The Perils of DMCA Take Down Notice Automation (Again)

It seems like you can’t turn around these days without another embarrassing situation arising from careless DMCA take-down notice protocols. In this case, it appears that a representative of movie studios has issued a series of take down demands calling for, in some instances, the removal of TV show footage from the website of the network that carries said TV show.

As reported by TorrentFreak.com, a take-down notice filed on behalf of 20th Century Fox identifies the original work URL for the show “How I Met Your Mother” as http://www.cbs.com/shows/how_i_met_your_mother/, and yet, later in the same notification to Google that this original work URL appears in (fourth on the list of offending URLs, specifically) this same URL appears as an infringing URL.

I’m not going to name the company representing these studios here (the name is in the TorrentFreak article linked to above), but I will (AGAIN!) emphasize the moral of the story here: Check your work, people!

This sort of mistake is why DMCA Force has a human being review every potential infringement identified by our software. Sure, it takes more time to do it that way, but at least we can confident that we’ll never have to explain to a client why we had Google remove their website from its SERPS for allegedly violating their own copyrights….