Takedown Piracy is a copyright enforcement outfit that works on behalf of porn companies; they sent thousands of takedown notices to Google demanding the censorship of search-results for links to pages that contained the word "pure," "rebound," "lipstick," and other common words, including several Github pages that had nothing to do with their clients' movies.
The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows anyone to demand Internet censorship without offering any proof of copyright infringement, and provides no real penalties for entities who abuse this process by using overbroad searches or maliciously targeting non-infringing sites.
The above are just a few examples from a single takedown notice which can be viewed on ChillingEffects. It makes disappointing reading.
In Takedown Piracy’s defense the company has sent 39.6 million URL notices to Google since 2011. However, that will be of little comfort to the many legitimate projects which are now harder to find due to the company’s errors.
Taking a wider look at Google’s Transparency Report, one discovers that Github is being targeted on a regular basis by a wide range of copyright holders. Few if any bother to send a notice to Github itself. If they did they might make few mistakes, but carpet-bombing Google is much easier, quicker and cheaper.
Google Porn Takedowns Carpet Bomb Github [Andy/Torrentfreak]
