I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [157]
I knew it would be pointless to keep fighting, and the page went up as written. I was learning to pick my battles.
The Copyright Crusade
One battle picked us. The Church of Scientology filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) demanding we remove links to Operation Clambake (www.xenu.net) from our search results. Operation Clambake, based in Norway, sought to expose what it claimed to be unethical practices within the church. The DMCA was a federal law requiring companies to remove content that an owner asserted was protected. In this case, that content included some of the church's internal documents and photographs on the Xenu website. We had no doubt the church would sue Google if we did not comply with the letter of the law and remove the references to xenu.net from our search results for the term "Scientology."
Ironically, while we were intent on keeping Google's internal processes private, many on our staff supported the first amendment rights of church dissenters to expose Scientology's secrets. I heard grumbling in support of those threatening to boycott Google for kowtowing to "an oppressive and censorious organization." The law was the law, however, and the DMCA was the status quo. But at Google the status quo was nothing more than an inconvenience to be improved upon as time allowed. Evidently, the time for fixing DMCA removal requests was now.
Matt Cutts led the charge. He proposed we put on our game face and drop pointed hints about how far we would go to defend our results, implying that we were committed to a more combative stance than we were actually prepared to adopt. He drafted a polite letter to his contact at the church (from whom we had received previous complaints) in which he laid out a number of paths Google might take, from publicizing that we had eliminated results at their request to letting the courts settle the issue.
Cindy was reluctant to stir the PR pot further. Larry and Sergey knew we couldn't bluff a group so famously litigious in protection of their copyrights. "Scientology will never back down," they advised Matt. "Focus on the per-search notification alerts. Figure out a way to let users know that some of our search results have been filtered."
Within a week, engineers Daniel Dulitz and Jen McGrath had come up with a solution. Any time a DMCA notice necessitated the removal of a search result, we explained that a result had been deleted and provided a link to a copy of the complaint on a website run by ChillingEffects.org. That way Google met its legal obligations while still letting users know what information had been removed.
Our user mail rapidly turned more positive. The New York Times ran an article about our innovative approach and noted that publicity about Scientology's complaint had pushed xenu.net to the second-highest spot in the search results for "Scientology"—just below the church's official site.
The xenu.net episode went a long way toward establishing our credibility with the hard-core, libertarian-leaning, free-speech army. I suspect some would have preferred Google go down in a blaze of glory, expending all our resources fighting the Scientologists in a Supreme Court smackdown, but they appeared somewhat appeased by Google's innovative way of "fighting without fighting." The outcome reinforced Larry and Sergey's optimism that there would always be a creative, technology-based solution when we got ourselves in a jam. We just had to be intelligent enough to see it, and if Google employees had anything, it was off-the-charts intelligence. Yeah, we could most definitely innovate our way out of anything.
That hubris would carry a price in years to come.
Chapter 21
Aloha AOL
I RAN INTO SOME Hawaiians," I informed our executive staff in March 2002. "They said Google had the best search technology in the