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Movie studios keep mistakenly reporting their own servers for piracy

Movie studios keep mistakenly reporting their own servers for piracy

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Have you ever walked into a crowded room and smelled something gross and thought, "Man, someone forgot to shower this morning, huh." But then you realize that you forgot to wash the shirt you're wearing and you're actually what smells?

This is like that, but for copyright law.

Scanning through the takedown notices posted to ChillingEffects.org, reporters at The Next Web noticed something strange and frankly sort of embarrassing. In a piracy takedown notice sent to Google last week, Universal Pictures France listed a local address (127.0.0.1:4001) as the illegal source for a copy of Jurassic World — ratting out their own computer for piracy and demanding Google delist it from public search rankings. Basically, they found their own movie on their own system and ran screaming to Google about film piracy.

It turns out, this happens all the time. TNW dug up more than a hundred other cases dating back years, using a simple "localhost" search. It's a sign of how haphazard the reporting process is and how little effort studios make to double-check their takedown requests. But mostly, it's just embarrassing. Sure, you probably had that torrent client open for scanning rather than leaking, but when monitoring is that lax, is it any wonder screeners keep slipping out?