Oh, the cyclical ironies of the Internet. The attention gained by trying to force a Web site to take down content or shut down sparks others to post that content elsewhere.
Here is
one letter that you don't want to receive: "You are currently hosting
website content that contains our proprietary information. We demand that you
take down the posting immediately."
I guess I
am fortunate that I have only received one takedown notice in all my years of
building and running various publication Web sites.
This past
month we've seen a lot of judges and lawyering up to try to remove various Web
content -- ranging from a video of teens brawling in upstate New York to
documents from a Swiss bank that supposedly show offshore money laundering, to
even a game of Scrabble that is played on Facebook. It is sad to see,
ineffective, and a waste of everyone's time.
Almost
always a takedown notice is a mistake, because all it does is focus attention
on the about-to-be-banned content and motivate others to post it elsewhere. We
even have a term for this, called "The Streisand Effect."
Techdirt's
Mike Masnick coined the term on his popular technology blog after the actress
Barbra Streisand's 2003 lawsuit seeking to remove satellite photos taken of her
Malibu house. Those photos were part of
a series of thousands of pictures that were taken along the entire
California coastline, so imagine even if you
knew Streisand's street address it would be somewhat of an effort to try to
locate the specific picture.
As a
result of the attention from the lawsuit, her photo is now easily accessible
and notorious. So the effect of the legal action just promotes the
accessibility of the content that the lawyers are trying to ban.
The
courtroom antics of last month around the Swiss bank brought the notion of
takedowns to a new level of ridiculousness. Here, we have lawyers in a
California courtroom trying to pull the plug
on an entire Web site (Wikileaks.org) because of one posting of the site that
was subject to the legal wrangling. This was more than just a takedown notice,
it was to terminate the domain entirely, and remove any DNS records pointing to
the site.
The
bank's lawyers went this route because the site's registrar was a
US corporation, unlike the site, its
staff and its hosting provider who were all located in various other countries.
Eventually, the courts reversed themselves, realizing that they didn't have
jurisdiction. By then, multiple mirror sites were created with the banned
content. And the court themselves realized this, from their ruling:
"The
press generated by this Court’s action increased public attention to the fact
that such information was readily accessible online. The Court is not convinced
that Plaintiffs have made an adequate showing that any restraining injunction
in this case would serve its intended purpose."
In my own
case, the takedown was related to a speech that was given at a conference, and
our article had copies of the presentation slides that were removed by the
conference organizers at the request of the vendors involved. The lawyers
claimed the content was proprietary and the presenter was "not authorized
to distribute it" at the conference. Again, by the time we took the
information off our site, it had been picked up elsewhere around the Internet.
It is
time to stop punishing the monkey, and realize that there are better solutions
than takedowns. The term comes from the wonderful lyrics of guitarist Mark
Knopfler. If you haven't heard the song, it is worth giving
a listen. Here are some of the lyrics:
You've
been talking to a lawyer
Are you
gonna pretend
That you
and your employer
Are still
the best of friends?
Somebody's
going to take the fall
There's
your quid pro quo
The boss
has hung you out to dry
And it
looks as though
They'll
punish the monkey
And let the organ grinder go
/ 2 
