TorrentFreak

To mark the occasion of 20 million URL takedown notices sent to Google by RIAA member companies, the organization has complained that search engines still aren’t doing enough to reduce the piracy problem. The RIAA says it is using a bucket to deal with “an ocean of illegal downloading”, one in which content is replaced and re-indexed in a never-ending loop. Notice and takedown procedures aren’t fit for today’s reality and must be revised, the music group argues.

Copyfighter, journalist, sci-fi writer and Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow has fallen victim to the almighty content empire of Rupert Murdoch. In an attempt to remove access to infringing copies of the TV-show Homeland, Fox has ordered Google to take down links to Doctorow’s latest novel of the same title. Adding to the controversy, Doctorow’s own publisher has also sent DMCA notices for the Creative Commons licensed book.

Following requests from some copyright holders, search giant Google has relaxed its DMCA restrictions allowing for more takedown notices to be processed. As a result the number of URLs being removed from Google continues to shoot up, surpassing the record-breaking 4.4 million mark this week. Both Google and the RIAA are happy with the progress being made but the former says it will keep a close eye on abusive practices.

The homepage of the popular torrent search engine Torrentz disappeared from Google this week after Hollywood studio Paramount sent a peculiar DMCA takedown request. Paramount claims in the notice that the URL links to infringing content, but there are no links to torrents or even other torrent sites on Torrentz’ homepage. The meta-search engine has filed a counterclaim and is waiting for Google to respond.

Hollywood movie studio Fox has asked Google to remove dozens of allegedly infringing links to Pirate Bay proxy sites but forgot to check whether the links even exist. The result is a slew of bogus DMCA claims, some for TV-shows that have yet to be produced. Another prime example of how automated take-down procedures lead to abuse.

One of the Internet’s largest indexes for streaming movie and TV show content is locked in a dispute over the removal of the site’s homepage from Google’s search engine results. Movie2K, the 240th most-popular site in the world according to Alexa, had its main page delisted following a copyright complaint from Paramount Pictures and efforts to have it reinstated have failed. Google says it will not review the situation, even though the infringing material in question is no longer present.

Google is being criticized by copyright holders for the limits it puts on the number of “pirate” links that can be removed per day. The Hollywood -funded anti-piracy organization BREIN wants to increase the daily DMCA cap from 10,000 to 40,000 and eventually remove the restrictions altogether. The RIAA further wants the ability to do more queries to find illegal content and previously said that the current limits are “miniscule.”