[jasontraff]

This is fantastic news! For too long have larger companies used the looming threat of legal action to discourage legitimate competition from smaller companies. I'd never heard of Chilling Effects before this, but now I'm tempted to put all of the C&D's we've collected (and will continue to collect) into it.

[revelation]

Google seems to relay the majority of their legal notices there for many years now [1]. That said, the site didn't change at all in those years, either. Just an information trove rotting away.

[1] You can try searching for "Amy Weber" on Google (random query I pulled from one of the complaints, semi-nsfw). For me, it shows multiple links to CE with respective DMCA-esque requests made to german governmental bodies. You aren't affected by those in the USA, but theres a DMCA one, too.

[magicalist]

The site hasn't changed much (and dear god is it still slow), but it has been pretty fundamental in a number of papers on copyright. The database will hopefully be able to bring actual data to bear on future copyright reforms...if that ever happens.

I'm surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of the site before. If a link has been removed from Google, it will replace it with a notice that a link was removed and and link to the actual takedown request in the Chilling Effects database (which includes the link that was taken down). I believe they started doing this when they were forced to take down the Scientology links years ago.

Since we now know Microsoft is one of the top DMCA notice issuers to google, if you pick a query like

https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+7+torrent

you'll see a bunch of the notices down at the bottom. If you click through to a notice, I don't think you can figure out which link was actually removed for your particular query since the notices can apparently contain hundreds of links, but it is at least a decent measure of transparency for the process.

[dfc]

Which copyright papers has CE played a fundamental role?

[davorak]

Please do. The world would better if it was a standard practice for everyone.