Did you know that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS infringes on the copyright of big-budget Hollywood movie ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’?

Of course you didn’t know that.

Because it doesn’t!

But piracy hunters working on behalf of Hollywood movie studio Paramount seem to think otherwise…

Ubuntu Torrent Removed in DMCA Takedown

Cited in a DMCA takedown request filed against Google on behalf of Paramount Pictures, and spotted by TorrentFreak (and tipped to us by reader ~nonanonymous) is an innocuous link to a 32-bit alternate install image Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.

The takedown request seeks to remove links to a number of torrent URLS that are alleged to infringe on Paramount movie ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction‘.

Ubuntu clearly doesn’t. All it takes is a quick glance at the URL in question to see that. It’s very much a stock iso of an old Ubuntu release.

And yet Google has complied with the request and scrubbed the link to the page in question from its search index.

But don’t hate on Google for this. The sheer volume of DMCA requests Google is made to process by copyright holders is gargantuan: over three million ‘pirate’ URLs per day, say TorrentFreak.

And while I’m sure Google has plenty of measures in place to catch erroneous URLs and false positives caught in the cross-hairs I do concede that it can’t catch ’em all.

The “good news” for Ubuntu is that only a single URL was affected by this notice, and it is a URL pointing to an old version of Ubuntu that few people are likely to search for.

As for Paramount’s piracy-hunting shipmate who flagged the innocuous URL, they should pay greater attention to the tools they use to issue automated DMCA notices.

A little bit of accuracy isn’t too much to ask.