The mistake led to the album being unavailable for a day

Sep 4, 2014 13:23 GMT  ·  By

Music group industry IFPI made one of the most ironic takedown requests as it asked Mega to remove Kim Dotcom’s own music album from the service.

“Good Times,” the album Dotcom released a while back, didn’t just happen to show up on the list on a single occasion, but twice already. If this doesn’t make everyone question just how exactly these requests are made and how efficient the takedown efforts from such labels are, then nothing will.

Mega, which was built by Kim Dotcom, has been growing in recent months, in part thanks to the services it offers, and in part thanks to Dotcom’s name.

TorrentFreak reports that copyright holders have been keeping a close eye on Mega, especially given everything that’s happened with Megaupload years ago. So far, things have gone relatively well and there’s only been a small number of requests that have been sent to Mega so far.

Earlier this week, however, the most ironic thing happened as Mega received a request to take down Dotcom’s “Good Times” album. Not only did the demand go through, but Mega also complied with it and removed the album.

The album was released by Dotcom earlier this year and it’s been available for download on his website without any charge. The link points to Mega and has since been restored, although for a couple of days it was down. Every time someone tried to download the album, a message appeared, telling them that the file was no longer available either due to a Terms of Service violation, because the URL is invalid or because the file has been deleted by the user.

Upon investigation, Mega revealed that the link had apparently been taken down due to a request from music industry group IFPI that was issued on September 1. The group claimed that the link was infringing on one of its artists, although Kim Dotcom is obviously not one of them.

Kim Dotcom took action and asked Mega to reinstate the album, as is within his rights as the owner of the album. As mentioned above, the link is now back in working order, so they clearly complied.

While this is all somewhat amusing, what’s sad is the fact that this isn’t an isolated incident when a link mistakenly ends up in a DMCA request. In fact, this happens quite often and they’re not only asking to take down links that don’t belong to them at all or to open source content, but also to take down homepages, which isn’t allowed.