Google: the majority of takedown notices are bogus

Google has filed a submission with the New Zealand government in response to the new law there, which compels ISPs to terminate your Internet connection if you're accused of copyright infringement three times. In its submission, Google discusses its experience with "notice and takedown," which allows people to censor web-pages merely by asserting that they infringe copyright — and they note that this process is routinely abused — check out the numbers they proffer:

In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.

This doesn't surprise me: what did the world's governments expect when they allowed the entertainment industry to talk them into notice-and-takedown? If you create a free, easy, largely consequence-free means for censoring the Internet, that it wouldn't be abused?


Google submission hammers section 92A

(via /.)