Critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act got some ammunition—not to mention a laugh—last month, when Warner Bros. Entertainment embarrassingly asked Google to take down hundreds of copyright-infringing websites, only to later realize that it had included legitimate sites and some of the company’s own official pages. General counsel say that the blunder dredges up questions about whether the current notice and takedown system is working for both copyright owners and service providers.
Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides a notice and takedown process that allows copyright owners, like WB, to protect their works from online infringement. On Aug. 18, WB, via its hired DMCA agent Vobile, sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google listing over 300 allegedly infringing sites. As tech blog TorrentFreak discovered, legitimate domains were targeted, such as an Amazon page selling “The Dark Knight” and an official IMDb page for “Batman Begins.” Also listed were some of WB’s own official websites for movies such as “The Matrix.”
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