Earlier this week, Google received a DMCA takedown request citing Kodi’s website amongst the offending URLs, and rather than looking into it first, the tech giant just waved its magic dick and made the site vanish from search results.
The request was made on behalf of Turkish pay-TV service Digiturk, stating, “the infringed content is sports content (illegal video stream) branded and watermarked with the trademark/logo BEIN SPORTS HD.” Kodi is an open-source software, which third-parties can use for whatever they like – including illegal torrents. The site itself isn’t in breach of any laws and the people behind it aren’t up to any funny business, but for some reason, Google failed to do its due diligence and removed Kodi from its search engine results. VLC -also a legitimate site – was also listed in the request but escaped the purge. Kodi’s Keith Herrington said:
“It’s unfortunate content companies continue to lump us and VLC together with services who are clearly in violation of copyright law by not only providing streams to their content but using their logo, etc and that Google doesn’t even bother to check or validate, they just remove.
“It feels like a very “˜guilty until proven innocent’ model which I do not agree with.”
The company submitted a counter-notice, and Google has now restored the site. If you google Kodi now, you’ll see it pop up, front and centre. [TorrentFreak]
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.