The vigilant folk at TorrentFreak think they've found something odd: among the hundreds of thousands of sites Microsoft has recently asked Google not to index are requests to remove references to sites that in no way infringe Microsoft's rights but instead mention the the free OpenOffice suite. TorrentFreak's report on the …

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Friday 16th August 2013 10:34 GMT localzuk

Make it illegal

The law should protect both sides - if false takedowns are being submitted, they should be fined and the proceeds go to the target.

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1. Friday 16th August 2013 12:12 GMT Vociferous
  
  Re: Make it illegal
  
  "Should", yeah. I'll drink to that. And when consumers get as many high-paid lobbyists as RIAA, Sony, Microsoft, Apple etc, maybe it will actually become like that too.
  
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Friday 16th August 2013 11:24 GMT andy 45

It's obviously set up to block anything with 'office suite' in the title.

pretty thoughtless though.

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Friday 16th August 2013 12:18 GMT Anonymous Coward

A search of bing for office keygen...

30,400,000 results - top 3 results are:

1 Welcome to new crack keygen resource KEYGENS.NL

2 office serial number, key - KeyGenGuru.Com serial numbers, keygen ...

3 KEYGENS.NL - office 2010 cracks and keygens generated to unlock ...

Perhaps they should sort their own search engine out before interfering with others.

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1. Friday 16th August 2013 12:57 GMT Joe Drunk
  
  There aren't any actual keygens to download from those sites
  
  They are there to test the effectiveness of whatever AV suite is installed on your PC.
  
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Friday 16th August 2013 13:46 GMT AndrueC

That probably involves tuning whatever 'bot it uses to compile initial lists so it is more accurate.

A bot? What could possibly go wrong with that?

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Friday 16th August 2013 15:11 GMT raving angry loony

Naive, perhaps?

I like how the author seems to simply believe the Microsoft story that the whole thing was a mistake by a bot, rather than deliberate action by a company that's not changed its (unethical) stripes in 30 years. So naive.

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1. Friday 16th August 2013 16:09 GMT bean520
  
  Re: Naive, perhaps?
  
  Look at the blocklist itself. The OpenOffice torrents are filled with artifacts that somewhat suggest what's being offered is identifying itself with Microsoft's offering rather than Apache's (Open Office 2010 anyone?). It is more than feasable to suggest that this was a bot error
  
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Friday 16th August 2013 20:55 GMT Henry Wertz 1

"Sue for what? Damages? And who would have grounds to sue?

These were third-party torrents for a freely redistributable open-source software.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Microsoft slapped silly, but it's not going to happen."

The hoster of the torrent, the person who put up the torrent, *and* the copyright holder all have a chance under DMCA to invoke the penalty clause for perjury in DMCA requests, which these are. I've NEVER heard of it being invoked, but I guarantee if any of my content was falsely DMCA'd, I'd invoke the penalty clause.

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