Photo by Sapo Essay

A batch of DMCA notices from Google arrived today saying various sites had been removed from Google Search results.

We hadn’t been contacted in regard of any of these sites, so presumably Google is targeted because it is easier and quicker to get content removed from Google, than it is to attempt to assert a copyright claim directly with diverse web hosting providers, even though our contact details are trivially easy to obtain for these matters.

As it happens, in these cases, we would have taken down the sites immediately on request, and probably will in response to the Google emails.

However I fear it shows that the copyright holders have got more than what they want, an Internet where controversial or difficult material is immediately removed from the biggest search engine just by simply asserting it is copyright infringing.

The underlying issue here is that Google is a monopoly search provider, and all the big English language search providers are under US jurisdiction, and thus the same bad law (DMCA).

Time to finish that report I was writing on this issue and email it to my MP.