Letters From Microsoft Accuse BBC Of Copyright Infringement

Max Smolaks,

Automated software thought number 45 was owned by the Windows developer

A number of websites including those belonging to the BBC, CNN, the Huffington Post and Wikipedia have mistakenly been accused of copyright infringement, with automated letters requesting Google remove links to them from its search results.

The copyright “takedown requests” were sent by faulty automated software on behalf of Microsoft, after a bug made it think that the US company held copyright to the number 45.

Automatic process

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), takedown requests can be issued by the copyright holder in order to remove search results that link to material that allegedly infringes copyrights. The process takes about 10 hours from the moment notice is received, and can be fought with counter-notice.

The BBC said its website was falsely identified by software designed to stop illegal sharing of Microsoft’s products. It appeared in the same list as Windows 8 Beta torrent links, alongside pages that originated from Microsoft’s own Bing search engine, US government, TechCrunch and Rotten Tomatoes.

While the British broadcaster and many popular news websites experienced no problems thanks to being in Google’s “trusted” list, many smaller websites were removed from the search index, and are still absent today.

The requests were originally sent in July and due to a software bug seemed to target content which featured the number 45. For example, BBC’s coverage of the day 45 of the Olympic Torch Relay and a Wikipedia article on Caesar’s Civil War, which ended in 45BC, were both classed as infringing Microsoft’s copyright.

A BBC story about music officially distributed through BitTorrent and a Wikipedia page on Britain’s Got Talent also made it into the naughty URL list.

According to TorrentFreak, over the pat year Microsoft has issued nearly 5 million copyright takedown requests.

In May, Google had started to offer statistics on search result takedown requests as part of its Transparency Report. The details available in the report include the names of organisations which have requested search results to be pulled, how many such requests they have made, the information on top targeted domains and other statistics.

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