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NBC's Bogus Copyright Claim Got Canada's 'Mr. Robot' Premiere Yanked from Google

Elliot Alderson would not be pleased.
Image: Flickr/Rafiq Sarlie

Mr. Robot connects with its audience so well in part because of little touches like its episode titles—"eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v"—which are guaranteed to take anyone over the age of 20 right back to their days of torrenting with Napster on their parents' bulky Dell desktop.

It's pretty ironic, then, that the (totally legal) online Canadian premiere of the show on Showcase.ca was removed from Google's search results thanks to a bogus copyright claim by NBCUniversal in the US, which was filed on August 11th.

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DMCA takedown requests—named for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—are usually reserved for links that direct people to pirated content. If they're submitted to Google and accepted, like NBCUniversal's request was, then the link is removed from Google's search results and replaced with a notification that directs the searcher to the Chilling Effects database, which collects DMCA takedown requests.

Screenshot: Google

You can check out the request that took the Mr. Robot premiere off of Google's search results here, where it's listed alongside links to sites that actually host illegally pirated content.

So, what happened here? It's hard to say, but there have been cases in the past wherein totally innocent sites have been removed from Google's search results via a DMCA request due to a glitch in the automated system that rounds up links to be submitted. The coding site GitHub has been a victim of this in the past, thanks to copyright protection companies working on behalf of the porn industry. This might be the case with Mr. Robot.

NBCUniversal did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment. Showcase, when reached for comment, noted that the streaming link for the Mr. Robot premiere has expired anyway, since the show will be airing on the antiquated 20th century communication medium of television tonight.