News
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Fighting Back: A Victory for Freedom of Expression in the Turkish Constitutional Court
Today, we are pleased to announce an important victory for freedom of expression online: we beat Turkish President Erdoğan in the Turkish Constitutional Court. For almost a decade now, we have received regular takedown demands from Turkey (officially known as the Republic of Türkiye). Often, the reported sites contain political speech that are critical of…
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Shining Light on National Security Letters
Transparency. We aim for it in most everything we do at Automattic. When it comes to legal demands from the government, being fully transparent can be hard and even impossible in cases where we are prohibited by law from revealing information about a legal request we receive. Nowhere is the lack of transparency more controversial…
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Error 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons
Internet Service Providers and online platforms like WordPress.com are increasingly facing demands to block access to URLs in different countries. These orders can come as the result of court decisions (in the case of the UK and Turkey), or directly from governmental authorities (in the case of Russia or Georgia) and are usually directed at content…
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The Baby Dances On: A Win for Fair Use
Last week saw an important victory in the battle to protect the fair use of copyrighted material online. A Federal Appeals Court held in Lenz v. Universal that the DMCA requires rights holders to consider the important doctrine of ‘fair use’ before issuing a takedown notification. We submitted an amicus brief in this case, and are very pleased…
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ICANN Considers Relaxing Domain Registration Privacy; Automattic Objects
We’ve said it time and time again: user privacy is important to us. We’re vigilant about protecting it on WordPress.com, and we’re always on the lookout, ready to weigh in on policy proposals that might curtail the privacy that we and our users value so highly. Today, our focus turns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names…
Automattic Transparency Reports 