Over the past several months Microsoft and many other copyright holders have built up a dubious track record when it comes to DMCA takedown notices. It wouldn’t be hard, for example, to exclude the keywords “Open Office” to minimize instances of collateral damage. However, based on the URLs we see that few attempts have been made to prevent this particular error from happening. However, thanks to the overbroad filtering techniques of Microsoft’s DMCA takedown vendors many of these have now been stripped from Google and other search engines, Bing included.Īdmittedly, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are related terms, so mistakes can happen. OpenOffice itself lists several official torrents on its download page and many of these are re-distributed across torrent sites. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) include links to OpenOffice downloads, mostly on BitTorrent sites. A quick search reveals that more than a dozen notices sent in June alone (e.g. The example illustrated above is not an isolated incident either. The notices, which contain references to unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office, also list many links with Apache’s open source office suite OpenOffice in the title. The latter happened with several recent DMCA takedown requests sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft. Their often automated anti-piracy systems regularly trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, sometimes from direct competitors.

While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests sent by Microsoft and other copyright holders are correct.

In addition the software giant also strips infringing links from its own search engine Bing. Microsoft has been one of the most active senders and over the past month alone has asked Google to remove more than a million infringing URLs from its indexes.

Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google in the hope of making pirated content harder to find.

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