[Infowarrior] - Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

[Richard Forno]

Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/02/google_removes_pirate_bay_homepage/

Mountain View executes DMCA takedown
By Kelly Fiveash

Posted in Music and Media, 2nd October 2009 11:36 GMT

The Pirate Bay’s homepage and seven other pages relating to the  
BitTorrent tracker website have been removed from Google’s search  
engine, following a DMCA complaint.

Anyone attempting to locate thepiratebay.org via Google will be  
greeted with some results to access the website, but none that point  
directly at its homepage.

We’ve asked Google if it could tell us more about removing some of the  
site’s pages from its search engine, but at the time of writing it  
hadn’t got back to us with comment.

The Pirate Bay mouthpiece, Peter Sunde - who actually quit his  
position as the website’s main spokesman a few months back - asked on  
his Twitter account this morning “why is 'thepiratebay.org' (the  
frontpage) removed from your [Google’s] index?”

A DMCA notice at the bottom of a “thepiratebay.org” search query via  
Google reveals that Mountain View has simply reacted to a takedown  
request.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital  
Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page.  
If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the  
removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” reads a notice.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing returns the correct result on its  
search engine, so it’s clearly not been slapped with a similar DMCA  
notice yet.

We'll update this story if Google offers us any further insight. Its  
policy on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is here. ®