The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) recently made a request for Google to blacklist and remove the homepages of a number of 'pirate sites' that offer links to pirated content, reports TorrentFreak. Google refused the request, by the body that represents six of the major studios in Hollywood, likely because the takedown notices were viewed as being too broad in scope.
Google regularly receives DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders in an effort to make pirated movies and music harder to search for online. Putting numbers in perspective, music industry groups the RIAA and BPI are among the most active senders, collectively pushing for over 170 million URLs to be taken down in recent years.
In comparison, the MPAA's figures were fairly modest, having only asked Google to remove 19,288 links from search results in the past. However, its most recent DMCA request is slightly different to previous ones, asking Google last week to blacklist entire homepages of a total of 81 sites which allegedly infringe copyright - instead of providing specific URLs to where allegedly pirated content is linked from. The 81 sites named were predominately torrent and streaming sites, and the MPAA's push was seen as a deliberate strategy, though Google was not entirely receptive, as most of the takedown requests were denied.
The online search leader took "no action" against 60 of the 81 submitted URLs, including casa-cinema.net, freemoviestorrents.com and solarmovie.is. Although Google did no clarify why the decisions were made, TorrentFreak suggests that it is possibly due to the homepages of these websites only indirectly offering links to pirated content. Also notably it requires more than one click from the homepages to reach the actual copyright infringing contents.
"We've designed a variety of policies to comply with the requirements of the law, while weeding out false positives and material that's too remote from infringing activity," a Google spokesperson said. It would appear that, at least for now, Google will not be making any major actions in blacklisting pirated website domains just yet. It is clear that MPAA's request was far too broad in Google's eyes.
