14 DAY TRIAL // Over the years we've seen a good share of cringe-worthy takedown requests sent to Google, and this one is up there with the best of them - Premier League asked Google to take down Facebook's homepage.
The claim, of course, is that the site distributed copyright-infringing content. Google's response was negative, as one would expect, and it's fair to say that there were probably quite a few chuckles shared among those handling the DMCAs.
Google, of course, is used to getting tons of takedown requests. The company receives millions upon millions of DMCAs every year and removes quite a bit of them, taking them out of search results. The problem is that copyright holders tend to believe that if it's not in Google's search results, it's not on the Internet anymore, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
Another thing they've been trying to do over the years is to get Google to remove site homepages, even for sites that contain legitimate content. Even when it comes to torrent sites, Google won't remove the homepage because those sites also contain some perfectly legal content. Therefore, most such demands go ignored.
Streaming sites and... Facebook
TorrentFreak reports that this outlandish demand to take down Facebook.com was sent by NetResult on behalf of Premier League and targets plenty of sports streaming related sites.
Included on the list, however, is also the Facebook.com URL, presumably after some user or another shared a link to streamed content. Since these lists are mostly created automatically, it's quite possible that the social network's page ended up on there by mistake. After all, no one in their right mind would ask Google to remove Facebook from its search results.
Google investigated the claims and decided not to comply with the notice. Since this particular DMCA mostly included home pages, we're sure there's a need to refine that machine that's putting together lists to send to Google.