Now TorrentFreak has pointed out that the copyright holders do not agree. Within the Transparency Report FAQ is a list of example takedown requests that Google declined. Some are simply absurd. “A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice,” and “An individual in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to court proceedings referencing her first and last name on the ground that her name was copyrightable.” Google declined.
But another declined example is somewhat surprising: “A content protection organization for motion picture, record and sports programming companies requested the removal of search results that link to copyright removal requests submitted by one of their clients...” In other words, rightsholders have requested the takedown of their takedown requests.
TorrentFreak notes that this example is not alone. “Other Hollywood studios including NBC Universal and Lionsgate have done the same, and Microsoft too.” It explains the issue: “With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available.”
Google doesn’t see these links to links as infringing material, and has indexed them within its search engine. “We link in our search results to the requests published by Chilling Effects in place of removed content when we are able to do so legally,” it explains.
It does, however, sometimes remove other links to links. “If we take a look at the text pasting service Pastebin we see that Google removed 82,937 URLs from its index. These indirect links are all non-clickable and no different from the DMCA notices,” notes TorrentFreak.
But it’s getting worse. “No longer is Google merely asked to remove direct links to copyrighted material as the DMCA prescribes, but also links to copyrighted material.” This, suggest TorrentFreak, is the mess created by the current DMCA procedures. “Both Google and the copyright holders agree that something has to change, but understandably the solution they envision is quite different.”