The MPAA, or Motion Picture Association of America, represents six of the major studios in Hollywood and it asked Google to remove homepages of countless “pirate sites” that offer links to pirated movies. Google refused the request for majority of the URLs provided by the MPAA because it viewed the takedown notices as being too broad.
Its normal for Google to receive DMCA notices from copyright holders as piracy of music, movies and TV shows is pretty common online. To put things in perspective, music industry groups like BPI and RIAA have collectively seeked to have more than 170 million URLs taken down over the past few years.
The MPAA’s case is a little different. It had sent a DMCA request to Google last week pointing out 81 homepages which allegedly infringe on their copyrights, the websites primarily include streaming and torrent websites. MPAA didn’t provide URLs where pirated content is linked from rather it wanted to have entire homepages blacklisted.
For 60 of the 81 URLs provided in the DMCA request Google took “no action.” It may be so because the homepages of these websites indirectly offer links to pirated content which often requires more than one click on the homepage.
A spokesperson for Google told TorrentFreak that while the company has many policies to comply with requirements of the law, these policies also help it to separate false positives and “material that’s too remote from infringing activity.”
It looks like Google isn’t going to blacklist such websites even if they indirectly link to any pirated content, at least for now, because evidently it sees such requests as too broad.
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