Microsoft Asked to Censor Itself

In its continuous efforts to make pirated material harder to find, rights owners ask the search giant to remove millions of search results on a weekly basis. Although those automated requests are normally legal, there are more mistakes than you might expect. For instance, in an embarrassing act of self-censorship Microsoft recently asked Google to filter links to its very own website.

As you know, the search giant has already received takedown requests for over 100 million URLs in 2013. Although major part of the submitted URLs do link to infringing material, not all requests Google receives are correct.

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The matter is that automated systems used by many of the rights owners often trigger notices which include links to absolutely legitimate material, let alone their own work. That’s exactly what happened in a recent DMCA takedown request sent by LeakID on behalf of Microsoft. Instead of listing links to infringing content, Microsoft asked Google to remove links to their own Microsoft.com. The list of the links it wanted to delete contained six links pointing to Microsoft’s store, support pages and product descriptions.

Microsoft was lucky that the search giant noticed the error and didn’t remove the pages in question from the search results. However, it would have been a fitting punishment if the company had decided to comply with the request. This was quite an entertaining error, but matters get more and more serious when rights owners censor legal material produced by others. Industry experts find it difficult to say how frequently this happens, but just by browsing through DMCA notices one can find dozens of examples.

For example, industry observers found that recently HBO had asked the search giant to remove link pointing to a perfectly legitimate copy of the open source video player VLC. This one was clearly submitted by mistake, but the sad part is that it is still absent from Google’s search result.

It is clear that Google can’t be blamed for responding to DMCA takedown requests, as the company is required to do so by law. Taking into account the millions of notices submitted to Google every week, the company does a great job at filtering out the most obvious mistakes. On the other hand, the rights owners should take much more care to prevent such mistakes, at least to avoid embarrassing themselves.