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There was an answer that was removed from Stack Overflow due to a DMCA takedown notice. According to the comments there, the complaint was not published to Lumen Database (formerly called Chilling Effects), despite the fact that since 2013, SE has uploaded such notices. Also, it appears that there have been no such notices uploaded since September 2017.

Why did SE stop uploading such notices? Has there been a single notice between September 2017 and now? If so, why weren't those uploaded?

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We do still get DMCA notices, and we tend to get at least one every month. But at some point, Lumen removed the usual submission form that we were using to report these to their database, without warning (or at least we never received any). It actually took me some time to figure this out. I was going to submit a batch of them one day and it took me near half an hour to track down an old link to the form that, sure enough, just said they no longer accept online submissions. So, we stopped submitting the reports.

There is a back-door process for these that larger companies with fancy forms and databases use to report them, but we don't have any of that tooling that would let us send reports to them automatically. So it looks like we're just out of luck for reporting to them unless they decide to re-enable that form or we put a bunch of work into creating those systems, which is unlikely to happen given how few of these we even get (again, we're talking about 1-2 on average per month, because we've worked with some of the people that send them regularly to combine them into a sort of monthly report).

That said, I did recently bring this up internally when I noticed the submission form was gone and couldn't submit further notices, and the idea of creating our own transparency report was even floated. We don't have any hard timeline or idea of what we're going to do, but some expected upcoming changes to how we process DMCA notices may make it a lot easier to generate that transparency report automatically without much, if any, effort on our part - so it may very well become a thing. Fortunately the way we have been processing them will make it quite easy to update and track these reports retroactively for a fair bit of time too.

As of right now, this irks us because the rug was kind of pulled out under out feet. We want to do something to continue reporting this kind of information. We just don't know exactly what that way is going to be or look like at this time.

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  • On their about page, it looks like one can still fax or mail reports; why not do that? – Sonic the K-Day Hedgehog Jun 26 '18 at 0:46
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    @SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Just really not worth the effort, to be honest. – animuson♦ Jun 26 '18 at 0:49
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    I just gave my fax machine to Goodwill too. ...Curses? – Shog9 Jun 26 '18 at 3:57
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    @Shog9 You don't need a fax machine to send faxes - internet fax servers have been a thing for some considerable 6 to 8 time periods. – DavidPostill Jun 26 '18 at 18:50
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    "Oh, sorry, looks like The Internet jammed" just doesn't have the same ring to it, @David – Shog9 Jun 26 '18 at 18:53
  • @Shog9 It's also harder to send a looped all black to a fax spammer as well :) – DavidPostill Jun 26 '18 at 18:56
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    and they call this "progress"... – Shog9 Jun 26 '18 at 18:57
  • To be clear here, the "1-2 on average per month" is across the entire network, right? – Sonic the K-Day Hedgehog Nov 14 '18 at 17:33
  • @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Yes. – animuson♦ Nov 14 '18 at 17:35
  • @DavidPostill or, if you're in to Rube Goldberg, set a computer to monitor DMCA notices. When one is received, print it. The printer tray feeds directly in to a fax machine where an Arduino is set up to enter the fax number when a print job is complete. Done! – BruceWayne Nov 15 '18 at 0:49

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