Another SOPA-in-practice moment: Our friends at TechDirt have had an anti-SOPA/PIPA post taken down in the name of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Only problem is, there’s no infringing content to be found anywhere near the post. Not in the post itself, not in any of the comments. Nowhere. Which, since the post has now been surreptitiously disappeared from search engine results, is more than a little worrying, as it gives substance to the fear that anti-copyright measures can be and are used to suppress free speech. The Techdirt team was given no notification of the takedown or opportunity to remove the so-called infringing content, either. They stumbled on it a month later doing a regular Google search.
And given that the post that was taken down was a primer on how to fight SOPA/PIPA copyright legislation, it all leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth.
Read the Techdirt post here. We’ll be watching what happens.
