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...

Why Mandatory Web Filtering is stupid....

There are people out there who praise web filtering, and say how It's the greatest thing to protect children online. There are others who say "these non-child friendly sites, why do we even allow them?" and mandate mandatory filtering for all, such as Australia and it's mandatory filtering program called the "great Aussie firewall" which was stopped a few years ago due to complaints that it would block video game sites...
You read it right... Gaming sites..  Censorship is never right, even if kids are the reason for it. Already many states have mandatory regulation in public libraries to block sites found "harmful  to minors", as vague as that seems. The statues are vague and have no specific content that must be blocked, so they basically allow the libraries to chose what sites are harmful to minors to block them.  This extends into schools, including colleges as well in many cases. I tried 2 filters, and both gave me complete control over what sites to block...
Talk about scary ways they could be abused to block out something the person running the school/library doesn't like.  So what's the whole thing about gaming sites being harmful to minors, anyway?

One of the internet filters I tried is a free one called OpenDNS. I also looked at another site called "free internet", which also blocks gaming sites by default...  OpenDNS is not just web filtering, it is a free DNS service to reroute traffic from dangerous (virus) sites that happens to offer a free internet filtering program. I tried it out.... And was shocked how much dubious, not so harmful to minors type stuff was included with full filtering. The following categories of stuff were filtered:

Gaming sites
Sexuality oriented sites
Porn sites
File sharing sites
Web mail
Forums (!)
Gambling
and some others I can't remember now..

Most of these could be considered stuff you don't want kids to see, but gaming sites, forums, webmail, why are they even on the list? So I got curious. I decided to sign up with OpenDNS's free filtering service to test 50 or so sites to see what ones are blocked, assuming I was browsing the internet where OpenDNS was forced down my throat due to mandatory filtering laws (hypothetical ones).  The results were, well stupid...  Number 1, a ton of gaming sites got blocked, including doomworld, planetquake,planethalflife, rockstar.com, planetduke, blood.com, and the site for my favorite video game, Deus Ex.   But even worse the following gaming sites which report on gaming news were also blocked, Rock Paper shotgun, Gamepolitics.com, g4tv.com, kotaku.com. Then you get the downright retarded entries which were blocked for no good reason whatsoever: Fpscreator.com, TesNexus.com, 3dgamers archive, filefront,com, bioware.com (!),  planetdescent.com (!) , and the site of a free descent 2 source port, d2x-xl.   But almost ALL sites for video games that are quite controversial were allowed by this filter, including duke4.net, fear3.co.uk, callofduty.com, seriouszone.com, and others, yet Planetdescent and d2x-xl's sites get blocked? Descent is pretty much the coolest and least violent series of FPS games, you fly around destroying robots, yet the big site for duke nukem 3d, which approaches x-rated terms in violence, is allowed?  Then sites like  rock paper shotgun, and kotaku get blocked for being gaming news sites, what good reason is there for that? Then comes the ones that "really" piss me off, Bioware.com, TesNexus.com, and Gamepolitics.com. Gamepolitics is a game related politics site, not a violent games site, bioware makes RPG games that are mildly violent with one or 2 with same sex relationships that got ripped on Fox News (Mass Effect), besides that their games are less about gore and more about strategy, yet their entire site gets blocked for 1 controversial game? (that shouldn't be, none  the less!). Then you get tesnexus.com, a modding site for a tame yet really good RPG games in the elder scrolls series. Why block that?  None of those games are really that violent at all. Fallout3Nexus, for Fallout 3 wasn't blocked and it's the most violent rpg ever made? Add in 2 file hosting sites for games, Filefront.com, and gamers.org, both blocked. Why? Are they afraid that some kid will download some mods for a game he probably doesn't own... Why filter out files. You need the game and a PC to even play them. Librarians would probably catch the kid trying to burn a cd with  the game demo or attempting to play it in the library. For mods, you need the damn game the mod is for to play it, and a demo won't do. Patches, same thing. Why block file sites whatsoever. There is no reason why, unless the people thought game file hosting would lead to school shootings, or something utterly stupid like  that. It makes no sense whatsoever to block this way, PERIOD.

Other types of sites blocked are web mail sites like gmail and yahoo mail, which have absolutely no reason to block. I had yahoo mail since I was 20 for gods sake. Why filter that out? You then get all the file hosting sites online like 4shared, mediafire, rapidshare, dropbox, etc. All of these have a reputation for hosting pirate files, and they do. But they also host plenty of completely legal files, including mods for video games. There have been plenty of links to video game files on sites like this, posted on forums. Sometimes the only way to be able to host a file is to use a service like this, and simply blanketing them as "pirate" sites is stupid, but unfortunately, it makes no sense to block the host, when you could block the actual warez sites with the links to the 200 files you need to download the pirated stuff, because without that you will never find all 200 files with a simple internet search due to the fact that each link to one of these sites has a completely different account character list and file name, and the character list is a random string of characters, 30 long, that makes it almost impossible to find one file after you found the previous file through a web search.

Then you get the complete ban on social networking, which is well... Stupid.  Almost every single big social networking site, such as myspace, youtube, facebook, etc, are all blocked and made it look like someone was trying to redirect me to a fraudulent site,  to boot. This will  scare people who try to go to these sites to make it look like their infected with redirection malware which normally does this kind of  thing, with an Error box in chrome  that fooled even me, thinking that some malware had infected my PC when I tried to visit youtube, until I read it closer. I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind the panic on social networking. Sure, a kid could become obssessed with them, and they give out personal info, but as long as you know what you are doing, you're fine.  But the  youtube thing pisses me off. Youtube's primary focus is video streaming, NOT social networking, unlike myspace and facebook. By demanding these things get blocked, the mandatory filtering groups will be cutting off all lets plays, all walkthroughs, and tons of other stuff that simply are not even close to harmful to minors.  Now, none of this was meant as an attack on OpenDNS, I just think if they mandate filtering in the US, and use something similar to OpenDNS, in terms of site types to block, they will end up blocking TONS of sites that aren't even remotely harmful to minors, and let a lot in too. Filtering is not the answer, really.