Movie Studio Targeted Reddit

LionsGate was seen attempting to wipe an entire Reddit sub from Google’s indexes. The movie studio claimed that the action was necessary to protect the movie A Madea Christmas. However, the search giant refused to comply with the overbroad takedown attempt.

Millions of DMCA notices are sent to search giants each week: for example, Google received over 8.5 million within the last 7 days. While most of those complaints are accurate, some of them aren’t. As for Google, the company admits that it has to reject thousands of DMCA notices every day, usually because they target the same URLs again and again.

Some of such failure notices can be easily spotted (for example when rights owners target content they don’t actually own the rights to). Sometimes the content creators don’t target infringing material precisely – instead of sending a notice for a single URL, they want to move up a level and take down a whole bunch of them in a single swoop. This is what the movie studio tried to do a few days ago, targeting 9,000 URLs in a single DMCA notice, where dozens of URLs were duplicates. However, Google dismissed links targeting Reddit for different reasons. Three links submitted by LionsGate targeted a Reddit sub called BestOfStreamingVideo after someone published a link to the company’s movie ‘Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas‘. The movie studio tried to have the whole sub-reddit delisted from Google, but the search giant refused to comply.

In the meantime, it should be admitted that the “over-broad” strategy has quite paid off in the past. For example, the Motion Pictures Association of America has managed to have the homepages of a number of popular websites removed from Google’s search, including that of KickassTorrents.