The BPI has apologised for an “isolated error” that led to a takedown requests being filed against a handful of online reviews related to Canadian rapper Drake.
It just so happened that the reviews in question didn’t look too favourably on the Universal artist’s Take Care album, leading a number of music journalists to assume the takedown requests had been filed by UMG itself.
A number of reports surfaced last week claiming such foul play but Universal has since denied any involvement, while the BPI has issued the following statement apologising for a mistake on its behalf.
"BPI uses the DMCA process to request the removal of millions of links in search results to infringing sound recordings every year,” the statement said. “We have no intention of ever trying to remove links to reviews or writing about music.
“In this case, we regret that an isolated error occurred with the effect that we mistakenly asked for a few links to reviews to be removed. Immediately on learning of the mistake, we asked Google to reinstate the links concerned and are undertaking a review of our processes to ensure this does not happen again. We apologise to all concerned for our mistake."
The extent of the BPI’s round the clock effort to clamp down on website’s that infringe upon its members’ intellectual property was revealed in May when Google stats showed it had filed takedown requests for 160,000 URLs with the search giant.
Source: Billboard
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