How Law Firms Generate Pirate Links for DMCA Notices
https://sp-security.blogspot.com/2017/02/how-law-firms-generate-pirate-links-for.html
Today’s
story will be about the site found at MP3Toys.xyz – we would understand
if you have never heard of it, because it is not popular at all. The
surprising fact is that it somehow managed to become the second most
complained about pirate website ever, with Google receiving about 50m
DMCA notices in just over 6 months (more than about The Pirate Bay).
The explanation can be partly found in Google’s Transparency Report, which is a complete record of every DMCA notice the search engine receives and currently lists more than two billion URL takedowns. Google normally puts the biggest offenders at the top of the list. Indeed, you can find the 4shared file-hosting portal at the first place, which is normal, because it has been out there for years, enjoys massive traffic and stores countless files. However, the second line is occupied by a service that nobody has ever heard of – MP3Toys.xyz, which somehow received a seriously impressive 49.5m takedown requests.
One should admit that MP3Toys is clearly a pirate platform enabling users to download and stream unlicensed MP3s. The site appeared in Google’s databases in the middle of 2016, and the search giant has already received requests to remove 49.5 million URLs from its indexes. This is quite weird, because Alexa rank for the site is somewhat 25 millionth. In other words, the site has no significant traffic.
It turned out that one of the anti-piracy companies is simply making things up with the DMCA requests. APDIF do Brasil appears to have an unusual fascination with MP3Toys and sends millions of notices to Google – most of them bogus. The problem is that APDIF simply tries to guess the URLs where MP3Toys stores its content, and whatever address they enter shows up in the browser – because the service creates it at the moment of inquiry. The content on these auto-generated pages cycles, but it never relates to the searches being put in. In other words, MP3Toys randomly generates a page of music that has nothing to do with the URL input, the anti-piracy company logs it as an infringement and sends a complaint to Google, which has to “remove” these random URLs from its search results despite the fact that they were never in them in the first place.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.
The explanation can be partly found in Google’s Transparency Report, which is a complete record of every DMCA notice the search engine receives and currently lists more than two billion URL takedowns. Google normally puts the biggest offenders at the top of the list. Indeed, you can find the 4shared file-hosting portal at the first place, which is normal, because it has been out there for years, enjoys massive traffic and stores countless files. However, the second line is occupied by a service that nobody has ever heard of – MP3Toys.xyz, which somehow received a seriously impressive 49.5m takedown requests.
One should admit that MP3Toys is clearly a pirate platform enabling users to download and stream unlicensed MP3s. The site appeared in Google’s databases in the middle of 2016, and the search giant has already received requests to remove 49.5 million URLs from its indexes. This is quite weird, because Alexa rank for the site is somewhat 25 millionth. In other words, the site has no significant traffic.
It turned out that one of the anti-piracy companies is simply making things up with the DMCA requests. APDIF do Brasil appears to have an unusual fascination with MP3Toys and sends millions of notices to Google – most of them bogus. The problem is that APDIF simply tries to guess the URLs where MP3Toys stores its content, and whatever address they enter shows up in the browser – because the service creates it at the moment of inquiry. The content on these auto-generated pages cycles, but it never relates to the searches being put in. In other words, MP3Toys randomly generates a page of music that has nothing to do with the URL input, the anti-piracy company logs it as an infringement and sends a complaint to Google, which has to “remove” these random URLs from its search results despite the fact that they were never in them in the first place.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.
