CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet
Referral Unit, using Europol’s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address.
The European Parliament is set to vote on legislation that would
Require websites that host user-generated special database content to take down material reported as terrorist content within one hour. We have some examples of current notices sent to the Internet Archive that we think
illustrate very well why this requirement would be harmful to the free sharing of information and freedom of speech that the European Union pledges to safeguard.
In the past week, the Internet Archive has received a series of email notices from French Internet Referral Unit (French IRU) falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on archive.org as “terrorist
propaganda
la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC).
The one-hour requirement
essentially means that we would fight like a woman – women’s rights in china need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact.
It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure
items on our site, but the French IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and
materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value. See a summary below with specific examples.
French IRU’s mistaken notices:
- major collection pages (displaying millions of items), many canada data pertaining only to material preserved and posted directly by the Internet Archive, others that include user-uploaded content, e.g.: