
Stripe partners with Chilling Effects - anurag
https://stripe.com/blog/towards-transparency
======
ianterrell
This is great news.

> _we’re adding a clause that commits us (when possible) to first notify the
> user if we’re legally compelled by a litigant or government to disclose a
> user’s private information_

The only additional thing I would like to see is an additional commitment to
use all legal means to fight gag orders when they're present.

~~~
iandanforth
Do you happen to know what these means are? For a national security letter my
understanding is that the company can't tell _anyone_ and for other lesser gag
orders it might be impossible to even contact the EFF for assistance.

~~~
cwp
In the case of a national security letter, you have to sue the U.S.
government. It's rare, but possible. The Internet Archive did it, and won.

[http://archive.org/post/192021/fbi-gag-order-against-the-
int...](http://archive.org/post/192021/fbi-gag-order-against-the-internet-
archive-is-rescinded)

~~~
magicalist
that looks like they fought the request and won, but that the gag order was in
place until the FBI actually withdrew the national security letter.

Maybe it's what you meant, but it seems that there's no way to get the gag
order removed without also getting the letter withdrawn.

~~~
cwp
I suppose you could sue for the right to break the gag order, while still
supplying the information, but I'm not a legal expert.

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jasontraff
This is fantastic news! For too long have larger companies used the looming
threat of legal action to discourage legitimate competition from smaller
companies. I'd never heard of Chilling Effects before this, but now I'm
tempted to put all of the C&D's we've collected (and will continue to collect)
into it.

~~~
revelation
Google seems to relay the majority of their legal notices there for many years
now [1]. That said, the site didn't change at all in those years, either. Just
an information trove rotting away.

[1] You can try searching for "Amy Weber" on Google (random query I pulled
from one of the complaints, semi-nsfw). For me, it shows multiple links to CE
with respective DMCA-esque requests made to german governmental bodies. You
aren't affected by those in the USA, but theres a DMCA one, too.

~~~
magicalist
The site hasn't changed much (and dear god is it still slow), but it has been
pretty fundamental in a number of papers on copyright. The database will
hopefully be able to bring actual data to bear on future copyright
reforms...if that ever happens.

I'm surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of the site before. If
a link has been removed from Google, it will replace it with a notice that a
link was removed and and link to the actual takedown request in the Chilling
Effects database (which includes the link that was taken down). I believe they
started doing this when they were forced to take down the Scientology links
years ago.

Since we now know Microsoft is one of the top DMCA notice issuers to google,
if you pick a query like

<https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+7+torrent>

you'll see a bunch of the notices down at the bottom. If you click through to
a notice, I don't think you can figure out which link was actually removed for
your particular query since the notices can apparently contain hundreds of
links, but it is at least a decent measure of transparency for the process.

~~~
dfc
Which copyright papers has CE played a fundamental role?

------
dfc
I do not understand why a payment processing company would be receiving
general cease & desist requests or DMCA takedown requests. What am I missing?

EDIT: Tried to clarify that I am not limiting the scope of the question to
DMCA takedowns and DMCA cease and desists. Rather DMCA takedowns and general
cease and desists.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Companies trying to shut down a website will often go after anything they can
connected to that site: the service itself, its hosting service, their
upstream bandwidth provider, their payment processor, and anything else they
think they can get away with.

~~~
dfc
It will be interesting to see who sends stripe requests.

This announcement would be so much more interesting if the CE search worked:(

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purephase
Seems like a wise decision. First I've heard of Chilling Effects and it sounds
interesting. Seems like an opportunity there for someone to make it
international as it is very US-specific. Calling all IP lawyers!

Stripe is now in Canada, so maybe OpenMedia.ca?

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pdog
First I've heard of Chilling Effects. Their website
(<http://chillingeffects.org>) looks like a conspiracy theory website, but I
guess take-down requests are rather conspiratorial.

~~~
nitrogen
Sounds like a great opportunity for a designer to redesign the site for fun
and portfolio.

~~~
dmix
It's never as simple as a designer offering a redesign (have to coordinate a
CMS, approval, etc). It'd be best if the people involved took an interest in
it.

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kloncks
I believe AngelList also does this with Chilling Effects.

~~~
malandrew
Quora does this as well.

