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Ukrainian TV station TRK sent a rather bizarre take down request to Google. The company’s anti-piracy partner, Vindex, has asked the search engine to remove a search result that points to 127.0.0.1. Tech-savvy people will immediately recognize that the anti-piracy company has apparently found copyright infringing content on its own server.
While search engines are extremely useful for the average internet user, copyright holders also see this as a major drawback.
The fact that “fake sites” appear in search results has become a source of frustration. As a result, Google and other search engines are faced with a constant stream of DMCA takedown notices.
Google alone has processed over five billion takedown requests and millions of new URLs are reported every week. Although the majority of them correctly point to problematic links, there are also a lot of errors.
Some copyright owners flag perfectly legitimate websites as pirate havens, while others shoot themselves in the foot by targeting their own websites. The latter arrived at the webtoon Toomics subscription service just recently.
Please take 127.0.0.1 offline
This week we saw another problematic DMCA advisory, which is perhaps even worse. TV channel TRK Ukraine asked Google to remove the content hosted on the IP address 127.0.0.1, which is the local host of a device or server.
The request was sent by TKR’s anti-piracy partner Vindex, which essentially marked a file on its own machine. The “forged” link is 127.0.0.1:6878/ace/manifest.m3u. This points to a playlist file, possibly for the P2P streaming platform Ace Stream which is often used to hack content.
“Illegal content”
According to the takedown notice, all links marked “illegally provide external links with which users can access and / or download unauthorized copyrighted material from Football”. This would then include the file on Vindex’s computer.
Since 127.0.0.1 refers to the host computer, Google is technically prompted to delete a file from its servers. A file that does not exist. Needless to say, Google took no action in response.
The above suggests that Vindex may want to take a close look at its deletion bots. The company does not have a great reputation when it comes to DMCA notices. Of all links that were reported to Google, just over 10% were deleted by the search engine.
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