In an effort to rid the entire internet of the scourge that is pirated content, Warner Bros. has gotten a little heavy handed — including its own websites in a copyright complaint to Google.
Torrentfreak reports Warner Bros has submitted over four million URLs for review this year alone, on the back of pressure from film studios for Google to altogether remove sites like The Pirate Bay from search results.
Among those four million URLs were a number of sites not actually containing any illegally obtained content. Such as Warner Bros own site, for example, along side IMDB listings, and a link to Amazon where you can actually buy the films.
Oops.
Ahhh.
…yeah.
Warner Bros. utilised the services of Vobile to submit the copyright claims, a company who “offers solutions to help content owners protect, measure and monetise movies and TV content across the Internet and on all screens”.
Google spotted the mistake and didn’t take down the official IMDB and Amazon links, but the Warner Bros. links are still under review. Google being a little cheeky, perhaps?
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo
Comments
10 responses to “Warner Bros Flagged Their Own Sites For Violating Copyright”
Odd considering no one in their right mind would want to download any of the trash they have released recently…. Oh god I hope Wonder Woman is good.
Don’t get your hopes up, the last two outings have been meh!!!
Geoff Johns is overseeing it all now though so I have some hope he’ll steer it back on course, not sure how much of Wonder Woman was already done before he came on though so I’m at least staying positive until Justice League.
If both of those movies are terrible… well I guess I’ll be a sad panda 🙁
Google should take down the official links as well. WB have formally requested it after all.
My thoughts exactly. Take them down and put them through weeks of red tape and paperwork to get them back up.
See how they like it for once.
Maybe then we’ll start seeing a little bit of change.
Surely if you have the technology to scour the internet and submit millions of DMCA requests a year, you could add a simple whitelist. Seeing as this isn’t the first time they’ve done this either….
The thing is that the companies hired to send these DMCA requests are as dumb as your typical call center. Rather than manually processing any hits that their bots come up with, they just forward them all straight to Google (or any company that take DMCA requests, for that matter)
Oh, and they don’t know what ‘fair use’ or ‘not-even-remotely-close-to-copying-at-all’ is.
Cue the Disney conspiracists…. “Marvel paid google! Disney bribed google!”
This is when we laugh HAHAHAHA