Big Content is using piracy take-downs on Google to spike bad reviews.
According to the Verge, British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) group listed a series of pages that it wanted removed from Google Search. Three of the requests pointed instead to reviews of Drake's album Take Care, one by The A.V. Club and one by About.com writer Henry Adaso.
Adaso wants to know how his review could be removed after a DMCA complaint. He thinks that it can only be because comments on both his 50-word article and that of The A.V. Club contain links to an extremely negative review and that Universal was trying to scrub mentions of it from the web.
The Verge thinks that this might have been a mistake but it doesn't reflect well on BPI or Universal, who clearly didn't look through their requests very closely. But it also shows an alarming trend from Google which says it plans to downrank sites that get too many take-down requests.
It is possible that some sites could effectively be kicked off the web if Big Content makes another mistake or, worse, starts doing it deliberately.
More here.
Thursday, 16 August 2012 11:35
Big Content uses “piracy” to pull bad reviews
Written by Nick Farrell
Google take-down is censorship
Nick Farrell
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