 The internet is great because almost anyone can be a publisher, distributor, and creator of pretty much anything they want. For example, I could just go on here and bam, I've just published something for the world to see. You know how hard that used to be? But when the internet was just taking off, Congress realized that this ability to post anything presented kind of an interesting problem. I mean, if I can post anything, what's preventing me from posting art, music, or words that legally belong to someone else? Specifically, Congress was looking at copyrighted material. If a creative work is copyrighted, that means the holder of that copyright has the exclusive legal right to print, publish, distribute, film, or perform that work, whether it be musical, artistic, or literary. That's a long sentence. Copyrights can be owned by individuals or corporations, such as book publishers, movie, and music production companies. If the owner of a copyright finds out that you've been distributing their copyrighted material, they can sue you for a lot of money. But now, think about how the internet works. I might have posted the thing, but you probably found it by typing something into a search bar. And whether it's a video, picture, or words, there's some website that's hosting the material and therefore allowing it to be on the web. So now, the person who owns the copyright can sue the company that allowed the material in the search results, the company that allowed me to post the material, and if they really want to at that point, they can sue lowly little old me. Alternatively, search engines like Google, for example, could start reviewing everything that everyone posts. Yeah, I don't like that either. So Congress was like, okay, we need to create an out for search engines and websites where this copyrighted material gets posted. Behold the birth of the takedown notice and something called Safe Harbor. When copyright holders think that they found content that they own the rights to, somewhere online without their permission, they can request that the content in question get taken down by writing a letter called a takedown notice. Like hey Google, or WordPress, or Twitter, or YouTube, or Facebook. I own this stuff, and I'm pretty sure this person posted a copy of it without my permission. Sincerely, copyright owner. The company that's hosting the material would typically then send a message to the person who posted it saying, hey, so and so, we've got to take this down. Then the company removes the link or pulls the material, probably leaving a screen like this in its place. They don't have to remove it, but if they don't, they lose their Safe Harbor and they can get sued, like I just described. In a lot of cases, the companies or the copyright holders send a copy of the takedown notice to the Berkman Center, where one of our projects maintains and studies a huge database of notices. That way, anyone can learn about these requests to remove content from the internet, who's sending those requests, why, and to what effect. Because you see, while all this started as a way to just remove copyrighted material, requests for takedown are expanding to include a ton of stuff. For example, you can request the takedown of material that you find offensive, spammy, or libelous. Unlike requests for copyright, asking for these reasons doesn't necessarily mean the material will be removed. In fact, laws about takedown requests are constantly evolving, and it's pretty fascinating stuff. Think about the right to be forgotten law in Europe. There any citizen of the EU can request a search engine take down any search result that brings up something that they don't want linked to their name online. This might include a police record that was recently digitized and made available online. But the request could be for any reason really. Or recently, Twitter used this copyright law to take down a number of tweets where people had copied and pasted a joke from one person's account. You can read more about cool case studies like this in the same place where you can find that database of takedown notices at chillingeffects.org. Links below.