Porn studios' copyright takedowns are making it hard to find code
Aggressive anti-piracy efforts often have their share of unintended victims, but the porn industry's crackdowns are leading to some decidedly unusual collateral damage: open source software. TorrentFreak notes that copyright takedown requests from studios like Wicked Pictures are removing Google search results for GitHub code projects whose names are only vaguely similar to adult movies, or even the studios' names. Among the casualties are Facebook's Rebound (a spring physics add-on), Netflix's Lipstick (workflow visualization) and OpenSUSE Linux's Wicked (a network setup tool).
Porn producers likely aren't the only copyright holders affecting code searches. However, their actions illustrate a big problem with leaning too heavily on search result censorship to deter pirates. While Google, Microsoft and other search providers will often toss out inaccurate takedown requests, they face hundreds of millions of these requests per year -- it's virtually impossible to catch every mistake. Unless media creators are more selective when they fight bootleggers, they risk hurting legitimate content that just happens to use the right (or rather, wrong) keywords.
[Image credit: AP Photo/Dita Alangkara]
