Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by

Wendy Seltzer Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and a staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium, where she is the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Selt ...

and founded along with several

law school clinic A legal clinic (also law clinic or law school clinic) is a legal aid or law school program providing Legal aid, services to various clients and often hands-on-legal experience to law school students. Clinics are usually directed by clinical prof ...

s and the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

to protect lawful online activity from legal threats. Lumen is a "project" of the

Berkman Klein Center The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

. Its website, ''Chilling Effects Clearinghouse'', allows recipients of cease-and-desist notices to submit them to the site and receive information about their legal rights and responsibilities. Founded in 2001 in San Francisco, California, it later moved its operations to Massachusetts.

Inception

The archive was founded in 2001 by Internet activists who were concerned that the unregulated private practice of sending cease-and-desist letters seemed to be increasing and was having an unstudied, but potentially significant, " chilling effect" on free speech. The archive got a boost when Google began submitting its notices to the site in 2002. Google began to do so in response to the publicity generated when the

Church of Scientology The Church of Scientology is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of Scientology, which is variously defined as a cult, a scientology as a business, bu ...

convinced Google to remove references and links to an anti-Scientology web site,

Operation Clambake Operation Clambake, also referred to by its domain name, xenu.net, is a website and Norway-based non-profit organization, launched in 1996, founded by Andreas Heldal-Lund, that publishes criticism of the Church of Scientology. It is owned and ma ...

, in April 2002. The incident inspired vocal Internet users and groups to complain to Google, and links to the Clambake site were restored. Google subsequently began to contribute its notices to Chilling Effects, archiving the Scientology complaints and linking to the archive. Starting in 2002, researchers used the clearinghouse to study the use of cease-and-desist letters, primarily looking at Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 512

takedown notice Notice and take down is a process operated by online hosts in response to court orders or allegations that content is illegal. Content is removed by the host following notice. Notice and take down is widely operated in relation to copyright infri ...

s, non-DMCA copyright issues, and trademark claims. On November 2, 2015, Chilling Effects announced its renaming to Lumen, as well as a number of international partnerships.

Reception

Lumen has been praised for providing and promoting transparency on the use of copyright takedowns. The Copyright Alliance has criticized Lumen for republishing lists of

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

s named in takedowns as part of its database. It argued that this defeats the purpose and intent of sending takedown notices to search engines in the first place, as they would subsequently be added to "the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet.". While the Lumen database formerly used to show full URLs, in 2019 the URLs were redacted to only display the website names and the number of URLs from each site, with the full URLs only to be made available to authorised users.

Members

* Berkman Center for Internet and Society,

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

George Washington University Law School The George Washington University Law School (GW Law) is the law school of George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Established in 1865, GW Law is the oldest top law school in the national capital. GW Law offers the largest range of cou ...

Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (commonly known as Berkeley Law or UC Berkeley School of Law) is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It is one of ...

Boalt Hall The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (commonly known as Berkeley Law or UC Berkeley School of Law) is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It is one of ...

Santa Clara University School of Law The Santa Clara University School of Law (Santa Clara Law) is the law school of Santa Clara University, a Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California, United States, in the Silicon Valley region. The School of Law was founded in 1911. The Jesuit ...

High Tech Law Institute * Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School * University of Maine School of Law * IIP Justice Project,

University of San Francisco School of Law The University of San Francisco School of Law (USF Law) is the law school of the private University of San Francisco. Established in 1912, it received American Bar Association accreditation in 1935 and joined the Association of American Law Sc ...

References

External links

* {{Scientology and the Internet Internet-related activism Internet-based activism Freedom of expression organizations Organizations established in 2001 2001 establishments in the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown incidents Scientology and the Internet Internet censorship Information society

Inception

Reception

Members

See also

References

External links