The British Recorded Music Industry, BPI Group, has been using Google’s DMCA take down resolution service to remove bad reviews that are available on Google’s search engine about their artists’ music. In a list of entries they wanted delisted from Google’s search engine they included three requests pointing to reviews of Drake’s album Take Care, one by The A.V. Club and one by About.com writer Henry Adaso.
Henry Adaso wants to know how his review could be removed after a DMCA complaint – when it was not breaking the DMCA in any way. 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 that Universal was trying to scrub for Google so music fans will never stumble across it.
Some people have said it is possible that these may be “mistakes” but mistake or not it certainly doesn’t reflect at all well on the integrity of the music industry. Many protested against censorship bills for precisely this reason – companies, corporations and other groups using the banner of Piracy to remove content that they do not like.
It is possible that if Google doesn’t rigorously examine these requests for DMCA take downs from its search engine, that we could see sites delisted for no apparent reason.
