The Internet Archive has been hit with 550 “false” demands to remove “terrorist propaganda” from its servers in less than a week.<\/p>\n
The demands came via the Europol net monitoring unit<\/a>\u00a0and gave the site only one hour to comply.<\/p>\n The Internet Archive said the demands wrongly accused it of hosting terror-related material.<\/p>\n The website said the requests set a poor precedent ahead of\u00a0new European rules governing removal of content.<\/a><\/p>\n If the Archive does not comply with the notices, it risks its site getting added to lists which ISPs are required to block.<\/p>\n The Internet Archive, which uses the archive.org web address, is a non-profit organisation that lets people save and visit pages that might otherwise have been lost from the net.<\/p>\n In a blog, the website’s Chris Butler said that it had received notices identifying hundreds of web addresses stored on archive.org as leading people to banned material.<\/p>\n However, Mr Butler said, the reports were wrong about the content they pointed to, or were too broad for the organisation to comply with.<\/p>\n Some of the requests referred to material that had “high scholarly and research value” and were not produced by terror groups, he said.<\/p>\n Others called for the delisting of massively popular links that led people to “millions” of items.<\/p>\n As well as listing vast amounts of non-contentious data, Mr Butler said, the demands to remove material were issued during the night when the Archive was unstaffed. This made it impossible to react within the one-hour window demanded by the notices, he said.<\/p>\n “It is not possible for us to process these reports using human review within a very limited timeframe like one hour,” he said.<\/p>\n He asked: “Are we to simply take what’s reported as ‘terrorism’ at face value and risk the automatic removal of things like the primary collection page for all books on archive.org?”<\/p>\n Initially the website believed that the notices came from a unit within the Europol European policing group, known as the Internet Referral Unit (IRU). It is tasked with seeking out terror-related materials and making net firms remove them.<\/p>\n However, Europol said the requests actually came from the French IRU which routed its requests through Europol.<\/p>\n The French IRU has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment on why it issued so many reports to the site.<\/p>\n Mr Butler said the Archive had not complied with the requests and was still receiving lots of takedown notices from the French IRU.<\/p>\n He said the Archive’s experience did not bode well for impending European rules governing the use of copyrighted material.<\/p>\n The Article 13 provision of European laws asks sites to get content checked before it is uploaded.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Automatic removal<\/h2>\n