In recent years, Google has had to process an incredible number of takedown requests, aimed at ‘pirate’ sites in search results.
While most of these notices do indeed list links to copyright-infringing content, not all do.
Every week we see obvious errors, where sites such as IMDb, Wikipedia, Justice.gov, and NASA are targeted. By now we ignore most of these mistakes but in some instances, we take them personally.
That’s also the case for a DMCA takedown request Google received a few days ago. This notice claims to identify several problematic URLs that allegedly infringe the copyrights of Disney’s hit series The Mandalorian.
TorrentFreak Targeted
This is not unexpected, as The Mandalorian was the most pirated TV show of last year, as we reported in late December. However, we didn’t expect to see our article as one of the targeted links in the notice.
Apparently, the news that The Mandalorian is widely pirated – which was repeated by dozens of other publications – is seen as copyright infringement? Needless to say, we wholeheartedly disagree. This is not the way.
Takedown Protest
We will certainly put up a fight if Google decides to remove the page. At the time of writing, this has yet to happen. The search engine currently lists the takedown request as ‘pending,’ which likely means that there will be a manual review.
The good news is that Google is usually pretty good at catching overbroad takedown requests. This is also true for TorrentFreak articles that were targeted previously, including our coverage on the Green Book screener leak.
Not Disney
Finally, it’s worth noting that this takedown request doesn’t come from Disney, as one might expect. Instead, it was sent by the company GFM Film, which doesn’t immediately ring a bell.
At first, we thought that the German camera company GFM could have something to do with it, as they worked on The Mandalorian. However, earlier takedown notices from the same sender protected the film “The Last Witness,” which is linked to the UK company GFM Film Sales.
Since we obviously don’t want to falsely accuse anyone, we’re not pointing fingers. What we know for sure, however, is that our news article didn’t host or link to any infringing content.
