Over the past few months several Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove links to the "free-to-share" Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK. The film's director, Simon Klose, has contacted the search engine in an attempt to have the links put back online but thus far without success. Meanwhile, film studios continue to submit new DMCA requests to censor the documentary.

After a long wait The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK was released to the public earlier this year.

The film, created by Simon Klose, follows three Pirate Bay founders during their trial in Sweden. True to the nature of the site it can be downloaded for free.

Through this model the film’s director hopes to reach the broadest audience possible. However, several film studios are obstructing this goal by sending DMCA notices to Google, asking the search giant to remove links to the documentary.

Klose was quite shocked when he found out about the unwarranted censorship and initially decided to lawyer up to sue the movie studios. That plan was later aborted when the lawyers at Chilling Effects advised the director that his efforts would be futile.

“The lawyers saw no use suing the movie studios for filing false DMCA claims and seek damages, unless I could prove subjective intent and bad faith. Instead they advised me to file a counter-notice once I had found out whether Google had actually taken down the links or not,” Klose explains.

The director decided to take up this advice and contacted Google instead, hoping to get the censored links put back up.

Klose managed to get in touch with Google’s Nordic Policy counsel David Mothander, who said he would follow up on the case. But today, two months and several reminders later, the director still has to receive a reply.

This leads Klose to belief that Google is more interested in helping Hollywood to censor the web than assisting independent creators to correct DMCA takedown abuses.

“To me it’s a depressive lesson that Google rather acts as a private proxy for dinosaur copyright enforcement than helping indie filmmakers experiment with sustainable distribution models” Klose says.

While the automated takedown request in question may not be intentional, they are certainly not an isolated incident. After our initial report back in May copyright holders have sent in several new takedown requests for TPB-AFK.

Below is one that was sent on behalf of HBO in June. The notice claims to protect “The Pacific” but also lists a link to the Pirate Bay documentary. A quick search on Google reveals that the result has indeed been removed.

HBO takedown notice

The same is true for a DMCA request that was sent in Lionsgate’s name recently. This notice lists “The Haunting in Connecticut 2 Ghosts of Georgia” as the copyrighted work but as can be seen below, the notice also affects TPB-AFK and a wide variety of other unrelated titles.

Lionsgate takedown notice

Klose is pretty upset by the unwarranted censorship which he says hurts his business model, and he urges Google to also protect those who gladly give away their work for free.

“It sucks to be arbitrarily censored by Google’s and Hollywood’s bot system. By making it harder for us to share the film they are harming our freemium distribution experiment,” Klose tells TorrentFreak.

“It’s bizarre to be punished for experimenting with distribution models by an industry doing so little for the filmmakers they claim to protect,” he adds.

While it’s unrealistic to expect Google to catch all errors made by copyright holders, Klose’s problem does bring up an important issue.

There is currently no easy way to check whether a link has been removed from Google. In addition, it is not clear how third parties can send counter-notices to reinstate content on websites that they don’t own.

First and foremost, however, copyright holders should make sure that their automated tools don’t take down legitimate content that is not theirs.

Update: Simon Klose tells TorrentFreak that after he posted his complaints in public, Google’s Nordic Policy counsel David Mothander offered to reinstate the links.

“David from Google just called me up and said his “reply to me had got stuck in his outbox”. He said it was a really lame excuse and said he was sorry. Then he offered to put the links that had been taken down back,” Klose says.