Hollywood clashes with Google over 'takedown requests'

Several major US copyright holders have sent Californian search engine Google requests to remove notifications of their own takedown requests, complaining that their publication serves as a major directory for pirate content.

The media organisations – including 20th Century Fox and NBC Universal – are worried that one ‘skilled coder’ to use Google’s database of links to illegal content to create a huge pirate search engine.

Illegal content

Google has so far refused to bend to the will of copyright holders - who submit almost 20 million ‘takedown’ notices each month – meaning that the ‘infringing’ DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices are still online, reports copyright news website Torrent Freak.
According to the report, the notices were designed to make illegal content harder to find, but the process used to file the notices unintentionally creates a semi-organised index of links to infringing material.