Chilling Effects DMCA Agent?

From Chris Castle’s Music-Tech-Policy Blog:

One of the intimidation tactics regularly used by Google in responding to DMCA notices is to forward the notice to something called the Chilling Effects Clearing House. The website promotes itself as being run as “[a] joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.”

What these people do is repost your DMCA notice for a nice Two Minutes Hate from the Google Amen Chorus.  (A random sampling of the re-posted DMCA notices shows that all the re-published notices seem to be from Google.)  And so here’s the interesting thing about ChillingEffects.com.  It is republishing links (or at least the text of links) to what pretty clearly seem to be infringing websites.  So in case you were looking for a handy repository of this information, it’s probably one of the best.

Chilling Effects redacts some information from the DMCA letters–some but not all.  And based on what I’ve seen so far, one data point they never delete is the link (or at least the text of the link) to the infringing work.  So, why aren’t they just redistributing and republishing the (at least potentially) infringing links?

To read the full post on this topic, go to the Musictechpolicy.com blog here.

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