I follow a fair number of librarian or related blogs (some of which I found myself, some were from the Academic Libraries bundle at Hack Lib School’s LIS Blogs to Follow). Google Reader has become a regular stop on the internet wandering I do more or less daily, one I can feel is a more positive use of my time than, say, Gawker. This past week, the Reader has produced a couple of interesting posts about royal diaries and Google’s transparency on copyright challenges.
Via No Shelf Required, Queen Victoria’s Journals have gone live and are available for browsing from the Royal Archives and Bodleian Libraries of Oxford. First of all, this is a link that will go on my Abecedary of Reference Sites (not yet live) because it is way cool, but it is also personally relevant because it’s similar to the project I just completed and recently mentioned, “Brooklyn Diary, 1864.” Of course, my ancestor’s diary is a much, much (MUCH) smaller endeavor, but it’s nice proof that keeping a diary is an activity that unites people of various classes and countries and provides useful information for future generations.
BeSpacific links to Google’s recently released Transparency Report. As part of Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, an “information location tool” such as Google can be petitioned by copyright holders or “reporting organizations” to remove search result links to websites they deem an infringement of their property. Google’s report shows about 95% of their requests, and reveals that they fulfill 97% of the requests they receive, many within about 10 hours (FAQ; the report also covers government requests, discussed here). The biggest requester, as copyright holder and via a reporting organization, is Microsoft, whose requests are about 1 million of the 1.275m requests of the past month. The most requested removals are for torrent sites.
As I learned in Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright (2001) (which I read for a paper on authorship, submitted earlier this evening for the Libri student award!), the scary thing about the DMCA is Google’s speedy removal time. They do admit to not completing every request when they get it, especially if the request is obviously “inaccurate or intentionally abusive” (FAQ), but they only notify the subject of the removal request “[w]hen feasible and legal to do so … to give them an opportunity to submit a counter-notice in response to copyright removal requests (FAQ).” What does this mean? How in those 10 hours do they figure out what is and is not “feasible?” Torrent sites are fairly clear targets for these requests but what if the torrent is for something completely legitimate, like some users of the busted MegaUpload? Google is happier to remove the material and deal with the issue later rather than spend the time to get it right. I use Google products a lot (the Reader, for one), but I’m starting to get more and more wigged out about stuff like this…
referencius victorious 