Google lists thousands of takedown notices of Fraudulent "Infringing" Content

So I was reading how google would put any site lower in their search results based on copyright takedown notices given to them by copyright holders. On an article about this (not the linked one), there was a link to this google site showing how many takedown notices google receives per month and what sites are complained about. Most are free file hosting sites, and warez sites, but some big surprises crept in..

First, nearly half of the 2000 links I looked through when browsing page 1 to the page where the 2000 link was posted, were porn sites. A lot of blogging sites crept in as well, and so did facebook, twitter, and other social networking. However, their have been copyright takedowns of gaming file hosting sites as well, probably fraudulent ones.

Here are 10 screenshots showing what sites were given fraudulent takedowns, all circled in red.. These results were set per month so the URLS listed were all complained about in 1 month.

I saw quite a bit of blogger listed, mainly because there are blogger blog with pirated content on them, but wordpress? Sounds like a fraudulent claim, because I refuse to believe that wordpress hosts 763 URLS that have infringing content on them.

Yahoo? WTF!  It's a search engine and doesn't actually host anything that could be considered pirated or infringing. With 1808 "Url's" to boot. I refuse to believe that this is a valid takedown notice, mainly because besides yahoo mail (which nothing pirated can be hosted on), and my.yahoo, what else do you have?

No We have the 335 Facebook takedown notices. Now on facebook, there might be some infringing content, but 335? Sounds awfully fradulent to me. I refuse to believe that 335 URLS have been found per month with obvious infringing content.  Same thing with the below twitter.com takedowns. Twitter doesn't even allow people to host anything but file links with very short descriptions and short 30 character "tweets", where are the 333 twitter infringing URLS? Made up, that's where!

Yet another fraudulent search engine takedown notice with 274 URLS of "infringing content" that is supposedly on a site that can't even host that stuff. Google.com has search results and the mere idea that they are linking to infringing material might cause these "takedown notices" but there actually isn't any material on google that is infringing, and notice how this said "google.com", as in the search engine, not youtube, not gmail, not anything else but the search engine itself... Sounds really fishy to me.

Now we got 239 quite possibly fraudulent takedown notices of content on Scribd.com, a document hosting site.  I've never heard of scribd.com even being used to host copyrighted material, and while these results could be genuine, I'm not so sure... Moving on...

Now HERE is the one that pisses me off. Gamefront, formally known as filefront, is a gaming file hosting site, a really big one. It has thousands of video game demos, patches, mods, etc. Not once have I ever encountered anything pirated being hosted there... And I have never even heard of it being associated with piracy, but yet we get 232 takedown notices per month on a gaming file hosting site which probably deletes anything that could be infringing. Are these legit? Hell NO! These sounds fraudulent beyond belief. It's like 2 copyright holders and 2 more organizations insisted on filing takedown notices on all legal files, because If you believe that filefront/gamefront has mostly legal files, how the hell can they have 239 pirated URL's discovered per month? It sounds really fishy, fishy like an attempt to take down mods or something like that...

Now we get 192 takedown notices for dailymotion.com, a video sharing site. Whether these takedowns are legit or not remains to be seen, but judging by youtube and it's thousands of fraudulent takedown notices done by people trying to make a buck off of innocent uploaders, you really cannot trust these to be genuine, can you?

Another yahoo.com search result... Moving on...

Finally, another 66 livejournal URL's being "found" per month, by 26 quite possibly bogus copyright holders, and 19 "organizations". I have never heard of livejournal as a source for infringing stuff, and I refuse to believe that 66 have been found per month.....

What we have here, is an example of Copyright Fraud being done on a large scale by people trying to shut down sites that host LEGAL, Non-infringing content. Not once have I discovered any infringing (full games,etc) files on Filefront, or infringing content on Google itself, or on yahoo or wordpress  or on Scribd, etc. Infringing documents maybe but 239 per month? Yeah Right!!! It seem like most of these circled ones are quite questionable at least and obviously fraudulent at worst. And to bring up another completely different subject : Look at all the porn sites listed.... Is copyright law being abused to shut down porn?

It looks like it is, maybe part of the GOP's "War on Porn" that they announced recently. If the morons in the right wing can over abuse copyright  law to take down Porn, then they can abuse it to take down any site that gets their panties in a bunch (Porn, Violent Games, Modding Sites, Youtube, Social Networking), because I don't believe that Porn is infringing, hell I don't see how 16,000+ notices on tons of  porn sites are all infringing on someones copyright. I see how they are all fraudulent to censor them too..

If these results are the ones that will all be listed lower in the search results, then the internet has already been censored, and it will only get worse...

How the GOP's war on Porn could be used to silence violent gaming sites.

Looking through 1 of the 4 sites I use to find "controversial" stuff online, techdirt.com, I came across more info on a ridiculous porn/obscenity blocking/filtering plan that Mitt Romney and the GOP are sponsoring to mandate filtering of porn on all new computers being manufactured.  The article is here.  The problem I have with this is 2 fold...   1) Obscenity is very broadly defined, and has been used in laws restricting games to adult based on things that fit the 3 prong test with violence substituted for sexual content, many many times. The definition of Obscenity is below, taken from the wikipedia page I found while searching for it.

"The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."


Now lets look at info on the the law CA tried to pass in 2006 that got voted down by Scotus in Brown VS EMA, found on this site.  I quote:

 "  AB 1792, as amended, Yee. 
Violent  video games.
   Existing law 
 prohibits the distribution
 of harmful matter, as defined, to minors.  Existing law defines
harmful matter with reference to, among other things, its appeal to
the prurient interest and its depiction of sexual conduct.
   This bill would set forth legislative findings and declarations
regarding the harmful effects of violent video games on minors.  It
would 
  prohibit a person from knowingly distributing or
exhibiting to a minor  any video game that appeals to minors'
morbid interest in violence, that enables the player to virtually
inflict serious injury upon human beings or characters with
substantially human characteristics in a manner that is especially
heinous, atrocious, or cruel, as defined, and that lacks serious
literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.  The
bill would exclude from this 
prohibition  any game in which the visual depiction of violence
occurs as the result of simultaneous competition between 2 or more
players  , as specified.... <BLAH BLAH BLAH>"

Notice how the bill "borrows" the obscenity statute as a guide that CA would use to decide what games would be fined?  The utterly subjective and biased "lacks serious artistic, political, or scientific value for minors" could be used to fine ANY game that offended the judges in CA, and no store would even know what could be fined, leading to the mass taking of any game that has any violent content off the shelves, period. IMHO, this was the reason SCOTUS found  the bill unconstitutional.  Now what does this do with any filtering of Porn or Obscenity being abused to filter violent game sites? 

If the CA bill abused the obscenity statute to  try to give CA the right to accidentally or purposely cause a chain reaction of stores taking violent games off the shelf, by fining games that offend them, what's to stop the government filter to be abused, to filter out sites for games that have some sexual content, Duke3d, etc?  Even if the filter itself is put into filter Porn sites, you saw from my previous article how filters many times also block gaming sites anyway.. And stupid ones like ones for tame games rather than violent ones. The Libraries of Conservative states already filter out any and all "harmful to minors" things which could be abused by libraries to filter out violent game sites.  What's to stop the GOP to filter out other "undesirables" like sites for violent games, file sharing, web mail, file hosting, blogs, video game modding sites, secretly in a filter that is publicly advertised as an anti-porn filter, but has all things the GOP simply like, like those kinds of sites, put in it's filter, secretly?