Warner Bros. Listed Its Own Website in Takedown Request

The movie studio is never tired of trying to prevent its infringed content from showing up in search results, but recently it went as far as to asking Google to take down its own website, claiming that some of its pages contain illegal material.

Warner Bros. believes that Google facilitates finding pirated content and wants it to remove websites like The Pirate Bay from search results entirely. The movie studio is doing its best by reporting pirated content to Google and asking it to be removed from the results. Like the entire entertainment industry, Warner Bros. intensified its efforts and thus far it has flagged over 4m allegedly infringing links. The problem is that not all of the reports are accurate – and this week’s example proves this.

Through its anti-piracy partner Vobile, the Hollywood studio asked the search engine to censor its own URLs from the search results, including the official Warner page of the 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight and another Warnerbros.com URL for the sci-fi classic The Matrix. So, Vobile asks the search giant to remove this link from search results acting on behalf of the studio. A few days earlier, a similar takedown notice targeted Warner’s website, claiming that the official page for The Lucky One is infringing its copyrights.

In this case, Warner Bros. only hurts itself with such takedown requests. But the problem is that its own website is not the only erroneously targeted domain. It also targets a link to the Amazon store, selling or renting a copy of The Dark Knight, as well as a link to Batman Begins in the Sky Cinema store, long with the movie’s official IMDb page.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.