Chilling Effects
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Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and founded along with several law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect lawful online activity from
legal threat A legal threat is a statement by a party that it intends to take legal action on another party, generally accompanied by a demand that the other party take an action demanded by the first party or refrain from taking or continuing actions object ...
s. Lumen is a "project" of the Berkman Klein Center. Its website, ''Chilling Effects Clearinghouse'', allows recipients of
cease-and-desist A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop alleged illegal activity. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not disc ...
notices to submit them to the site and receive information about their legal rights and responsibilities. Founded in 2001 in
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, California, it later moved its operations to
Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
.


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 In a legal context, a chilling effect is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction. A chilling effect may be caused by legal actions such as the passing of a law, the ...
" on free speech. The archive got a boost when
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
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 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 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...
(DMCA) 512 takedown notices, 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 The Copyright Alliance is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(4) organization representing artistic creators across a broad range of copyright disciplines. The Copyright Alliance's institutional members include more than sixty trade organizations, a ...
has criticized Lumen for republishing lists of URLs 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 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, ...
, Harvard Law School * Electronic Frontier Foundation * George Washington University Law School * Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, Boalt Hall * Santa Clara University School of Law High Tech Law Institute *
Stanford Center for Internet and Society The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program founded in 2000 by Lawrence Lessig at Stanford Law School and a part of Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. CIS brings togethe ...
,
Stanford Law School Stanford Law School (Stanford Law or SLS) is the law school of Stanford University, a private research university near Palo Alto, California. Established in 1893, it is regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools in the world. Stanford La ...
*
University of Maine School of Law The University of Maine School of Law (UMaine Law or Maine Law) is public law school in Portland, Maine. It is accredited by the American Bar Association and Maine's only law school. It is also part of the University of Maine System. The school's ...
* IIP Justice Project, University of San Francisco School of Law


See also

* Censorship by Google


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