PM (#3331606) Homepage
    Does this make google a circumvention device?

    Sounds painful.

  • by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @04:58PM (#3331670) Homepage
    Getting the contact info for Ava Paquette at Moxon and Korbin is trivial. Plenty of other people have gotten "Avagrams" or "Ho grams".

    In fact, someone did a song dissing Avagrams. Hmm, hang on a sec...

    Enturbulator 009 [stationmp3.com] has a number songs poking fun at the Happy Fun Cult.

  • by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Friday April 12, 2002 @05:40PM (#3331998) Journal

    They sued that one guy for "threatening" them with a cruise missile. I wouldn't be making threats of imminent physical harm that you can't defend in a long and costly court battle.

    There was a letter by a Scientologist in the local paper recently - something about using L. Ron's new drug "Narcanon" or something like that to wean kids off of drugs. I don't want to think what it's weaning them off of.

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