Warner Bros. Demands Copyright Takedown Of Its Own Websites

It’s like that scene in a bad 1990s straight-to-video psychological crime thriller where the cop runs a suspect’s fingerprints — only to find he’s the suspect! Except now it’s a major movie studio flagging websites that it created and owns as copyright pirates.

TorrentFreak points to a recent Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice sent by Warner Bros. to Google, demanding the search engine remove links to dozens of websites that are allegedly violating Warner Bros.’ copyright on movies like The Dark Knight and The Matrix.

And of course there are the usual boneheaded mistakes you find on these sorts of notices, including demands to delist things like the Amazon.com page for The Dark Knight, or the RogerEbert.com review page, IMDB listing, and the Sky TV info page for Batman Begins.

Then there are the two truly idiotic takedown requests:

Yup, Warner Bros. flagged the official home video sites for The Dark Knight and The Matrix as DMCA violations. And this isn’t the first time it’s made a mistake like this. TorrentFreak notes that only a few days earlier WB sent a takedown demand for its own site for the risible 2012 Zac Efron romance The Lucky One, but maybe the company was trying to do a public service by scouring the internet of references to that film.

The Warner Bros. goof joins a long list of moronic DMCA takedown demands, including:

Columbia Pictures’ attempt to scrub the web of any video with the word “pixels” in the title.
Universal’s attempt to delist the IMDB page for Furious 7
A DMCA claim trying to take down the entirety of Skype, Dropbox, and Whatsapp.
Multiple movie studios demanding the removal of a free documentary about The Pirate Bay.
Paramount accusing unrelated forum discussions of hosting pirated copies of Ghost and Clueless.

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