Movie studios keep asking Google to remove pirated content on their own computers

Google search results sometimes include a tiny message at the bottom that some sites have been removed for sharing pirated content.

Those requests come from movie studios and other content rights holders who manually submit links to be taken down.

What’s pretty hilarious is movie studios have been submitting takedown requests that include links to pirated content stored on their own desktop computers.

Here’s Universal Pictures France asking Google to take down files for Jurassic World hosted at ‘http://127.0.0.1’ — which is the system’s ‘localhost’ address — where a BitTorrent client appears to be running:

NBC Universal asked Google to take down a lot of links from its own machines apparently sharing 47 Ronkin:

Workman Publishing tried to take down 108 links to a pirated Life of Pi audio book, all hosted on its own computers:

If you start digging, there are a number of similar requests in Chilling Effects‘ database for both ‘localhost’ and ‘127.0.0.1’ links.

The submissions are likely innocent mistakes due in part to the actual hunt for infringing content, but shows just how little effort the movie studios are putting into submitting takedown requests. They just scan some IP addresses, bundle up a wall of links and lob them over the fence to Google for takedown.

Perhaps next time disable your torrent clients before submitting a takedown?

First takedown link spotted by @johl