Geniuses Representing Universal Pictures Ask Google To Delist 127.0.0.1 For Piracy

from the furiously-dumb dept

We recently wrote about a German film distributor that went on a DMCA takedown blitz and managed to send notices for sites that had nothing to do with infringing files (such as IMDB and, er, Techdirt). In a somewhat related story, we learn that representatives of Universal Pictures have likewise gone DMCA happy over infringing versions of movies like Furious 7 and Jurassic World -- even to the point of issuing takedowns not only for the film's IMDB page (for Furious 7), but for "127.0.0.1" for Jurassic World.

And while we’re on the topic of self censorship, it’s worth noting that Universal Pictures also asked Google, in a separate notice, to remove http://127.0.0.1 from the search results. The mistakes were made by the French branch of the movie studio, which only recently began sending takedown notices to Google. The company has reported less than 200 URLs thus far including the mistakes above.

You can see the notice here. 127.0.0.1 is, of course, the IP address a machine uses to refer to itself. It's also known as "localhost." In other words, it basically means "home."
...Should we delist this house from the address books? This is obviously a case of these companies setting up some kind of automated system, working off of an obviously flawed algorithm, that is causing these errors, rather than having real people going through to see if the targets for these takedown notices are actually infringing. Why do we allow this kind of collateral damage in the DMCA system?

Even more ridiculous? The organization representing Universal who sent this notice is TMG, or Trident Media Guard, which is the company that is officially working with the French government on its Hadopi copyright enforcement program. You'd think that a company so closely involved in such issues, working with a major movie studio, might try to be a little more careful about these things. But, of course, when have copyright defenders ever cared about collateral damage like this?

And here's the really crazy part: it's not like this is even particularly rare. Chilling Effects has long lists of DMCA complaints that point to 127.0.0.1. We're talking about a whole lot of armed militias running around utilizing a targeting system that wouldn't be trusted in a snowball fight, never mind in the realm of something as important as speech and communication via the internet. Here are just some of the most recent (many filed by NBC Universal): If we have to live with the DMCA, filers ought at least be forced to take responsibility for their own notices. Pointing back to their own flawed algorithms shouldn't be an excuse -- especially when the requests are so obviously wrong.

Filed Under: 127.0.0.1, copyright, dmca, france, hadopi, localhost, takedown
Companies: google, tmg, universal, universal pictures