Facebook DMCA Notices Silence Digg and Google

Google has shut down Facebook Secrets, the Blogger blog that gained notoriety when the anonymous author posted code from the recent Facebook server snafu. The mysterious owner of Facebook Secrets is not going down without a fight, however. S/he has posted a new site called Facebook Secrets Again, though the Facebook code is not included.

Instead there are two DMCA notices from Google. The second, which appears to be a response to some sort of challenge about the site removal, reads:

As mentioned in our previous email, we work with a third party to post DMCA notices we receive. The notice we received because of the content on your site can be found here (once the notice has been posted):

www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=3836

We have had to remove the content mentioned in the complaint from your blog. If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits.

The link above leads to a page on Chilling Effect, a site which tracks DMCA notices. The page reads: ???DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google. The notice is not available.???

But Facebook Secrets isn???t the only site that???s been served with a DMCA takedown. Digg also received a takedown notice and complied. So far, the Digg community has remained oddly silent. Apparently Digg users aren???t as interested in Facebook code as they are in DVD unlocking codes.

Earlier this week, Facebook contacted Wired News to give an official statement about the code leak, which read:

A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further. (emphasis mine)

Requests made by Wired News for clarification from Facebook regarding what specific laws were broken have gone unanswered. The complaint filed against Digg cites copyright violations, which isn???t exactly ???several laws,??? though it is enough to file a DMCA complaint.

For what it???s worth, an anonymous Compiler reader posted most of the code in the comments on the previous entry.