Oops, Warner Brothers Accidentally Flags Own Site As Illegal

It has been suggested in the past that the systems used by companies to detect copyright infringed content can be a bit overzealous, and that sometimes certain things that should not get flagged are flagged as illegal as a result of that. In fact just recently, Warner Brothers had their own website flagged as illegal.

Apparently this request was filed on behalf of Warner Brothers by a company called Vobile, who actually helps other companies file for hundreds of thousands of takedown requests a month. The request basically saw Vobile flag Warner Brothers’ website as containing copyrighted content, and asked Google to remove links to it as a result.

It seems that Warner Brothers weren’t the only legitimate website that got flagged. A report from TorrentFreak also revealed that other websites such as Amazon, Sky, and IMDB got flagged as well. According to TorrentFreak, these kind of errors are pretty common due to the systems used by these companies to detect copyrighted content, which like we said earlier, can be a bit overzealous in their detection.

Thankfully for the websites affected, Google decided not to remove these links after reviewing the takedown requests, but as TorrentFreak points out, perhaps these algorithms should have whitelisted certain websites to begin with.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Legal, Piracy