Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

https://stripe.com/blog/towards-transparency

by anurag • 14 years ago

186 30 14 years ago

purephase• 14 years ago

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?

ianterrell• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

cwp2• 14 years ago

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...

Titanous• 14 years ago

There are two things that should be done to fight national security letters and gag orders:

1) Sue the US government to fight the order.

2) Use technical workarounds to inform your users without breaking the law. For example, rsync.net has a signed notice that they haven't been served a warrant: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

rsingel• 14 years ago

Due to an appeals court decision, NSL gag orders have been challengable since 2008 -- and it's very simple to do.

But the thing is, companies rarely care to fight for their users.

In 2010, the FBI admitted that the gag order has been challenged only 4 times, with a 50% success rate.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/nsl-challenges/

So yes, that would be a fine clause for companies to sign onto as well.

jasontraff• 14 years ago

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.

davorak• 14 years ago

Please do. The world would better if it was a standard practice for everyone.

revelation• 14 years ago

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.

magicalist2• 14 years ago

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.

pdog• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

dmix• 14 years ago

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.

dfc4• 14 years ago

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.

chc• 14 years ago

If you look, you'll see that the DMCA is not mentioned anywhere in this post. They're receiving demands that they stop serving certain users, not to take down copyrighted content.

dfc4• 14 years ago

I guess I needed an oxford comma or two. I will update my post to be clearer.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

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.

dfc4• 14 years ago

It will be interesting to see who sends stripe requests.

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

Firehed• 14 years ago

Courts will subpoena financial records. I don't know the details not being the one that provides the information but I know we have received requests in the past.

I'm going to see if we can set up the same thing. I wasn't aware of this service but definitely support the disclosure when it can be legally provided.

kloncks• 14 years ago

I believe AngelList also does this with Chilling Effects.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Quora does this as well.

Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

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