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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."
I'm thinking Google should just remove any and all links to anything that even just has the movie studios' name on it. Including their own websites.
So, Hollywood is actively trying to push itself into obscurity?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Take them all down, plus any link relating to the studio, all studio movies, show times, or anything similar.
Make the bastards pay for promotion like they did in the days of newspaper advertising. Charge them 10 million dollars per movie studio, 1 million per movie, and 100k per site to get back into Google's index.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I hope Google delists these webpages (only the specific pages that correlate to the films) and any other (free?) advertisements. Maybe then the film studios get to feel, how it is not having ads in the internet. Just let them shoot in their own feet.
The good news is that Google has so far left many of the links up.
No, good news would be that Google has completely disregarded any communications. The fact that the word "many" was used rather than "all" means that it is in fact quite bad news.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
There has to be some sort of fine for this automated bullshit. The price for bullshit "take-downs" should be enough to discurage this automated take-down crap.
In fact, automated requests should not be allowed.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm thinking the net would be a much better place if Google just obeyed these requests, no questions asked. And did it very fast.
Seriously this sounds like an Onion article that someone copied and put on their site.
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"The good news is that Google has so far left many of the links up."
How is that good news? If the studio wants a link to their own Facebook page for a movie removed from search results, DO IT. Google should comply with the idiotic requests. I would imagine the response would be similar to those newspaper sites that have requested their stuff be removed from Google News: traffic dives and they change their tune rather quickly. IMO, the best way to show the stupidity of the DMCA is to plainly demonstrate it to the content creators.
First paragraph of TFA says "We’ve written about the ridiculousness of automated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests before, including Microsoft asking Google to censor BBC, CBS, CNN, Wikipedia, the US government, and even its own Bing links, but this latest episode takes the cake." That would seem to imply it's an automated process in play, although there really isn't much information in the article, and it could conceivably be read another way.
Oh no... it's the future.
a) all takedown notices from a rights holder will be sequentially queued
b) right holder must provide complete history of ownership and demonstrate right to assert takedown
b) if item (N) is found to be an invalid take down request a fee of $ZZ,ZZZ must be paid
c) regardless of the validity of request (N+1) it will not be acted on until any fees requried for invalid requests (MN+1) have been paid
As long as the rights holders are making valid requests they get serviced. Mess around and they have to pay for the work done.
It may have been some randoms doing DMCA illegally:
FTFA:
Update: Yesitis.org now points to a parked page. Yet another sign that these notices may be fraudulent, and not authorized by the copyright holders at all. If that’s indeed the case it remains unclear what the purpose of these notices is. It would show how easily these DMCA notices can be abused.
Or perhaps just the movie studios clearly mis-understanding what the internet is all about.
Perhaps? It's been a while. They've clearly demonstrated it beyond any shred of doubt.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
What's a Bing? Sorry, I'm just too lazy to Google it.
Oh, that's easy! I saw this hip new original television show called Hawaii Five-0 where the characters say "Bing it!" and the dialog flows so naturally in this scene you just have to see it. And when she looks up Clifton Bowles, she just has to push in "C" and then "L" and Clifton Bowles autocompletes because, let's face it, everyone's searching for Clifton Bowles and "CL" is more than enough to complete that search!
...
Oh yeah, as a viewer that product placement was natural and unforced and subconsciously I find myself saying "Bing it!" more and more in everyday conversations. I've also found myself buying a lot of Bing Crosby CDs, planning my trip to Bing, Iran and drinking a lot of British Bing Cola
My work here is dung.
The corporations have gone rampant.
So what does the "under penalty of perjury" part of a DMCA takedown notice mean?
AFAIK, a takedown notice has to include something like this:
Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved.
Doesn't that mean that someone can be held legally liable for fraudulent takedown notices? Who would have to sue to enforce it? Google? The legitimate site that was taken down because of the notice? The Department of Homeland Security since they are supposed to be keeping us safe?
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"
This NEEDS to happen. I'm certain this idea was thought up by some marketing drone.
Marketing Ass 1: "I got a great idea! Let's force google to take down links to our movies! That will TOTALLY make people want to see and buy our movies!"
Marketing Ass 2: "But how will they know about it...?"
Marketing Ass 1: "Fuck you, we're doing it anyway."
The less I hear/see about these asinine movies, the better. (Even though it's a rarity these days that the movie studios actually release a NEW movie, instead of some shitty ass 3d version of an older one).
I think it's high time for Google to issue an internet death sentence for a day or two to each movie studio that participated in this. They will see what happens when their internet presence disappears from Google.
"have asked Google to take down legitimate pages related to their own films, including sites legally hosting, promoting, or discussing them"
Over the years there have been similar wishes over and over again, which would make Google basically a police mandate over content hosted by 3rd parties, making them un-findable in searches. Which, in my view is crazy a** stupid. If they have problems with content out there, they should kick those in their behinds who actually host the content they want to "protect", and not try to get a search engine block access. The very purpose of a search engine is to answer your queries, independent of those queries' perceived legality (and searching for the title of a movie is most certainly not illegal). If someone puts up illegal content for others to see, that person/entity should be policed over, and leave the freaking search engines alone. I don't want to get to a point where a search engine can't be trusted to actually search for what you seek because some companies force it to censor results.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If I were Larry Page I'd have laughed them out of my office.
Frankly, this kind of behaviour from them makes me WANT to pirate their content [on the assumption that it was worth watching in the first place, in reality, there's too much garbage] - just because they're being arseholes.
But seriously, I sincerely hope that Google tells the studios to go fuck themselves.
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