Entertainment companies often send takedown notices to Google, asking them to remove links to material they claim copyright over. That's fine. But now those same companies have started sending takedown notices requesting that Google take down... the takedown notices. It's basically the legal version of Inception.
As part of its transparency policy, Google publishes every takedown notice it receives from either copyright holders or government bodies. As TorrentFreak has pointed out, that means Google has built up a pretty huge database of pirated material, which effectively undoes the point of a takedown notice -- to make copyrighted material harder to find. Now companies such as 20th Century Fox and Microsoft want Google to take down their own takedown notices.
At the centre of this is Chilling Effects, a site that lists takedown notices under America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "to help recipients resist the chilling of legitimate activities". It republishes the takedown notices Google publishes, and adds in further legal analysis to make what can be threatening and intimidating language less so.
Several companies have asked Google to remove Chilling Effects from its search results. Request number 515623, submitted by Microsoft on 26 Feburary, wants Google to take down three pages -- a straight republication of a takedown request Microsoft sent to Google in April 2012, the index of all of Chilling Effects' republished takedown notices and the page that explains the DMCA's "safe harbour" provision that protects web hosts if their clients host pirated content without their awareness.
Other companies that have submitted similar requests to Google include Fox, Sony and NBC Universal. It's tempting to label this an example of what goes wrong with automated copyright enforcement, but the inclusion of links to pages that explain how people can defend themselves against a takedown notice makes it seem a tad more intentional than that.
You can still search on Google for the takedown notices (and the URLs they contain), so it hasn't worked (yet) -- but if copyright laws are increasingly turning the web into some kind of infinite regression series (or perhaps a Mandelbrot set of takedown notices) it's indicative of a flaw in the approach to piracy.
Image: Shutterstock
Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/5/takedown-notices-takedown-notices
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