The Hill reports that the wireless industry group CTIA has indicated that it will support a cellphone unlocking bill during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter. Now, the group isn’t supporting broad unlocking rules, but rather the very limited, and kind of worthless H.R. 1123, or the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act.

If you’re just joining us. H.R. 1123 is a House bill introduced by Rep. Bod Goodlatte. The bill would reverse the Librarian of Congress’ decision earlier this year to put cellphone unlocking back on the list of practices that violate the DMCA. Previously, it was exempt under the copyright law thus allowing customers to unlock their devices.

At the time, the reasoning for putting it back on the list was because the Librarian thought that wireless carriers were doing a good enough job of letting customers unlock their phones. Leaving it up to the carriers, however, leads to some being able to unlock their devices and some can’t. Even those that can have to sometimes jump through a lot of hurdles just to move a phone to a different carrier.

So, why do wireless carriers like Goodlatte’s legislation when they make it as hard as possible for customers to move phones? They like it because it does absolutely nothing to change the status quo. As the CTIA puts it, the bill provides “a reasonable balance that protects consumers and carriers alike.”

Unfortunately, Goodlatte’s bill does nothing to protect consumers. It just alleviates their suffering under the DMCA for three years. It does nothing to fix the actual problem.

In a perfect world, Congress and wireless carriers would be listening to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argues that cellphone unlocking should be removed from the DMCA altogether.

To restore a free market that benefits consumers, we should amend the 1998 act to allow consumers to take their mobile devices from one carrier to another without fear of criminal prosecution or civil fines. We should also make clear that those who help consumers unlock their phones and tablets won’t be prosecuted either. And we should reiterate that contracts remain valid and enforceable. These fixes should be permanent, so that consumers, developers and wireless carriers don’t have to worry about the law shifting on a whim.

The entire op-ed is well worth reading, but the above is the central argument. Let people do whatever the hell they want with their phone after the contract is up. Cellphone unlocking should not be a crime, and it shouldn’t have even been a copyright issue in the first place. As Pai says – “No one seriously believes that unlocking a cellphone to switch carriers is equivalent to piracy.”

Unfortunately, the carriers do, and they will fight to keep cellphone unlocking under the DMCA. Goodlatte’s bill does just that while pretending to care about consumer choice. Here’s hoping that the House heeds Pai’s words instead of the carriers’ during today’s hearing.

The Hill reports that subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet will hold a hearing next Thursday to discuss Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act. The bill would repeal a decision by the Librarian of Congress last year that made unlocking cellphones a violation of the DMCA.

It sounds pretty good, right? Unfortunately, Goodlatte’s bill, and its companion bill in the Senate, only puts a bandaid on a bullet wound. The bill in its current state doesn’t address the DMCA or its anti-circumvention protections that currently make unlocking your cellphone a punishable offense. Instead, the bill will make unlocking cellphones legal for only three years until the Librarian of Congress makes another decision as to the legality of cellphone unlocking.

As I’ve previously discussed, the cellphone unlocking debate is just one tiny part of a larger debate on the DMCA. It’s an outdated bill that was meant to protect intellectual property in the digital age, but instead stands in the way of progress. Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s bill – the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 – does a much better job of addressing this issue by permanently legalizing cellphone unlocking and other technology circumventions that don’t explicitly violate copyright.

Unfortunately, Congress has a proven track record of pushing for bills that only delay the problem instead of addressing it head on. Depending on how next week’s hearing goes, we may get another three years of legalized unlocking before the Librarian of Congress deems it illegal yet again. Maybe then Congress will actually act on meaningful reform, but I doubt it.

TorrentFreak reports that Google has quietly rolled out a new feature in its transparency reports that details how many false DMCA takedown requests it receives from copyright holders. Google details these false requests in a newly updated FAQ:

From time to time, we may receive inaccurate or unjustified copyright removal requests for search results that clearly do not link to infringing content. An independent, third-party analysis of how frequently improper and abusive removal requests are submitted was conducted in 2006.

Google then lists a number of examples of where copyright holders submitted false DMCA takedown requests. Here’s some of the better ones:

A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice.

An individual in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to court proceedings referencing her first and last name on the ground that her name was copyrightable.

A driving school in the U.K. requested the removal of a competitor’s homepage from Search, on the grounds that the competitor had copied an alphabetized list of cities and regions where instruction was offered.

None of these scenarios fell under DMCA regulations, and therefore Google did not remove them. These are just examples, but Google still receives erroneous DMCA takedown requests. Our own Web site, WebProNews.com, was subject to two false takedown requests at the hands of AMC over our coverage of The Walking Dead season 3 premier. Of course, the link was non-infringing as it linked to AMC’s own stream of the premier.

The takedown request levied at our site, and others, was most likely fueled by AMC looking for links that mentioned “The Walking Dead” and “free.” There’s no thought put into the suggestion that there may be legitimate free sources to watch these episodes. Strangely enough, none of the links were removed despite some links offering illegitimate copies of The Walking Dead.

This latest offering from Google serves to make the DMCA takedown process more transparent, but it probably won’t have any effect on the amount of takedown requests sent by rightsholders. Current laws don’t enforce repercussions for those who send false takedown requests so there’s no reason for rightsholders to use caution. If laws ever do change, it’s almost guaranteed that the amount of takedown requests would drop to the few hundred thousand a month it was at in 2011.

Twitter will normally respond to DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) requests that involve the “use of a copyrighted image as an profile photo, header photo, or background, allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image uploaded through our photo hosting service, or Tweets containing links to allegedly infringing materials.”

Once a takedown request has been filed, Twitter notifies the user and gives them the ability to file a counter-notice to dispute the copyright claim. None of this has changed. What has changed is how the rest of Twitter will see these particular tweets:

“In an effort to be as transparent as possible regarding the removal or restriction of access to user-posted content, we clearly mark withheld Tweets and media to indicate to viewers when content has been withheld (examples below). We also send a copy of each DMCA notification and counter-notice that we process to Chilling Effects, where they are posted to a public-facing website (with your personal information removed),” says Twitter in its Help Center.

That is a pretty big shift from how Twitter used to handle removed tweets. In the past, these tweets would just vanish without a trace. Now, even though the content of the tweet will be removed, users will at least be able to see that there was in fact a tweet there at some point and it fell victim to a copyright claim.

Here’s how a tweet (with an infringing link) will look when withdrawn:

And here’s the look for withdrawn tweets featuring media:

Earlier this year, Twitter reported 4,410 DMCA takedown requests for 2011.

Follow @jer

Jeremy K.
@jer

We now offer more #transparency in processing copyright reports by withholding Tweets, not removing. Learn more: https://t.co/vbLKNy2U.

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
2 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

YouTube says that a lot of the problems with the Content ID system comes from the fact that the system has over 500,000 hours of reference files to pull from. A video that even remotely matches the content that copyright owners have uploaded will be taken down with extreme prejudice. That’s a problem, and YouTube has introduced a new appeals process to make things easier.

Those who have their videos blocked on copyright grounds will now be able to appeal the decision. The new appeals process takes the fight directly to the content owner with two options – rescind the claim or file an actual DMCA takedown request. YouTube’s Content ID system was abused so much in the past because there was no actual DMCA requests involved. Requiring trolls to actually file a request should help cut down on illegitimate takedowns.

YouTube is also introducing a manual review process for claims. Those 500,000 hours of reference material can sometimes unintentionally cause a video to be blocked. The YouTube team has improved the algorithm used in this process, but they will also manually review videos that have been flagged. The video in question won’t be taken offline until it’s been manually reviewed.

Finally, YouTube has improved the matching technology that sits at the center of the Content ID system. Better algorithms are one part of the solution, but they will continue to build out their reference library to make sure that videos uploaded to YouTube aren’t affected by bogus claims.

It will be interesting to see if the Content ID system actually improves over the coming weeks. YouTube has to build back trust with a public that doesn’t necessarily trust its system or those who seemingly abuse it. In the meantime, here’s hoping a bogus claim from CNN or Fox News doesn’t take down the first presidential debate streaming live on YouTube tonight.

Do you think Google’s addition of this signal is a good thing for search results? Let us know in the comments.

“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results,” said Google SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal, at the time. “This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.”

One might have expected the removal request floodgates to have been opened upon this news, but that does not appear to be the case. In fact, interestingly, it has been kind of the opposite, according to Google’s Transparency Report.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points out that from August 13 to August 20, the number of URLs requested to be removed from Google search per week, actually decreased, going from 1,496,220 to 1,427369. It’s only a slight decrease, but the fact that it decreased at all, following this news, is noteworthy.

When Google first announced the algorithm change, it immediately sparked a great deal of criticism from bloggers and webmasters and concern from consumer groups. “In particular, we worry about the false positives problem,” the EFF said at the time. “For example, we’ve seen the government wrongly target sites that actually have a right to post the allegedly infringing material in question or otherwise legally display content. In short, without details on how Google’s process works, we have no reason to believe they won’t make similar, over-inclusive mistakes, dropping lawful, relevant speech lower in its search results without recourse for the speakers.”

Public Knowledge has spoken out about the change as well. Senior staff attorney John Bergmayer previously said in a statement, “Sites may not know about, or have the ability to easily challenge, notices sent to Google. And Google has set up a system that may be abused by bad faith actors who want to suppress their rivals and competitors. Sites that host a lot of content, or are very popular, may receive a disproportionate number of notices (which are mere accusations of infringement) without being disproportionately infringing. And user-generated content sites could be harmed by this change, even though the DMCA was structured to protect them.”

“Google needs to make sure this change does not harm Internet users or the Internet ecosystem,” he added.

Interestingly enough, Public Knowledge actually receives contributions from Google, as indicated in new court document Google provided in the Oracle case. “Google has contributed to Public Knowledge for years before the complaint in the case at bar was filed,” wrote Google attorney Robert Van Nest.

Regarding inaccurate and intentionally abusive copyright removal requests, Google says, “From time to time, we may receive inaccurate or unjustified copyright removal requests for search results that clearly do not link to infringing content. An independent, third-party analysis of how frequently improper and abusive removal requests are submitted was conducted in 2006.”

That was six years ago, and does little to set webmasters’ minds at ease. On an FAQ page, Google lists a number of examples of requests that were submitted that were “clearly invalid,” and notes that it did not comply with any of them.

In case you’re wondering how many of the requests Google does comply with, the company says on the same page, “We removed 97% of search results specified in requests that we received between July and December 2011.”

“We remove search results that link to infringing content in Search when it is brought to our attention, and we do it quickly,” Google adds. “As of May 2012, our average processing time across all removal requests submitted via our web form for Search is approximately 10 hours. However, many different factors can influence the processing time for a particular removal request, including the method of delivery, language, and completeness of the information submitted.”

As far as webmasters being informed of the issue by Google, the company says, “When feasible and legal to do so, we try our best to notify users to give them an opportunity to submit a counter-notice in response to copyright removal requests. For Search, it is extremely difficult to provide meaningful notice to webmasters whose pages have been identified in copyright removal requests, because we do not necessarily know their identities or have an effective means of contacting them. If users have registered with our Webmaster Tools as web site owners, we will notify them there. We also share a copy of qualifying copyright removal requests with the public site Chilling Effects, where a webmaster may inspect it as well.”

For the past month, Google says 5,680,830 URLs have been requested to be removed from 31,677 domains by 1,833 and 1,372 reporting organizations. The top copyright owners in the past month have been Froytal Services, RIAA member companies, Microsoft, NBCUniversal and BPI. The top specified domains have been filestube.com, torrenthound.com, isohunt.com, downloads.nl and filesonicsearch.com.

You can see all copyright removal requests here. You can see a big list of 133,502 specified domains here. A list of 9,660 reporting organizations is available here. The list of over ten thousand copyright owners is here.

All data reflects copyright removal notices received for search since 2011, with some omissions, which include requests for products other than Google Search (like YouTube and Blogger), and requests submitted by means other than Google’s web form (such as fax or written letters).

It’s important to note that while Google is now using the number of removal requests a site receives as a ranking factor, it is still only one of over two hundred factors. But the negative SEO ramifications of the signal still have people worried. Negative SEO was a growing concern before this signal was even announced, particularly as it’s related to bad links and the Penguin update. Now there is concern that competitors can submit notices, and influence Google. Whether this can be done successfully or not really remains to be seen. Google seems to be giving the impression that it cannot, as Google only complies with “valid” requests, but when was the last time Google executed an algorithm update flawlessly?

Google even recently reworded its help page for the question “Can competitors harm ranking?”. It used to say, “There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.” It was changed to say, “Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

But, as the image above shows, it doesn’t appear that Google’s announcement has led to too a substantial increase in attempted abuse so far. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to abuse it, and that people aren’t trying to abuse it. People were probably already trying to abuse it. While the number may be down since the announcement, the greater trend is clearly that of substantial growth in the number of requests. It will be surprising if the trend does not ultimately continue upward. We’re still waiting on the latest numbers to come out.

Are you worried about URL removal requests as a ranking signal? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What’s funny is that people can still find content from torrent sites as long as they search for relevant terms. It’s true that typing in “The Avengers download” no longer returns links to The Pirate Bay or other torrent sites. Typing in “The Avengers torrent” brings them all back to the front page.

The Pirate Bay addressed Google lowering their search rankings in a blog post. They say that a “very low amount” of their traffic actually comes from Google and that’s only a good thing. They see themselves as a search engine and Google’s move was a way to get rid of the competition. They expect people to search for content directly on The Pirate Bay when nothing shows up on Google.

They do, however, have one concern about Google’s new policy:

The thing we don’t like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They’re dictating terms. It’s really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so….

isoHunt’s Gary Fung takes it a bit further and says that Google’s new ranking signal is an antitrust violation. He points out that YouTube is not on Google’s list of DMCA takedown notices. Google will say that’s because they have their own internal reporting system within YouTube, but isoHunt says it’s all protecting Google’s own interests in search. He reiterates the idea from The Pirate Bay that isoHunt is a search engine that’s competing with Google.

Fung is also concerned over the use of “valid” DMCA takedown notices. He says that Google processes a DMCA takedown notice as valid if it hasn’t been countered. isoHunt receives too many DMCA takedown notices a day for them to counter and so they get counted as signals for Google to downgrade their ranking.

The harm here according to Fung is that a lot of legitimate content on isoHunt gets flagged with DMCA notices by overzealous copyright trolls. The mountains of legitimate content on torrent sites will be removed from Google search results. He equates it to censorship. In response, he says that “we need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust.”

Google has definitely ruffled some feathers with their newest search ranking signal, but it was to be expected sooner or later. The company must now ensure that legitimate content is not downgraded. They must also make search fair for everybody including themselves. Making YouTube and other Google services immune to their own algorithm may raise some antitrust flags in the future.

[h/t: TorrentFreak]

The courts are now having to deal with the issue of linking to content that may be illegal. Copyright law has generally been applied to those who host the content themselves. Now the law is being applied to sites that host zero content, but rather link to content on other Web sites. That’s where the case of Anton Vickerman comes in.

Should linking to copyrighted material be illegal? Where do we draw the line in copyright law? Let us know in the comments.

It was reported Monday that Vickerman was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to defraud. He now stands to serve four years in prison for running surfthechannel.com. The Web site hosted links to content off site – both legal and illegal. He was said to have made £250,000 through advertisements on the site in 2008.

The interesting part is that Vickerman could not be charged for copyright violation. The prosecution had to go with charges of conspiracy to facilitate copyright infringement. Facilitating copyright infringement is a hard sell in most courts because most people charged with the crime usually aren’t aware that the content they’re linking to illegal.

Unfortunately for Vickerman, he sold advertisements on his Web site. The mere fact that he made money by linking to this illegal content is what doomed him in the first place. The prosecution stated that Vickerman’s Web site “was created specifically to make money from criminal activity.” The defense obviously argued that this was not the case, but it’s hard to argue with the £250,000 made over the course of a year. That’s obviously more than what running a link aggregator would cost.

It causes one to think if the result would have been the same if Vicerkman had made no money off of the site. There are plenty of other sites out there that only link to illegal content, but make no money from it. They pay for the servers out of their own pocket or with donations from users. It seems to be a legal gray area that only becomes criminal activity once the site owner starts to make money off of it.

Vickerman isn’t the only UK resident who is facing charges over linking to illegal content, nor is he the most well known. We’ve covered the extradition case of Richard O’Dwyer extensively over the past year and it’s far messier than Vickerman’s case ever was.

For those who need a refresher, O’Dwyer is a 23-year-old from the U.K. who is going to be extradited to the U.S. for copyright infringement. What was his crime? He linked to online streaming videos of U.S. television shows and movies. The kind of shows that citizens in the U.K. can’t easily gain access to until months after their original airing in the U.S.

Just like Vickerman, however, O’Dwyer is being charged because he made money off of his Web site – TVshack.net. The site was reported to have had about 300,000 users per month and he made about £147,000 in revenue over three years from the site. For his crimes, O’Dwyer would be extradited to the U.S. where he could face up to 10 years in prison.

Of course, this brings us to the difference between O’Dwyer and Vickerman. Why can one be tried in the U.K. while the other has to be tried in the U.S.? Many groups and activists don’t see a difference and are fighting to have O’Dwyer tried in his native country. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales started a petition in June that called for the halting of O’Dwyer’s extradition. He even went so far to say that O’Dwyer is the “human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public.”

O’Dwyer’s mother even jumped into the fray with a passionate plea for her son to remain in the U.K. She said that her son’s extradition is not about copyright, but rather the U.S. wanting to flex its control over the Internet. She said that her son’s case is about “America trying to control and police the Internet.” She also said that it’s “wrong that America should lay laws down on the Internet for other countries.”

Both Wales and O’Dwyer’s mother bring up good points that lead to a much larger question. Why does the copyright industry care so much about linking to content? Why would they go out of their way to prosecute some guys that ran a Web site that never hosted any of this content, but rather linked to it. Most of the content on these sites were submitted by users. The DMCA has a safe harbor provision that protects Web sites from the actions of its users. Of course, a Web site can only qualify for safe harbor if they have no knowledge about the infringing content. It’s hard to say if Vickerman or O’Dwyer knew the content they were hosting was illegal.

Should O’Dwyer be extradited to the U.S. for merely linking to copyrighted material? Should either men receive DMCA protections? Let us know in the comments.

All of this is meant to lead up to the biggest problem at hand – Google. There are other search engines, but Google has been targeted the most for their actions. The copyright lobby has been constantly on Google’s back for linking to copyrighted content. They even claim that Google prioritizes infringing links over legitimate links in search results for those searching for something as innocuous as “Justin Bieber MP3.”

Back in January, when the debate over SOPA was in full swing, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said that Google was a “piracy leader.” He said that Google streams movies, which I assume he means YouTube, and sells adverts around them. That kind of response to Google is typical hence why Google and other search engines were given a code of conduct by the U.K.’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The code of conduct says that Google and other search engines should “assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright.” It also calls upon Google to “stop indexing Web sites that are subject to court orders.” In short, it’s all about the copyright industry wanting Google to stop linking to illegal content. They might have gotten their wish last week.

The Internet collectively freaked out when Google announced that they were adding DMCA takedown notices to their search algorithm. Google’s SVP of Engineering, Amit Singhal, said that “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.” Many people immediately began to assume that this was just Google bowing to copyright lobby pressure and why wouldn’t they? While it’s highly unlikely that Google would be convicted for copyright violations, the DMCA definitely protects them, it gives them a bargaining chip in Washington and Hollywood.

The mere fact that Google did this in the first place, however, is a major cause for concern. There are plenty of legitimate sites that receive bogus takedown notices all the time. Most of these sites thrive off of user created goods and media. Would Google knock them down in search results because of some overzealous copyright warrior?

Our own Chris Crum was quick to point out that Google’s new ranking signal was only one out of over 200. Sites that were already doing well are still going to keep doing well. Your favorite YouTube videos and Etsy stores are still going to stay near the top of search if Google has anything to say about. What is worrisome is that Google even had to address in the first place.

With Google backing the idea that linking to illegal content is indeed illegal, it only legitimatizes the current trend of going after those that only host links. Will Google’s move make the copyright lobby more aggressive in going after those who run link aggregate sites? Will it only go after those who link to television shows and movies? What about news aggregate sites that link to content from the overly protective AP?

It’s still too early to tell, but a war on links may be coming. The Internet was built on links, but that may not be the case for much longer if laws continue to punish the mere act of linking.

Do you think links are in danger? Would the copyright lobby try to destabilize one of the key tenets of the Internet? Let us know in the comments.

In fact, various groups were quick to speak out about Google’s new policy. The EFF, for example, called the policy “opaque,” and expressed its concerns about how Google will make its determinations, and about the road to recourse (or lack thereof) that sites will have.

“Sites may not know about, or have the ability to easily challenge, notices sent to Google,” said Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney, John Bergmayer. “And Google has set up a system that may be abused by bad faith actors who want to suppress their rivals and competitors. Sites that host a lot of content, or are very popular, may receive a disproportionate number of notices (which are mere accusations of infringement) without being disproportionately infringing. And user-generated content sites could be harmed by this change, even though the DMCA was structured to protect them.”

Other have questioned how Google will deal with these notices with regards to its own properties – namely, YouTube. YouTube, of course, gets plenty of takedown requests, but they go through a different system (which Danny Sullivan has broken down into great detail). In fact, the takedown request form Google pointed to in its announcement of the feature, specifically mentions YouTube:

“If you have a specific legal issue concerning YouTube, please visit this link for further information. Please do not use this tool to report issues that relate to YouTube.”

Sullivan says Google told him, however, that “notices filed against YouTube through the separate YouTube copyright infringement reporting system will be combined with those filed against YouTube through the Google Search reporting system,” and that Google will treat YouTube like any other site. However, he reports, Google does not expect YouTube to be negatively affected by this, nor does it expect other popular user-generated content sites. Google, he says, told him that it will take into account other factors, besides the number of notices it receives.

Well, this makes sense, because Google was pretty clear in its announcement that it was simply adding this as a signal – as in one of over 200.

“We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results,” Google’s Amit Singhal said. “Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.”

YouTube and other popular sites likely have enough other signals working in their favor to counter this one signal. It doesn’t sound like Google’s newest signal is necessarily going to be its weightiest.

Are you concerned about this new addition? Let us know in the comments.

Almost as soon as the Blogosphere was able to react to the news, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put out its own post about it. Julie Samuels and Mitch Stoltz with the EFF write, “Earlier this summer, we applauded Google for releasing detailed stats about content removal requests from copyright holders. Now that we know how they are going to use that data, we are less enthusiastic.”

The two go on to express concerns with how “opaque” Google is being about the process, despite Google’s claim that it will “continue to be transparent about copyright removals.”

The EFF’s concerns are the vagueness of what Google considers to be a high number of removal notices, how Google plans to make its determinations, and how “there will be no process of recourse for sites who have been demoted.”

Google does say that it will “continue to provide ‘counter-notice‘ tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated.”

“In particular, we worry about the false positives problem,” says the EFF. “For example, we’ve seen the government wrongly target sites that actually have a right to post the allegedly infringing material in question or otherwise legally display content. In short, without details on how Google’s process works, we have no reason to believe they won’t make similar, over-inclusive mistakes, dropping lawful, relevant speech lower in its search results without recourse for the speakers.”

“Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of copyright infringement,” the EFF addds. “No court or other umpire confirms that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners can be liable for bad-faith accusations). Demoting search results – effectively telling the searcher that these are not the websites you’re looking for – based on accusations alone gives copyright owners one more bit of control over what we see, hear, and read.”

The EFF concludes by saying that Google’s “opaque policies” threaten lawful sites and undermine confidence in search results.

The EFF is not the only group to quickly speak out about the announcement. Public Knowledge, a consumer rights group, also put out a much longer response.

We also received the following statement from Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney, John Bergmayer:

“It may make good business sense for Google to take extraordinary steps, far beyond what the law requires, to help the media companies it partners with. That said, its plan to penalize sites that receive DMCA notices raises many questions.

“Sites may not know about, or have the ability to easily challenge, notices sent to Google. And Google has set up a system that may be abused by bad faith actors who want to suppress their rivals and competitors. Sites that host a lot of content, or are very popular, may receive a disproportionate number of notices (which are mere accusations of infringement) without being disproportionately infringing. And user-generated content sites could be harmed by this change, even though the DMCA was structured to protect them.

“Google needs to make sure this change does not harm Internet users or the Internet ecosystem.”

It’s going to be quite interesting to see how Google’s new policy/signal holds up to abuse, and whether or not we see fair use significantly jeopardized.

Tell us what you think about the change in the comments.