BBC Thinks TorrentFreak is a Doctor Who Game of Thrones Pirate

Here at TorrentFreak we like to keep a close eye on both Google’s Transparency Report and the ChillingEffects database since both provide a unique insight into DMCA takedown requests sent to Google, Twitter and other sites. Sadly, today we’re the ones being targeted by wrongful takedowns.

Pretty much every month we find strange, unusual, incompetent or downright weird takedown requests online, but it’s very rare that we find notices issued against our own domain.

Nevertheless it does happen, and today is one such special occasion.

April 1st we ran a story titled ‘Game of Thrones Pirates Break BitTorrent Swarm Record’ in which we explained, unsurprisingly, that a torrent swarm record had been broken after the new series of Game of Thrones premiered.

Unfortunately, anti-piracy company Entura International, who work on behalf of the BBC, think that the article infringes on the BBC’s copyrights.

Without contacting TorrentFreak first, the UK outfit went straight to Google in an attempt to have one of our URLs deindexed because they claim it infringes copyrights on an episode of Doctor Who. You can see the takedown notice on ChillingEffects here.

Luckily Entura appear to have botched the URL (which looks like it came from Twitter), so thankfully Google didn’t take down the link.

However, as can be seen here on TorrentFreak’s Google Transparency listing, we also have other issues to deal with.

At the end of April, French anti-piracy company SCPP asked Google to deindex a total of four TorrentFreak pages but because the notice is still to be filed on ChillingEffects, we don’t yet know what the problem is. We suspect that SCPP also made a careless mistake, but time will tell.

Thanks to Google and ChillingEffects, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out.

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