Movie Group Wants Google to Censor Its Own Trailer

Magnolia Pictures, an American distributor of indie movies, has forwarded a takedown request to the search giant, asking to take down the IMDb listing for one of its films, a trailer and a few Rotten Tomatoes pages and news articles. The search engine declined this self-censorship attempt.

In order to make piracy less visible, rights owners keep sending dozens of millions of takedown notices to the search engine. However, not all of those notices are accurate. The high number of automated requests and the fact that rights owners fail to check their validity normally result in questionable takedowns.

Another interesting example took place a few days ago, when Magnolia Pictures asked Google to remove a list of URLs which happened to be certainly not infringing. This particular DMCA takedown request included trailers and the IMDb listing of the movie, along with news articles in The Week and Salon. Of course, this notice isn’t an isolated incident. In another request the same Magnolia Pictures demands to block a Hollywood Reporter article and a few other non-infringing pages.

Fortunately, Google has white-listed a few domains, because most of the websites mentioned in the DMCA request weren’t censored. At the same time, less prominent websites may not be so lucky. It looks like the DMCA avalanche is really becoming a bigger problem day after day, and Google alone is currently removing eight links per second. It is obvious that Google and other search engines cannot possibly verify every DMCA request, so the problem in question will only increase with more takedown notices being sent every day.

At the moment, copyright owners and the anti-piracy outfits employed by them have absolutely no motivation to improve the accuracy of their automated takedown systems. Industry experts can’t see any other way out but claim it’s time for rightsholders to be held accountable.

A few weeks ago the software giant Microsoft also set a great example by ditching its DMCA partner LeakID. The latter sent yet another embarrassing takedown notice, and the chances are that more will follow in the future.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article