It's been the case for some time now that, when content that infringes on a copyright appears on a website, the copyright holder will then turn to Google to have links to that content removed from search results. But sometimes, the requests to remove content--referred to as "takedown notices"--target the wrong material, material that never existed, or are overly broad. Some suggest that this is the case with a move on the parts of Warner Brothers and NBC Universal, who recently sent a takedown notice to Google (News - Alert) that targeted the entire homepage of Kim Dotcom's recently released Mega service.

According to reports, NBC Universal alleges that Mega's homepage is providing a link to a copy of its new ghost story, "Mama," and Warner Brothers is likewise alleging that Mega's homepage is boasting a link to pirated copies of "Gangster Squad." Yet a quick look at the homepage for Mega shows that no files are on the homepage at all, infringing or otherwise.

Kim Dotcom, for his part, suggests that this is more of the same kind of "unreasonable content industry behavior we have experienced for years," noting that, back in the days of Megaupload, fully one in every five DMCA requests were in error, and commonly the result of automated notices geared toward certain keywords that led to legitimate files being unjustly targeted for removal. Dotcom elaborates, saying, "The abuse of the takedown system is so severe that no service provider can rely on takedown notices for a fair repeat infringer policy."

It's clear that erroneous notices do have some clear potential to do damage to the access of legitimate files, and this is only exacerbated by the fact that Google reportedly gets millions of these notices coming in every week. Google can't catch all the errors--even assuming that the 20-percent rate Dotcom cited holds true to the present day (that means numbers measuring in the hundreds of thousands)--which means that legitimate content is being affected, to at least some degree, by takedown notices.

While it's important to protect and respect the rights of copyright holders, it's also important to ensure that legitimate content can be accessed by users at any given time. Some have suggested that DMCA filers pay a fee to file notices, or are charged a fee when a notice proves to be issued in error. This would likely reduce the amount of automated filings, and instead force the filers to practice some kind of oversight to better ensure that only valid targets are filed on. If the total number of filings decreases--especially if that 20 percent of erroneous measures falls through--the chances of catching errors increases, and the proper copyright notices are filed and removed.

It's clear that something needs to be done that both protects copyright holders and legitimate users for the sake of not only free enterprise but also free speech. Just what that something is, though, is still somewhat unknown.