A DMCA takedown notice sent to Google from an antipiracy firm has tried to take down some of the most popular legal apps on the Internet.
The notice tries to remove download links server software, office tools, programming language SDKs, and even image editors, all unrelated to the original copyrighted work. Some of the world's biggest software firms are targeted, including AMD, Microsoft's Skype, Java, RedHat, OpenOffice, Apache, Ubuntu, MySQL, WhatsApp, AVG and Opera.
Google checks all DMCA notices for invalid requests, and it is likely that this request from anti-piracy firm Total Wipes Music Group will be rejected. Had it been accepted, then it would brought chaos to the Internet, disabling the ability for users to search for some of the most essential tools for Internet productivity.
It is unknown as to how the takedown list was compiled, and why some of these tools, most have nothing to do with music or piracy, or the copyrighted work in question (the album "In To The Wild – Vol.7" by Aborigeno Music). DMCA takedown lists are usually produced by a software algorithm, along with a "white-list" to prevent false positive. Very little human intervention is needed in producing the list, although human verification, which usually takes place after the software has produced the list, has obviously failed in this instance.
Total Wipes Music Group has since released a statement blaming a software bug for the invalid submissions. The group says that instead of using keywords related to the copyrighted work, much more common keywords such as "downloads" were used to scrape for pirated links, resulting in some of the most popular download links to be added to the DMCA request.
The group has accepted total responsibility for their error.
"It was our fault, no doubts about it," the group admits via an email statement.
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