Warner Bros. asks Google to remove its own website due to copyright infringement
First rule of filing DMCA takedown notices: Do not ask for your own site to be taken down.
Warner Bros. would do well to heed that advice in the future. A recent DMCA copyright complaint to Google, filed on behalf of Warner Bros. by copyright protection company Vobile and first noticed by TorrentFreak, asks for two of Warner Bros.' own websites to be taken down. Some other sites on the list, including Amazon, are also obviously listed in error.
The sites in question are WB's official sites for The Dark Knight and The Matrix. As you can see in one of the screenshots below, Amazon's entirely innocuous page -- in fact, a page where people can legally buy copies of The Dark Knight -- is listed as a transgressor as well.
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It's possible that WB's pages ended up on this list through Vobile's automated process of detecting copyright-infringing sites.
Vobile's database "enables fully automated identification, tracking and management of any video and audio content with high accuracy and scalability," according to its own site.
DMCA notices such as the one linked above are numerous, and errors can happen -- in fact, in its Transparency Report FAQ, Google lists an example of a "major motion picture studio" requesting the removal of an IMDB page for one of the studio's movies. And Microsoft filed a DMCA takedown request in 2013, asking Google for its own site to be taken down. Still, with Google receiving literally millions of copyright-related takedown notices per day, it's a bit embarrassing that WB's piling on by asking for its own sites' removal.
We've contacted Warner Bros. about the DMCA notice, but have not yet heard back from them.
Topics Google
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
