Microsoft Sends DMCA Takedown Notices for Links to Open Source Competitors

From Torrent Freak:

Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google in the hope of making pirated content harder to find.  Microsoft has been one of the most active senders and over the past month alone has asked Google to remove more than a million infringing URLs from its indexes. In addition the software giant also strips infringing links from its own search engine Bing.

While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests sent by Microsoft and other copyright holders are correct. Their often automated anti-piracy systems regularly trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, sometimes from direct competitors.

The latter happened with several recent DMCA takedown requests sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft. The notices, which contain references to unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office, also list many links to Apache’s open source office suite, OpenOffice . . .