TorrentFreak

Google has quietly rolled out a new feature to its copyright transparency report, allowing the public to see when DMCA takedown notices sent by copyright holders are false. The search giant is currently processing more than a dozen million “infringing” links per month, but points out that not all requests sent by rightsholders are legitimate. As an example, Google cites a request where a major U.S. motion picture studio asked them to censor their IMDb page and official trailer.

In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?

Very soon the six strikes anti-piracy program will kick off in the United States but the RIAA isn’t just sitting back and presuming that it will be an anti-piracy cure-all. Since early November the recording industry group has massively upped the number of DMCA notices it issues to make content harder to find. From an average of between 200,000 and 240,000 URL requests sent every week to Google, the RIAA has just posted 463,000 and 666,000 in successive weeks.

If a copyright holder has a problem with content hosted on a website they are perfectly entitled to issue a copyright takedown request. Publisher Pearson did just that, after a 279-word list from one of its works dating back to 1974 appeared on an education blog. But rather than speak to the blog owner, Pearson DMCA’d its hosting provider instead. The end result was that hosting provider ServerBeach not only took down that blog, but around 1,450,000 other blogs too.

Just how easy is it to silence your critics on the Internet by using the DMCA? Apparently, very easy indeed. Yesterday, a writer who reports on religion and current affairs had his entire website taken offline after he allegedly breached the copyright of the operator of a Facebook page. His crime? Reproducing a 16-word Facebook posting made by his copyright adversary that accused an anti-racist, anti-fascist organization of being worse than pedophiles.

Over the last year Microsoft asked Google to censor nearly 5 million webpages because they allegedly link to copyright infringing content. While these automated requests are often legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. In a recent DMCA notice Microsoft asked Google to censor BBC, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, Wikipedia and many more sites. In another request the software giant seeks the removal of a URL on Spotify.com.

The dispute between file-hosting service Hotfile and Warner Bros, where the latter is accused of taking down content they don’t hold the copyrights to, is heating up. The court has accepted a brief filed by the EFF who argue that the automated takedown requests of the movie company represent a threat to free speech. Warner Bros quickly replied and disputes that computers are more accurate than humans, arguing that broad automated takedown systems are not incompatible with the DMCA law.