You can find almost anything on Reddit — including free, pirated movies — which is why one movie studio has started to not just go after the sources of these videos, but the places that aggregate them.
Warner Bros. filed a copyright claim against a popular subreddit, r/BestOfStreamingVideo, asking for that community to get removed from Google’s search results, only to have Google deny the request.
According to TorrentFreak, there are multiple reasons why Google would have refused to remove the page, which suggest that maybe the request was too broad, or that they’re moving the responsibility over to Reddit to moderate its communities. It’s not clear if Reddit also received the notice.
According to the Lumen Database, Warner Bros. filed 24 copyright claims on July 26 to Google, one of them being for the subreddit to that was linking out to a copy of the 2015 film Interstellar.
Screenshot via Lumen
The subreddit has over 46,000 subscribers as of the time of this writing. The moderators have made light of the incident, posting a thread with a “comedy” tag and continuing to go on their merry way. Some even have some advice for Warner Bros.
It’s not even the first time the subreddit has been targeted. In 2014, Lionsgate also tried to remove it, but was unsuccessful.
“In my opinion, if Warner Brothers spent all the time and money they spent on trying to control piracy on building a centralised platform for users to own their own movie library for a cost-effective price, they would make millions,” moderator xosfear told TorrentFreak.
[The Next Web via TorrentFreak]