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EU calls Project Gutenberg and Grateful Dead recordings "terrorism"
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By Mike Masnick | Techdirt
Techdirt
Saturday, Apr 20, 2019
From the would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-dangerous dept ...
Update:
The Internet Archive has issued a minor correction to its original
story, noting that it was not actually Europol who sent the demand, but
rather the French Internet Referral Unit using the Europol system, so
that it looked like it was coming from Europol.
Here is there update:
CORRECTION:
This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely
identified URLs as Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The
sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using
Europol’s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu
address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the
national IRUs’ assessment criteria of terrorist content.
None of that changes much else with the details of the original story, which remains below:
We've
been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely
insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet.
Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require
content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority"
within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist"
content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week.
And
as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law
would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if
they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown
demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting
terrorist propaganda content.
In the past week, the Internet Archive
has received a series of email notices from Europol’s European Union
Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on
archive.org as “terrorist propaganda”. At least one of these mistaken
URLs was also identified as terrorist content in a separate take down
notice from the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la
Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la
Communication (OCLCTIC).
And just in case you think that maybe the
requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with
a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown
demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the
entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of
over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive
of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead
collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist
content!
And, as the Archive explains, there's simply no way that (1)
the site could have complied with the Terrorist Content Regulation had
it been law last week when they received the notices, and (2) that they
should have blocked all that obviously non-terrorist content.
The
Internet Archive has a few staff members that process takedown notices
from law enforcement who operate in the Pacific time zone. Most of the
falsely identified URLs mentioned here (including the report from the
French government) were sent to us in the middle of the night – between
midnight and 3am Pacific – and all of the reports were sent outside of
the business hours of the Internet Archive.
The one-hour requirement
essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down
automatically and do our best to review them after the fact.
It would
be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of
relatively obscure items on our site, but the EU IRU’s lists include
some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that
obviously have high scholarly and research value.
Those are the
requests from Europol, who unfortunately likely qualify as a "competent"
authority under the law. The Archive also points out the request from
both Europol and the French computer crimes unit targeting a page
providing commentary on the Quran as being terrorist content. The French
agency told the Archive it needed to take down that content within 24
hours or the Archive may get blocked in France.
It's getting tiring
to have to keep repeating this: if the law forces censorship on internet
platforms, it's going to be abused widely. Lots of perfectly legitimate
content is going to get censored. And, as the Europol demands regarding
collection pages show, in ways where it's simply impossible to comply
absent blocking basically the entire site in the EU.
Thus, we are
left to ask – how can the proposed legislation realistically be said to
honor freedom of speech if these are the types of reports that are
currently coming from EU law enforcement and designated governmental
reporting entities? It is not possible for us to process these reports
using human review within a very limited timeframe like one hour. Are we
to simply take what’s reported as “terrorism” at face value and risk
the automatic removal of things like THE primary collection page for all
books on archive.org?
One would hope that EU bureaucrats either at
the EU Commission who brought forth this proposal, or in the EU
Parliament who will vote on it next week, will be required to answer
those questions before this monstrosity moves forward.
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