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Lumen is an independent research project studying takedown notices along with other legal removal requests and demands concerning online content. We collect and analyze requests to remove material from the web. Our goals are to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal--both legitimate and questionable--that are being sent to Internet publishers, search engines, and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.

Lumen's database contains millions of notices, many of them with a valid legal basis, some of them without, and some on the murky border. The presence of a notice in our database does not indicate a judgment among these possibilities, or that Lumen is authenticating the provenance of that notice or evaluating the validity of the claims it raises. Lumen in fact has no way of doing so. Additionally, the presence of a notice in Lumen's database does not mean that the takedown request was (or was not) acted upon by its recipient. Some of the companies that share notice data with Lumen indicate whether they took action on a particular removal request, some do not. Google, for example, sends to Lumen copies of the notices that Google receives regardless of Google's actions.

Lumen is not the sender or original recipient of the requests and notices within its database, and is unable to assist in any way with either removing or restoring on-line content from the web or search engine listings, with "blocking" or restoring access to websites or URLs, or with sending DMCA counter-notices. Lumen documents the notice-and-takedown process and ecology by reporting that a notice or request was sent and received, by and to whom, and regarding what online content. Lumen does not have any more information about a particular notice than what is present within a notice and is unable to provide contact information for notice senders or recipients. We are also unable to provide legal advice.

Currently housed within Harvard Law School's Library system, Lumen was conceived, developed, and founded in 2002 by then-Berkman Klein Center Fellow Wendy Seltzer, the project, then called "Chilling Effects", was initially focused on requests submitted under the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the Internet and its usage has evolved, so has Lumen, and the database now includes complaints of all varieties, including trademark, defamation, and privacy, domestic and international, and court orders. The Lumen database grows by and astonishing more than 200,000 notices per week, with voluntary submissions provided by companies such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Meta, Medium, Vimeo, Cloudflare, and Wordpress. As of mid-2025, the project hosts over forty-three million notices, referencing almost ten billion URLs. In 2024, the project website was visited over twenty-three million times by over seven million unique users from virtually every country in the world.