It’s like watching a snake eat its own tail: Movie studios are asking Google to take down links that connect to their takedown requests. We expect that as this story spreads there will be a takedown request to take down the takedown request to take down their takedown requests.
Why, precisely, are movie studios giving bloggers far too much excuse to engage in wordplay? Because it seems to be helping people who want to steal movies find the links they need to do it:
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.
This needs some explanation: As part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, search engines are required to take down links to pirated content. Google works with several law schools to collect and analyze those links, as well as publish the results, in a database called Chilling Effects
This is likely what the movie studios see as the real problem: Chilling Effects tends to turn up rather embarrassing dirt as it analyzes DMCA requests, like, oh, movie studios deciding to issue DMCA takedowns to anything that has the word “box” in it and stick the little guy with the clean-up.
Unsurprisingly, Google has not honored their request to make their DMCA takedowns completely opaque to the general public. Sorry guys, you’ll just have to be held accountable for your actions like the rest of us.