Technically, it was the French Internet Referral Unit, but fuck it.
So, the EU’s planned new Terrorist Content Regulation is about as stupid as their planned copyright laws. How so? Well, among other things, they expect content removal from sites within one hour upon request from a “competent authority” within the EU for any content deemed “Terrorist” content. Keep in mind throughout that this isn’t a law yet; it’s up for vote next week.
So, while it isn’t a law yet, apparently, one of the EU’s “competent authorities” decided to give it a test run anyway. And their Bikini Atoll? Project Gutenberg’s The Internet Archive.
Courtesy of the French internet Referral Unit, The Internet Archive was served well over 500 of these takedown notices for their various URLs. Examples of things the Unit apparently considered “terrorist content” include major collection pages such as Smithsonian libraries, Animation & Cartoons, The Grateful Dead, Their crown jewel Project Gutenberg, and even the famed Prelinger Archives. Also among the URLs were individual items, like CSPAN coverage of a House of Representatives meeting, a clip of Lawrence Wright speaking about the Reporter’s Neutrality on GRIT TV, and possibly the closest to “terrorist content” they got, a podcast on veganism and spirituality.
In the past week, the Internet Archive has received a series of email notices from French Internet Referral Unit (French 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 sent under the authority of the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC).
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 French IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value. See a summary below with specific examples.
Ah, but it gets better. See, The Internet Archive is based in the U.S. And they have actual business hours, too. So, you can guess when all of these requests came in, right? Between the midnight and 3am Pacific. When nobody was even there.
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.
Now, in my opinion, the proper response would’ve been to tell the Frenchies to get fucked (in the kindest possible way of course). But still, this is America; we’re not magically subject to your ass-backwards internet laws. Project Gutenberg, however, took a more tactful approach:
French OCLCTIC mistaken notice:
The OCLCTIC emailed us a take down notice a few days ago (April 8th) identifying an item making commentary on the Quran as including “provocation of acts of terrorism or apology for such acts”:
https://archive.org/details/002Baqarah_201712
The report stated that blocking procedures may be implemented against us if we did not remove the content in 24 hours. This URL was also on one of the lists that the French IRU reported to us.
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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?
Well, I hope you don’t live in the European Union, kids. Because your politicians seem dead set on ruining the internet. For you, and everyone else, too. Here’s hoping this incident gets thrown in those bureaucrat’s faces next week.
Source: TechDirt
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