RightsCon Toronto 2018

Lumen is a research project located at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, devoted to collecting and analyzing requests to remove online materials. The API-searchable database includes includes requests for removal based on different concerns ranging from copyright, privacy and trademark to “revenge porn” and defamation, submitted by individual senders or recipients, including Internet providers and hosts such as Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wordpress, and others.

Recently, researchers and advocates including Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA School of Law, in part through work with the Lumen database, have uncovered an alarming pattern of falsified court orders being used to seek and often achieve the removal of online material, most often reviews and criticism. If even court orders cannot presumptively be viewed as valid, what recourse is there for OSPs, and other online actors?

The Lumen team will would like to open the workshop with a brief introduction to Lumen and to the site’s API. Once the attendees are usefully familiar with Lumen, we will facilitate an open discussion about the implications of falsified court orders within the takedown request landscape, initiated by a short presentation from Profesor Volokh on his ongoing research. Relatedly, we would like to discuss the possible research opportunities Lumen’s database affords re: court orders and on other fronts; how Lumen can both facilitate such research and expand the research community using it; ways in which we might most successfully seek out other sources of notices, especially court orders, to make the database more comprehensive and useful; and finally, what improvements for the site the project might focus on in 2018. The session will be facilitated by Lumen team members, but will be centered around engaging our participants' opinions and expertise on this topic, and how Lumen can better facilitate research and advocacy concerning takedowns in light of the existence of falsified court orders.