The Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual "Who Has Your Back?" scorecard tells you which services will resist spurious attempts to censor your communications through baseless copyright accusations.
The report tells you which services require a legal DMCA notice to act, which allow you to file a counter-notice, which have similar trademark procedures and which post transparency reports documenting the process.
Major online platforms have become the hubs for so much of our speech. The result is that their policy decisions can have an outsized impact on what speech enters the public discourse, and what gets silenced or relegated to secondary status. As users choose which platforms will host their updates, writing, images, and videos, they ought to know which of these services have made explicit commitments to defend that speech against bullies that would try to take it down.
As with our April "Who Has Your Back" report, which addresses government requests for personal data, the categories we evaluate in this report are based on objectively verifiable, public policy statements. In order to preserve that quality, we've chosen not to award stars unless we can cite a public policy, even in cases where internal policies may meet our evaluation thresholds. We've also chosen not to award stars in cases where we've learned that a company has not heeded its own public policies. If users believe that a company's actions don't match its policies, and can provide specific examples, please let us know.
We compiled the information in this report by examining each company's published terms of service, copyright and trademark policies, and transparency reports where available. As part of our evaluation, we contacted each company to explain our findings and to give them an opportunity to improve their public stances.
Who Has Your Back? When Copyright and Trademark Bullies Threaten Free Speech 2014 [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
