Censor Content
Bad Reviews: How Companies Are Using Fake Websites to Censor Content
The Lumen database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals.
Lumen is a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Lumen is an independent 3rd party research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. We collect and analyze requests to remove material from the web. Our goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal--both legitimate and questionable--that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.
Our database contains millions of notices, some of them with valid legal basis, some of them without, and some on the murky border. Our posting of a notice does not indicate a judgment among these possibilities, nor are we authenticating the provenance of notices or making any judgment on the validity of the claims they raise.
Lumen is a unique collaboration among law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Conceived and developed at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (now the Berkman Klein Center) by then-Berkman Fellow Wendy Seltzer, Lumen was nurtured with help from law clinics at Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law.
Lumen is supported by gifts from Google. All individual and corporate donors to the Berkman Klein Center agree to contribute their funds as gifts rather than grants, for which there are no promised products, results, or deliverables.
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