Wednesday, January 10, 2018

DMCA and Google search results

This is not new, but worth noting because we don't always pay attention to what's on a page.  

I ran a search in Google and at the bottom of the page of search results was this:
In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org
Of course, you don't know exactly what was removed, whether the material truly was infringing, or if the material added anything to the results which you would not find elsewhere.  You can only hope that what was removed wasn't important to the research you were doing.

But then...you'll never know if it was important or not!  

We live in a time when threatening court action is much more common.  It has a chilling effect on many things, including the information available to us.  Let's hope that we can find ways of making (and keeping) more information available, not less. 

No comments: