Few industries protect their intellectual property as rabidly as major Hollywood studios do, and many are constantly on the prowl for any online content that infringes on the copyrights, as anyone who uploads a movie clip to YouTube will quickly learn. It turns out that some of those studios might be a bit too overeager when it comes to protecting their IP, as Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. recently learned when it accidentally filed a complaint against its own website for infringing content.

According to a report by TorrentFreak, Warner Bros recently filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice for dozens of allegedly infringing sites, some of which included domains belonging to WarnerBros.com. This included the official Warner Bros website for The Dark Knight, as well as the website for The Matrix. Warner Bros and its anti-piracy partner, Vobile Inc., sent the notice to Google, requesting that search results be censored to remove those websites.

TorrentFreak noted that this was not a one time mistake for Warner Bros, noting that a DMCA notice filed only a few days earlier included the official website for The Lucky One.

In these cases, Warner Bros is hurting itself by removing its own website from certain search results, but TorrentFreak pointed out that if Warner Bros can accidentally file a complaint against its own website, how many other sites on its complaints are also unfairly targeted?

Time for a new DMCA?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the primary piece of legislation used to regulate how copyrighted works may be used on the internet, but the DMCA was enacted nearly 20 years ago in a time when internet speeds and data storage capabilities meant that there was very little in the way of multimedia online.

Obviously, that has changed a great deal over the years, and with the rapid growth of livestreaming platforms like Facebook Live and Twitch, the media landscape of the internet today is worlds away from what it was even a few short years ago.

Some organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), believe that several portions of the DMCA need to be revisited to take these changes into account, and the EFF filed a lawsuit in July claiming that parts of the DMCA are unconstitutional.

More recently, the EFF asked the Supreme Court to revisit a 2007 case where Universal Music Group filed a DMCA takedown against a mother’s video of her toddler dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” While the court eventually ruled the video as fair use of the song, it also said that copyright holders could not be held liable for filing unreasonable takedown notices “as long as they subjectively believed that the material they targeted was infringing.”

“Rightsholders who force down videos and other online content for alleged infringement—based on nothing more than an unreasonable hunch, or subjective criteria they simply made up—must be held accountable,” EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry said in a statement. “If left standing, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling gives fair users little real protection against private censorship through abuse of the DMCA process.”

If the EFF is successful, then companies like Warner Bros could be held legally accountable for filing unreasonable DMCA claims, and considering the fact that it did not even catch its own name on its takedown notices, that might be something to worry about.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros Entertainment Inc.