Chilling Effects Announces New Name, International Partnerships

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: A History of Growth and Expansion

As hard as it is to believe, the Chilling Effects project launched nearly fifteen years ago, in 2001. Project founder Wendy Seltzer (then a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) then recognized, in the wake of the passage of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the need for someone to collect and study DMCA notices that were being to sent to online platforms requesting removal of allegedly copyrighted content. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse was borne of a desire to: (a) map the copyright takedown landscape by tracking requests for content removal; and (b) offer researchers a rich source of data and encourage cutting-edge investigation into the ways in which online intermediaries decide which content to host and which to remove.

In the intervening years, the DMCA and its mechanisms have become a vital (if controversial) component of the content ecosystem. The number of notices and URLs shared by our data partners with the platform has grown tremendously. For example, the project began with just a few notices each week and now receives approximately three-thousand new notices each day. Chilling Effects received its one-millionth notice on June 1, 2013, its two-millionth only a little over a year later, on August 22, 2014, and its three-millionth on July 12, 2015. We should reach three-and-a-half million before December 2015. Additionally, individual notices sometimes (and, it seems, increasingly) identify multiple URLs as sources of allegedly infringing content. Chilling Effects received its one-millionth URL in January 2012; its five-millionth in August 2012; its fifty-millionth in April 2013; its five-hundred-millionth in September 2014, and its one billionth in October 2015.

As the Internet, its platforms, and its users have continued to grow and change, so has Chilling Effects. Over the years, the project has gone from focusing exclusively on DMCA notices to hosting a much wider range of request types (including trademark claims, patent claims, private information claims, and others). The project has also continued to expand the list of Internet companies that share our interest in transparency regarding the Internet’s takedown ecology and are kind enough to share the notices that they receive with us. The project now receives notices from some of the web’s biggest and most familiar names, including Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Reddit, as well as many others. We are always looking to add more.

2014: Updating the Chilling Effects Site and Database

Because of this astonishing growth, last year, when the sheer size of the database became more than the original (and lovingly-maintained) Chilling Effects site could handle, the team ported all of Chilling Effects’ data to a new site and database. The project now offers API access to both bulk notice-submitters (i.e., those who wish to share notices with Chilling Effects) and researchers (i.e., those who wish to analyze Chilling Effects’ data); a powerful native search engine; and granular access to a searchable, parseable, and robust data set.

2015 and Beyond: A Broader and More International Approach

During the last few years, as the team has considered how Chilling Effects could continue to grow and improve, a number of international events related to Internet content removal drew our attention, and had an impact on our daily workflow. In January 2012, Twitter instituted its country-specific takedown procedure, and the project began receiving those requests. Russia’s ROSKOMNADZOR began issuing takedown requests under new Russian law. Courts in Turkey blocked Twitter and YouTube in 2014, and then again in 2015, along with Facebook, until sensitive materials were removed. Also in 2014, Brazil passed the Marco Civil, that country’s first Internet law, allowing for court-ordered content removal. Finally, and perhaps most notably, in May 2014, the European Union’s Court of Justice delivered its so-called “right to be forgotten” ruling, following which nearly three-quarters of a million EU citizens have asked Google and other search engines to remove material from search results.

Those events and their effects brought into sharp focus for Chilling Effects the realization that that ? just as the Internet itself crosses borders ? so too do the interests of the people, companies, and other organizations that use it in their daily lives and facilitate its use. And, therefore, so too do the takedown requests that affect the range of content accessible to Internet users, which requests increasingly have a global application and potential reach.

At the same time, as the project has expanded in recent years the range of notices it receives (from those involving just allegedly copyrighted materials to those that allegedly defame or invade a complainant’s privacy), it is clear that intellectual property-based takedowns represent but one facet of an increasingly complex content ecosystem where users, platforms, and regulators seek to balance competing interests and make difficult tradeoffs in determining which content remains available online. Extensive recent media coverage of issues like online harassment and non-consensual pornography (or “revenge porn”) underscores these complexities and the wide variety of content that raises the types of concerns Chilling Effects originally sought to research. Our project has always sought to balance its twin interests in research and transparency with the legitimate privacy and other interests of notice-senders, and that balance has become all the more important (and more complex) with notices that involve allegations of privacy violations and other non-copyright harms.

Against this backdrop, it made sense to that the next logical step in Chilling Effects’ growth, if it was to continue to be the definitive source for requests to remove content from the Internet, was to become a more explicitly international project with a broad-based mission to map and facilitate research on global requests to remove content from the Internet. The team wants to not only make available for research notices received by U.S.?based companies with an international presence (like those we already have from, Google, Twitter, and others), we also want to make available copies of notices sent domestically in countries other than the United States. These might be requests for removal from an Indian citizen to an Indian ISP, a Brazilian company to another Brazilian company, or perhaps even an EU citizen to a national data protection authority.

As we considered how best to accomplish this expansion, we discovered that the term, “Chilling Effects,” means different things to people and other entities in different parts of the world. Sometimes, it’s simply an unfamiliar phrase, or doesn’t translate well, which means it can be hard for people encountering us for the first time to know what the project is about. Occasionally, we’ve found our name can be even more confusing, leading to people to think that we only have notices that have in fact had a “chilling effect” on conduct or speech. These connotations are far too limiting for a project that operates as a neutral third party, collecting and studying removal requests and providing transparency about the sending and receipt of such notices.

The Birth of “Lumen”

With all of that in mind, we felt that this latest incarnation of the project would be best served with a new and more inclusive name, accessible and comprehensible worldwide. We are therefore excited to announce that as of today, the Chilling Effects project and database will be known as “Lumen”:

Lumen, the measurement unit for visible light, epitomizes our interest in illuminating the online public sphere and the platforms through which all users of the Internet post, search, speak, and read. We plan to be a light shining onto requests to remove online content for many years to come. From a practical perspective, very little will change for our users and notice submitters. All links to existing Chilling Effects notices will continue to function normally, simply redirecting to our new domain of https://www.lumendatabase.org . Notice numbers will remain unchanged, and will function as they currently do. After accommodating the name change and the change to our domain name in their internal procedures, bulk submitters will have the same access to our API that they currently do. And of course, the people on the Chilling Effects team will remain the same.

New Partners

To help us with our new international vision and plans, we are extremely pleased to announce a series of pilot partnerships with teams at three top research centers from around the globe. Each of these centers, like Lumen’s home institution (the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) is a member of the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers. Our pilot partner centers are:

The NEXA Center for Internet & Society ? Turin, Italy

Founded on 26 November 2006 by professors Juan Carlos De Martin and Marco Ricolfi, the NEXA Center is a research center founded at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering of Polytechnic University of Turin. It is an academic research center which studies the Internet with a multidisciplinary approach: technical, legal and economic. In October 2014, the Nexa Center took the role of coordinator of the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers. Team members include Center Co-Director Juan Carlos de Martin, Managing Director Raimondo Iemma, Research Director Federico Morando, and Privacy Director Alessandro Mantelero.

The Instituto de Tecnologia & Sociedade ? Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ITS Rio is a non-profit independent think-tank whose mission is to ensure that Brazil responds creatively and appropriately to the opportunities provided by technology in the digital age, and that the potential benefits are broadly shared across society. Through its own research and in partnership with other institutions, ITS analyzes the legal, social, economic and cultural dimensions of technology and advocates for public policies and private practices which protect privacy, freedom of expression and access to knowledge. Team members include Center Director Carlos Affonsa Souza, Executive Director Juliana Nolasco, Chief Project Officer Fabro Steibel and Mario Viola.

The Center for Communication Governance ? Delhi, India

CCG Delhi is a research center within NLU Delhi established in accordance with the National Law University, Delhi Act, 2007 and is meant to ensure that the Indian legal education establishment engages more meaningfully with communication law and policy, and offers academic contribution to communication policy making. Its work seeks to provide the materials and abilities required to help law and policy stay abreast of technological advancement, which in turn enhances citizens’ rights and diverse public discourse. Team members include Research Director Chinmayi Arun and Project Manager Sarvjeet Singh.

Each of these three centers is committed to becoming what we are calling a “regional hub” for Lumen’s activities around the world. The partner institutions will, in effect, create or facilitate local instances of Lumen’s database, leveraging local expertise and connection to gather notices from that country, to translate notices, where appropriate, into local languages, and to facilitate and conduct research on domestically relevant trends and issues in the takedown ecosystem.

As each center explores the territory and moves towards building these regional hubs, its team will also serve in an advisory role to the larger project, lending expertise and facilitating data sharing between non-US entities and the Chilling Effects home base. Participating Centers will also act as ambassadors for the project, and might participate in conference panels and discussions outreach to additional partners, as well as solicit new sources of data. And of course, the experiences for these first three Centers will serve as the template for what we hope will be a global Lumen network, collecting, archiving and studying any and all requests to remove content from online.

Conclusion

The Lumen team at the Berkman Center could not be more excited about these developments, and we hope you will join us in making Lumen “the definitive online source for worldwide requests to remove content from the Internet.”