CNN is reporting that Google has released a report showing a
shocking frequency of requests from western governments, especially the United
States itself, to censor search results and sometimes even remove blog posts,
on matters embarrassing to some public officials.
The iGoogle welcome page for account holders presented a
link to the story by John D. Sutter on Monday morning, link here.
Google’s specific page on this Transparency Report is here and it is rather shocking. Many to most requests from the U.S. were not
honored, but a few YouTube accounts were closed apparently because of
intimidating content. Some requests from Spain were rather
over-the-top. But Google did have to
comply with a court order from Germany on the removal of some sensitive content
that was apparently “not credible”.
The company, on another page, discusses requests to remove
search results that link to infringing content.
A lot of this content comes from Microsoft or NBC-Universal. That page is here.
It's likely that MSN's Bing and Yahoo! safe search (on Firefox) has received similar requests but hasn't reported the problem yet to the media.
I have, perhaps on three occasions over fifteen years,
removed small amounts of content from my web sites when asked to by specific
individuals. In all of these cases, the
circumstances were unusual or bizarre, possibly harmful to the person involved,
and not likely to recur with others.
A blogger has no way to know if a site linked is
infringing. I generally won’t embed
YouTube videos that I actually think are likely to be infringing. I prefer embeds from the sources that
actually own the original material (like film distributors). Sometimes embedded YouTube videos, while
still identifying the items, will not play and display a notice that the
account holder has been terminated because of repeated copyright complaints,
often by copyright owners other than the company owning the material in the
specific embed.
When I find these
(randomly) I remove or (usually) replace them. Over time, some embeds on older posts, just
like some links, will fail.
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