A few days ago I had been searching for information about a very cool IDE I’ve begun using called ‘UEStudio’. The bottom of the page read

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

I don’t live in the United States – I live in Canada. I contacted Google via their help desk as to why my search results were being filtered according to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act law when I’m not even in the US. The next day – after no reply from Google – I searched for ‘UEStudio’ once again and the warning was gone. I don’t know if the missing result was displayed this time or if they just omitted the error message for that particular query. Searching for ‘torrent’ still yields the warning with 2 results being filtered. Google obviously didn’t fix the problem.

I can only speculate about what kind of design Google has in its data centers where a fix can only be pushed down to one query. Thousands of servers assemble the final result to display. Complex algorithms prioritize Canadian based website (on google.ca) while still taking into account every other website in the entire world. No doubt Google knows what they’re doing.

PROTIP: on the machine that assembles and/or pumps out the final result

/*The server is probably tied to the hostname, so you’d only have to check if there is a DMCA warning*/

If(HOSTNAME == “google.ca”) omit_US_DMCA_WARNING();

This solution – although inane – would be a more acceptable outcome than the one query fix that may or may not have given me the missing result.

Another solution would be to find out where the computer for a particular IP is approximately located. Geo IP address lookup is a very simple technology that only requires an indexed lookup (QUICK) of an IP to the approximate area the IP address belongs to. Google has made use of this in previous scenarios *recalls not being able to watch the official video of Bleeding Love on Youtube due to location restrictions*.

To Google’s credibility, the server I connect to while accessing google.ca is located in Mountain View California. So even though I am outside of the US, the server isn’t. Google should just build another data center in Canada.

Ideally, everyone would be able to share and access all information. Hopefully, all limitations imposed on us are ones signed by people we put in office. Sadly, my search results are being filtered and I get a fucking US DMCA warning message. Google is still better than Yahoo.

Update: Searching for ‘torrent’ doesn’t show the error anymore. Searching for ‘torrent download’ does.

Update 2:

Google has finally replied – after 9 days – to my initial query about DMCA in Canada. This is their reply:

I agree that it is unfortunate that DMCA complaints affect our users worldwide.

Google.com is the index from which all other domain specific indexes are drawn, which is why items that are removed from Google.com will also be removed from any sub-index. We will keep you informed anytime we remove content due to a DMCA complaint by inserting a notice at the bottom of the search results page that links to the original complaint. While this is not an ideal solution, following the link will allow you to view the URLs you would have otherwise seen in the search results.

If the Chilling Effects notice is no longer showing up for the same search this usually means one of two things:

1. That the site that had its page blocked filed a counter notification with us that resulted in the page being re-included into our search results.

or

2. The ranking of the blocked page altered after our last crawl.

Hopefully this helps explain why you’re seeing the notice in some searches and not others; however, I know that this can be a bit confusing so don’t hesitate to ask if you would like further clarification.

Hope that helps!

The main point being that all other indices around the world are derived from the main index at Google.com and therefore are at the mercy of whatever laws that index is bound to. I am suspicious about the possible reasons they give for the error not showing up anymore. For the first reason, it seems unlikely that two counter notifications would be processed right after me complaining about them. The second reason also seems unlikely because any site that does have a very low pagerank would be less prone to DMCA complaints. Nevertheless, the Google employee that had replied to my query had joined the helpdesk the day of answering my question and only answered my question. I imagine that it probably went up the support chain – which is why it took so long to answer – and they eventually did get back to me with an answer. I still like Google better than Yahoo or Live.

Hello world!