Overlawyering: Silly DMCA take-down requests

Google recently created a page where users can track the various DMCA take-down requests (and the companies who issued them).

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt highlights how dumb some of these requests are and how they seem to undermine the companies’ own marketing efforts:

There is, for example, the case of Warner Bros. sending a DMCA takedown for the IMDB page of its own movie, Wrath of the Titans. It also demanded that the Guardian newspaper’s showing of the official trailer of the movie be removed from Google search. Ditto the official trailer on Apple’s site and Hulu’s site. And, let’s not forget the BBC America news article about how the film might be “critic proof” as well as a page from Charleston South Carolina’s newspaper, The Post & Courier about the film and telling people where to go see it. Though, I guess Warner Bros. lawyers didn’t want you to see it at all, because all of those were DMCA’d for being in Google’s search.

It seems that these companies are either using search bots to police their intellectual property online, which bot then report their findings to the companies’ counsel who send out pro forma DMCA take-down notices without actually evaluating the circumstances of the “infringing” IP use.

Take-away: If you don’t want your legal efforts to kill your marketing efforts, don’t use search bots to monitor your intellectual property. And certainly do not use a legal team that seems to act like a robot…