Weekly Dwell #8
After having a difficult week last week from a sickness, I've turned my attention to assisting with a project that has built an archive repository of takedown notices. This project has been around for over 20 years, and has nearly 30 million notices within the archive, roughly tracking along the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Within this project, organizations provide copies of their notices, and they are then aggregated and organized to be searchable for researchers, journalists, and honestly the organizations themselves as an archive repository they don't have to manage.
Within the context of this project, I've been noodling around ideas of trust and transparency, which relate back to work I started a few years ago from the vantage point of organizational activists. What do we really want to see from organizations? Ideally transparency is helpful, but what exactly should be transparent and why? It seems like copyright notices make sense as something that could be more transparent, however, under the DMCA they are not required to be public knowledge or shared somewhere publicly. But there is the opportunity to do so, since there is a process in place from organizations to receive and handle the notices. In some cases, the organizations have a lot of resources to assist with the requests, and others less so (often because they do not receive as many).
When it comes to trust and transparency, I am often of the camp that anything that can easily be transparent should be, especially if it doesn't harm the company in any particular way. The takedown notices are usually against other individuals, of which the organization is the intermediary, such as Google. Importantly, the notices can and do keep personal information hidden, so there isn't any potential for unapproved disclosure. Would these organizations seem more trustworthy if they were disclosing this information? Likely to some they would, and it certainly would open further opportunities for researchers and journalists to be aware of what is happening regarding copyright takedowns.
The trouble right now is not enough organizations are providing the takedown notices, despite the clear benefits on their side. Therefore, we're making a pitch to encourage more organizations to submit their takedown notices in order to build the largest takedown archival catalogue for organizations and researchers alike. Collecting these takedown notices will encourage future transparency on the web and build further trust among organizations during particularly low-trust times within technology.