Looks as though I wasn't expressing myself very
clearly. I'll take another try.
I think that the court documents should be public.
I think that, barring objections from the coprygiht
holder, the record of changes to remove copyright
violations should be public. If the copyright holder
objects, hiding them beats a legal fight, even
though I think they are not a copyright
infringement.
Google was served with a takedown notice and
complied with it by removing the identified items
from its search results. Presumably it also supplied
a copy of the notice to the
http://chillingeffects.org web site and it arranged
for its search result page to point to the takedown
notice, which in turn gave people all of the search
results it had been asked to remove.
My assertion was that the Google action was roughly
comparable to the Wikipedia leaving history entries
visible, but not part of the main work, that it was
likely that Google had obtained capable legal advice
supporting its practice, and that this suggested
that we should avoid over-reaction to takedown
notices in the light of their practice.
Instead of delete, I advocated a notification to the
copyright holder telling them about the history and
inviting them to let us know whether it was
objectionable to them, so they could choose to
request that we remove the history if they wish. If
they make the request, I suggest that we comply
promptly (or expeditiously if they reply with
another takedown notice).
As a seperate matter, I argued that if a private
Wikipedia contributor wanted their personal
information removed, we shouldn't let the GFDL
release of the information inhibit us from being
socially good and helping them to remove it, even
though the GFDL release means we could ignore the
request.
Does this clarify my views sufficiently to address
your question? If not, please let me know which
areas need further larification.
Google's decision seems to have worked fine in
practice, even if there is the theoretical possibility
that someone could go to
from the
supplied link and find the websites anyway. So far,
Sharman hasn't fought this link to this legal notice.
I don't see why we should do more than what Google did
to protect copyright holders, especially since Google
probably has a team of lawyers behind it, making sure
it does all of this accurately.
LDan
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