While working on the new DaniWeb Event Calendar feature, I did a Google search regarding the vBulletin built-in calendar feature. Built right into the search engine results pages was the statement: 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've never seen this before. The ChillingEffects website doesn't seem to be affiliated with Google but a browse around the site shows that the organization is, indeed, affiliated with a couple universities including Stanford.
Somehow this is related to a complaint on Google by an adult website saying that Google is infringing on their copyright of their material. Certainly this doesn't make sense because I was searching for information about vBulletin's calendar - I can't see how it would appear in the search results page of what I was looking for.
If you you search for "xenu" on Google, you'll get the same result about a DMCA takedown notice (Blame those nutty scientologists). This is Google's way of following the letter of the law, and not returrning search results that they are legally prohibited from doing, yet providing the information to the user in a roundabout fashion. chillingeffects.org is an independent site that was started to chronicle the negative affects of the DMCA and other laws that limit free expression online.
Hmm, if you ask me that complaint against google is just plain stupid. It is the responsibility of the site owner to configure their site in such a way that search engines are not able to directly link to specific content, either by making the URLs non-indexable (which should be the case with most of those images mentioned in the complaint) and/or by the use of a robots.txt file. They could also utilize server-side scripting to block or alter the content if it is being accessed by a search engine or referred directly from another site. It's not google's fault that they apparently don't know how to properly operate a website.
As to why Google would want to associate with ChillingEffects, my guess is just so they don't have to make up a site for that information and field the questions on it, they could just post it on ChillingEffects and let them handle the discussion.
