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Digital Top Stories
Much chatter over BPI takedown notice
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 22 June 2010
There has been much online chatter in the last 24 hours about a ‘takedown request’ sent by record label trade body the BPI to Google, requesting that the search engine block access to eighteen illegally posted MP3s which can be accessed via the search service by doing relatively straight forward key word searches involving artist and song names and then a word like ‘MP3’, ‘download’, ‘upload’ or the name of a file-transfer service.
It is widely known that copyright owners and their trade bodies frequently issue takedown requests to video sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo when they believe their rights have been infringed (ie a video or track they own has been uploaded to a content sharing site which is not licensed by said content owner). Such takedown notices are usually submitted according to the takedown system set out in US copyright law, because the owners of such sites are usually American, even if the copyright owners themselves are not.
But the BPI takedown request being discussed online yesterday, which was leaked by the Chilling Effects website, relates to searches on Google rather than content uploaded to a YouTube style platform, which some tech journalists and bloggers claim is much more unusual, leading some to speculate this is a new more aggressive initiative on behalf of the BPI.
Some also note that the document includes not only a list of specific links to infringing content, but also a list of home page links to the services that have aided the infringement, such as MegaUpload, leading to additional speculation that the BPI is stepping beyond the strict remit of America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act and calling on Google to block access to whole website rather than just infringing content.
For their part, the BPI has denied there is anything out of the ordinary about their latest takedown notice to Google, other than that it has been leaked, of course. Spokesman Adam Liversage told C-Net that such documents were filed with Google on a regular basis by bodies like the BPI and that “in most cases, Google takes down the links in question, following its own internal procedures”. While, perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone in the tech blog community seems convinced by Liverage’s explanation, I tend to think what he says is correct.
Although not as obvious as the takedown orders issued to Google’s video site YouTube – where any resulting removal of content is apparent for all to see because the page that previously hosted the infringing video explains what has happened – notices requesting the Google search engine remove links to infringing MP3 files are by no means uncommon. Indeed, Google has previously discussed that kind of takedown notice (mainly to complain about the labels trying their luck on occasion), and then there was that time when the whole piratebay.org site was temporarily removed from the Google system in error while someone was dealing with a copyright owner’s takedown notice.
As for the list of home page links in the BPI’s document, the notice clearly follows a set format, and that section seems to simply be a summary of the sites that appear in the longer list of specific content links above it – ie that list is there for information, not because the BPI is asking Google to remove said content sharing websites from their search results completely.
So, all in all, possibly a bit of a non-story, though for those not directly involved in the DMCA takedown process, it is still interesting to see the documents used by copyright owners. The one that has created so much chatter this week is at this URL:
chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=40373
