Music Group Celebrates Millions of ‘Pointless’ Piracy Takedown Notices

[Matrix]

The Association of Independent Music has teamed up with anti-piracy outfit MUSO to help its members remove infringing links from the Internet. The early results are promising, with five million takedown requests in a few months. However, on close inspection, it appears that they're all excited about nothing.

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) represents the interests of more than 800 independent music companies in the UK.

With online copyright infringement as one of the major threats, the organization also offers assistance on the anti-piracy front.

Earlier this year, AIM teamed up with anti-piracy tracking outfit MUSO to help its members remove pirated links from the web. With MUSO’s automatic takedown service, the labels can remove infringing URLs with minimal effort.

This week AIM sent out a press release showing how much has been achieved over the past four months. The results, shared by AIM’s Head of Legal & Business Affairs Gee Davy are impressive indeed.

“AIM’s partnership with MUSO began in May this year, and to see 5 million takedowns achieved already reflects the speed and efficiency with which MUSO has covered the catalogs across the independent music community,” Davy notes.

“Our members report that they are delighted with the service, which not only protects their releases from online piracy, but creates a visual dashboard to track piracy and protection activity in real time.”

While the comments suggest that pirated content was pulled offline, the reality appears to be quite different.

The press release doesn’t mention it, but, from what we can see, the five million takedown requests were (nearly) all targeted at Google. This means that no infringing content was taken down there, only search results.

Looking more closely at all the takedown requests MUSO sent to Google, on behalf of AIM, an even more disturbing picture emerges.

Google’s Transparency Report confirms that AIM sent close to five million ‘pirate’ URLs to the search engine. However, as it turns out, the vast majority of all reported URLs were not removed. And for a good reason.

Most of the links that were reported are simply not in Google’s search index. So, logically, there is nothing to remove.

 

Not removed
 

 

This also means that MUSO and AIM shouldn’t refer to these as removed links, or even takedown notices. These are reports of “non-existent” search results.

While Google previously noted that it accepts takedown notices for these types of URLs in some cases, which could end up on some sort of preemptive blacklist, there is more reason for concern.

Not only are most of the reported links missing from Google’s search results, they don’t always link to anything infringing on the pirate sites either.

Here’s a random sample that was taken from one of the recent takedown requests. This shows search results on a Zooqle proxy in various languages, which appears to be automated.

 

Takedown request
 

 

As mentioned before, these links were never indexed by Google. However, even the torrent site in question doesn’t return any infringing content, as the searches in question return no results.

 

No results
 

 

The above suggests that most of these takedown efforts are rather pointless. The URLs are not in Google’s index and even if they were, many would not point to infringing content.

To us, it appears that many of these notices are automatically generated by using variations of search strings on pirate sites, whether these point to actual pirated content or not. This is something we have spotted before.

This makes it easy to get to 5 million ‘takedowns’ in four months, of course, but it is rather futile.

TorrentFreak asked both AIM and MUSO for a comment yesterday. Both confirmed receipt of our inquiry, but at the time of publication, we have yet to receive a response to our questions.

 

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[steven36]

Zooqle follows DMCA too so they was most likely removed by Zoogle 1st  and Google didn't need to remove it, because it was already removed I can dl it  no problem without even using p2p ... the whole Digital Album MATTIEL LP or just that song that's not even the album that must of been a leak before the album even came out. The Album came out Oct 2017 on the internet it's almost a year old the song most likely leaked before it, once the album comes out no one just wants  1 song much.

 

Edit : I found a torrent for the whole album but it  don't have any seeds  but i can download it without torrent a few different ways. Heck only way i use Google to find music would be a last resort  I found  working downloads  in 4 different places without Google's help.

 

 

You can listen to it for free at there website  and idm will dl in 128 kb/s mp3

https://mattiel.bandcamp.com/track/cass-tech

 

But i found it in 320 kb/s and 16 bit flac other places ,

[steven36]

 Google Report: 99.95 Percent Of DMCA Takedown Notices Are Bot-Generated Bullshit Buckshot

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170223/06160336772/google-report-9995-percent-dmca-takedown-notices-are-bot-generated-bullshit-buckshot.shtml

 

What  MUSO  does is send out Auto takedowns they dont check to see if music is there or not, it works for more popular stuff , but it's no way it will work for indie music

Quote

 

Key features of this new service include:

• content protection
• automatic takedowns
• an online dashboard that will allow content owners to see all piracy protection activity for their content.

 

http://www.musicindie.com/aim-partners-with-muso/

 

indie music is hard to find anyway because uploaders rather upload something that will keep seeds , so if you don't no were to look you want find it  . No body is going to buy music from a unheard of group unless they  heard it somewhere before YouTube, Streaming service ,  or one of the indie sites that post free legal music .I want even pirate nothing i never listened too before .So AIM is wasting there money Most people can't find it a year after it leaks on the internet noway . You want even find a itunes release leaked on the web of unknowns like MATTIEL.. just maybe you will find some 320 kb/s mp3s  it's the  same with other indie groups. That's why so many people use legal streaming services to get there music these services are really great to find indie  music on .  Companies like MUSO should be banned from the internet for taking these people that's just  starting out money  but the EU passed laws were promotes this kind of crap. let the industry keep thanking Google is the only way to  find music they can go to hell with MUSO.  They should know better because the only way they started selling music again was steaming services and people who hear  it on there buy vinyls because they collect them .CDs don't hardly sell anymore.