Sony displays its own page for repeated copyright violations

It has long been part of everyday life for movie studios to act against copyright infringement, usually using automatisms such as bots. That means deletes don’t always hit the right one – here’s an example of how things can go wrong. It’s an endless cat-and-mouse game, but the content owners persist.

What is meant here, of course, is the perpetual battle against copyrighted content providers, where millions of takedown requests are sent every day. As TorrentFreak writes, one can certainly discuss the effectiveness of the procedure according to the specifications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), in any case, it helps little if companies target their own pages.

Sony vs Sony

That’s exactly what happened to Sony Pictures. The Japanese electronics giant’s film studio sent a takedown request to Google on behalf of Sony Pictures Network India, demanding the removal of a total of 34 links. That in itself would be anything but unusual, had the platform in question not been SonyLIV. This is a streaming service of the company’s Indian subsidiary.

The takedown request from anti-piracy service provider Marks can be objected to several allegedly pirated series and films, hardly needing to explain at this point that the content was, of course, completely legal. Such “false positives”, ie completely legal content that was wrongly recognized in this case, keep happening, and bots that pass the wrong message are almost always responsible for this.

In this case, however, things were even worse, as the takedown marked SonyLIV as a “piracy” platform in general. However, the consequences were not far-reaching, because in most cases (with the exception of two links) Google recognized the error and did not comply with the removal requests.