Copyright Act Leads to Studios Censoring Legitimate Links to Own Media
By Karla Robinson
December 6, 2012
December 6, 2012
- A recent automated request has asked Google to take down links to legitimate sites that reference studios’ films in addition to other links that seemingly have no connection to the films.
- Although Google has left many of the links up thus far, the appeal is just one example of the numerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests that Google has to sift through.
- According to The Next Web, the request was sent by a company called “Yes It Is – No Piracy!” on behalf of several major Hollywood movie studios.
- “Victims of the takedown requests include sites where the content is hosted legally (Amazon, CBS, iTunes, Blockbuster, Verizon on demand, and Xfinity), newspapers discussing the content in question (the BBC, CNET, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Guardians, The Independent, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, and Wired) as well as official Facebook Pages for the movies and TV shows and even their Wikipedia entries,” the post explains.
- While takedown requests for copyright violations are reasonable, these automated requests put unnecessary strain on Google, the article suggests. One such request from Microsoft asked Google to censor BBC, CBS, CNN, Wikipedia, the U.S. government, and even its own Bing links.
- “We have no problem with companies asking Google to censor webpages in its search engine because they are either illegally hosting or linking to copyrighted material,” comments TNW. “That being said, automated requests that don’t get a final check from human eyes result in mistakes, and it’s frankly quite sad that Google has to sift through them all. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened, and it likely won’t be the last.”
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