In an attempt to make pirated content harder to find copyright holders ask Google to remove millions of search results every week. While these automated requests are usually legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. For example, in an embarrassing act of self-censorship Microsoft recently asked Google to censor links to its very own Microsoft.com. […]
While the above error is rather entertaining, matters gets more serious when copyright holders censor legitimate content produced by others. It’s hard to say how frequently this happens, but just by browsing through the many DMCA notices we have been able to find dozens of examples already. […]
Of course Google can’t really be blamed for responding to takedown requests because they are required to do so by law. Considering the millions of notices submitted to them every week, Google does a pretty good job at filtering out the most obvious mistakes.
The copyright holders on the other hand could take much more care to prevent these errors. Even if it’s just to avoid embarrassing themselves.