In the past week, Europol and the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC) have sent 500 “terrorism” takedown demands to the Internet Archive demanding the removal of tens of millions of works: the entire archive of Project Gutenberg; an archive of 15 million texts, the entire Grateful Dead archive, the Prelinger Archive of public domain industrial films (much beloved by the MTV generation as they were the source of the channels classic interstitial animations), and the Archive’s collection of recordings from CSPAN.
The takedowns come in just as the EU is getting ready to vote on a proposal that will force platforms to remove “terrorist” content within one hour or face censorship through national firewalls, fines, and criminal sanctions.
Even if it was possible for the Internet Archive to sift through tens of millions of documents in a collection targeted by one of these takedowns in one hour to figure out if the takedown notice is valid, the timezone problem means that they would have to be ready to do this in the middle of the night in San Francisco, when the EU agencies most typically send their demands.
Even without this absurd law, the situation is dire. The French authorities gave the Internet Archive 24 hours to comply with its demand or face a nationwide block.
jesus CHRIST