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Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Links To Legal Copies of Their Own Films
An anonymous reader writes "Several large movie studios have asked Google to take down legitimate pages related to their own films, including sites legally hosting, promoting, or discussing them. 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 Guardian, 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. There are also a number of legitimate links that appear to be completely unrelated to the content that is supposedly being protected. The good news is that Google has so far left many of the links up."
Why purge it from the system entirely?
Leave the results there, but poison the link itself to take to a Google landing page of "Sorry, but we were told we cannot link to this {movie studio, movie, whatever} by {MPAA, others}. If you have a problem with this, please talk to them. Fuck you MPAA, Google."
I'm responsible for maintaining a marketing site owned by a sister-company of big Hollywoood movie studio. We market the DVD/BluRay/Online releases of major blockbuster movies. As part of a limitation of our CMS, we couldn't host trailers ourselves, so the marketing team was using a YouTube account.
The YouTube trailer for the DVD/BluRay release of a major summer blockbuster was taken down via a DMCA request. As a result, the trailer was broken on our marketing page for that release. Luckily, this was right around the time that we got our own video hosting resolved so we were able to solve it. But it was beautiful that for a couple days, the page running on OurCompanySite.com displayed a video with the message, "This content removed from YouTube at the request of Our Company"
Eons ago there was a magazine called Softside that published games written in BASIC for the Apple II, Atari and TRS-80. It soon got a visit from a Radio Shack lawyer asserting that only Tandy had the right to publish software for their computers, and demanding that they cease and desist from saying "Radio Shack" or "TRS-80" in their articles unless they paid Tandy a royalty.
The magazine complied by saying "S-80 Bus" which was not within the scope of Tandy's trademarks. Tandy got its wish: nobody ever writes about Radio Shack computers today.