How to read a Lumen Database record

What Lumen is

Lumen is an independent research project hosted at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center that collects and publishes takedown requests sent to online platforms. Companies including Google submit copies of notices they receive, and Lumen archives them so researchers, journalists and affected site owners can study how the removal process is used.

It is an archive, not an enforcement body. Lumen does not remove anything, does not adjudicate claims, and does not act for either side. Where it can legally do so, Google links from its search results to the relevant Lumen record in place of removed content.

What a record contains

• Sender. The party who submitted the notice — commonly an enforcement vendor rather than the rights holder.
• Principal / copyright owner. Who the vendor is acting for.
• Recipient. The platform the notice was sent to.
• Date. When it was sent.
• The work claimed. A description of the copyrighted material, sometimes with a link to an authorised copy.
• URLs listed. The specific addresses the sender asked to have removed. These lists can run to hundreds of entries.
• Notice text. The body of the complaint, including the statutory statements the sender made.

What is missing, and why

Lumen redacts personal information such as individual senders' contact details, so a record will often show an organisation where you expected a person. Not every notice reaches the archive either — submission is voluntary and varies by platform, and some records are withheld or partially withheld for legal reasons. Treat a Lumen record as strong evidence of what a notice said, and the absence of one as weak evidence that no notice exists.

Reading a record critically

A notice is one party's assertion, written by that party, usually at volume. Useful questions:

• How long is the URL list? A list of six URLs was probably reviewed by a human. A list of six hundred probably was not.
• Do the URLs actually relate to the work claimed? Bulk enforcement regularly sweeps in category pages, search pages and unrelated domains.
• Is the sender the rights holder or a vendor? This decides who you would contact.
• Does the described work match what is on the page? Sometimes it plainly does not.
• Has this sender appeared before? A repeat sender across your domains is a pattern worth documenting.

How Lumen relates to Google's data

The two are complementary. Google's Transparency Report data is structured and searchable by domain: it tells you that a request exists, who filed it, which URLs it named and what Google did. The Lumen record carries the notice itself: what was claimed and in what words.

DMCA Detector searches Google's records by domain and surfaces available Lumen notice links alongside the request details, so you can go from "does my domain appear anywhere?" to "what exactly did they say?" without hunting through the archive by hand.

Check a domain for copyright-removal requests

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Last reviewed 2026-08-26.