Google naming and shaming fake takedown requesters

Google receives a lot of takedown requests from companies around the world. Most of these are from large movie studios that don't want torrent links to their works appearing in the search engine's results, but sometimes these groups go way overboard, requesting links to completely legitimate content be removed. Perhaps to help curb this practice, Google has begun pointing the finger at the most culpable.

It's understandable why Google might want to try and cut back on the requests a bit, since it currently receives more than 12 million a month. Sometimes these wrongly requested takedowns are because the link has already been removed, but some of the requests are just strange.

“A major U.S. motion picture studio requested removal of the IMDb page for a movie released by the studio, as well as the official trailer posted on a major authorized online media service,’ it reads in Google's FAQ. While the studio remains unnamed there, TorrentFreak suggests that it's most likely Warner Bros.

Other strange takedown requests can be found if you do a bit of digging through the removals reports. 20th Century Fox has requested the Amazon Page for one of the movies it distributes, Tristan & Isolde be removed. It also doesn't want the Facebook page for the Dublin Theatre Festival to be listed, or for the BBC page for Scottish Symphony Orchestra to be found in search results. Fortunately none of these were held up by the search giant.

Another interesting note is that while Google appears to listen to copyright owners relatively evenly across the board, certain reporting organisations seem to be completely ignored. The obvious one here is Yes It is – No Piracy!, which has 100% of its takedown requests ignored – unless it's reporting on behalf of Warner Bros. Pictures. One of its requests was by the producers of the second Human Centipede movie asking for reviews of its movie by The Guardian to be taken down. Others seem more legitimate, like the removal of links to pirated streaming copies of its movies. Either way, Google didn't comply.

KitGuru Says: This is actually quite a fascinating read if you have a few minutes, as it shows some of the ridiculous requests many movie studios and copyright lobbyists make. It's good to see Google standing up to them and simply not complying too.

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