HBO Asks Google to Take Down VLC Media Player Link in DMCA Notice

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HBO Asks Google to Take Down VLC Media Player Link in DMCA Notice

In an effort to take down pirated copies of “Game of Thrones” from the Internet, HBO has also included a link to a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement.

 

HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.

Day in and day out copyright holders send hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.

During the past month alone copyright holders asked Google to remove 14,855,269 URLs from its search results. Unfortunately, not all of these requests are legitimate.

In some cases the notices are flagged as false because the content has already been removed from the original site.

Usually these notices ask Google to get rid of links to pirate sites, but for some reason the cable network also wants Google to remove a link to the highly popular open source video player VLC.

Pirate VLC?

The URL in question belongs to the torrent site TorrentPortal but as can be seen here, it doesn’t link to any infringing content.

The same DMCA notice also lists various other links that don’t appear to link to HBO content, including a lot of porn related material, Ben Harper’s album Give Till It’s Gone, Naruto, free Java applets and Prince of Persia 5.