Microsoft DMCA Notice ‘Mistakenly’ Targets BBC, Techcrunch, Wikipedia and U.S. Govt
In recent months the number of DMCA takedown requests sent out by copyright holders has increased dramatically, and it's starting to turn the Internet into a big mess. — One of the problems …
Context & Ripple Effects
False-positive takedowns are not new — back in March 2007, Ars Technica documented how victims of DMCA abuse began fighting back against wrongful notices. What has changed by October 2012 is scale: TorrentFreak reports the volume of takedown requests from copyright holders has grown dramatically enough to describe the process as turning the Internet into 'a big mess.'
Microsoft's slip lands at the worst possible moment for that argument: its mistaken notice swept up the BBC, Techcrunch, Wikipedia and even U.S. government websites — confirmed targets, not speculation. The story's unusually wide syndication, picked up by eight outlets including the BBC itself, BGR, The Next Web and Techdirt, shows how quickly an enforcement error by a major rights holder becomes a referendum on automated takedown practices.
First-order effects
- Microsoft must retract the erroneous notices and refile, while the BBC, Wikipedia, Techcrunch and U.S. government pages caught in the notice risk disappearing from search results through no fault of their own.
- The incident hands critics of high-volume takedown sending a concrete exhibit: a sophisticated rights holder's own tooling cannot distinguish infringing material from mainstream publishers and federal sites.
Second-order effects
- Search engines and hosts receiving surging notice volumes face pressure to add friction — human review, sender accountability, or penalties for repeat over-noticers — rather than processing claims automatically.
- Other large copyright holders running similar automated filters now weigh reputational risk against enforcement reach, since one bad batch can generate headlines across the outlets they would otherwise court.
Third-order effects
- If notice volumes keep climbing while accuracy stays flat, notice-and-takedown drifts from targeted removal toward collateral censorship of legitimate speech, reviving the counter-abuse push documented as far back as 2007.
- The pattern points toward a structural split in the DMCA regime between careful small senders and industrial-scale automated senders, with policymakers eventually forced to address quality, not just quantity, of notices.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is shifting from hand-picked takedowns to bulk automated notices whose false positives increasingly strike mainstream publishers and governments, straining the notice-and-takedown system itself.