davidkin hollywood

Thursday, March 21, 2002

Wow. Long time no see. What is the pressing social issue of the day that's driven me to fire up Radio? The Church of Scientology has apparently pressured Google to remove links to Xenu.net, a site critical of the church. This action is enabled by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and has been fairly well-covered already by kuro5hin, Slashdot, and News.com I sent an email experessing my opinion to comments@google.com which went thusly: 
From: David Kurtz 
Date: Thu Mar 21, 2002  11:16:00  AM US/Pacific
To: comments@google.com
Subject: Xenu, Scientology, DMCA
   
I'm really disappointed that Google caved into Scientology. I
know you aren't in the business of litigating copyright issues to
which you are a third party (courtesy of the wonderful DMCA), but
ferchristsake -- you're the best site on the Internet, and now
Scientology has gotten you to play their stupid game.
   
It's a damn shame.
   
Don't you have lawyers or something?
   
The DMCA is bad law, Scientology is a bad cult, and now they've
combined to make Google a bad search engine.
Not the best worded or most thought-out email I've ever written, but it was composed in a pre-caffeinated state on Thursday morning, as soon as I read the hubbub on Slashdot. Here's their response: 
From: "The Google Team" 
Date: Thu Mar 21, 2002  02:38:03  PM US/Pacific
To: "David Kurtz" 
Subject: Re: Xenu, Scientology, DMCA [#201199]
    
Thank you for your note about the Xenu.net website.
     
Google takes the first amendment very seriously.  We are also obligated to
follow the laws of the land.  We removed some pages of the Xenu.net
website from our search engine earlier this week in response to a
copyright infringement notification under the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act (DMCA).  It is not within our discretion as a company to decide when
to conform to the DMCA and when to ignore it. As the DMCA mandates, Google
also provides webmasters with the ability to have their content reinstated
if they submit a counter notification to Google.  Until that action is
taken, we will comply with the DMCA and keep the contested pages out of
our index. If you'd like more information on this topic, you can find it
here:
 www.google.com/dmca.html or by searching Google for "DMCA"
    
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&q=dmca).
    
We appreciate your interest in this issue and your taking the time to
express your opinion.
    
Sincerely,
The Google Team
I didn't mention anything about the First Amendment (it's not a 1st A. issue), so I figure that this was an autoresponse to what undoubtedly must have been a flood of protest emails. And damn straight... this shit should be protested.
comment 4:25:13 PM