Update: BPI, not Universal, guilty of spiking Drake reviews

Last week, we reported claims that the Universal Music Group had abused copyright law to expunge negative reviews of Drake’s Take Care from the internet.

Henry “Rizoh” Adaso claimed that his lukewarm, single-sentence review of the album (he gave it a 2.5 star rating) was taken offline after Universal filed a complaint under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act – a procedure usually used to remove illegal filesharing links.

Music Week now report that it was BPI – the trade organisation of the UK music industry – not Universal, who requested the takedown.

In a statement, the organisation apologised for what they described as an “isolated error”, saying: “BPI uses the DMCA process to request the removal of millions of links in search results to infringing sound recordings every year. We have no intention of ever trying to remove links to reviews or writing about music.”

“In this case, we regret that an isolated error occurred with the effect that we mistakenly asked for a few links to reviews to be removed. Immediately on learning of the mistake, we asked Google to reinstate the links concerned and are undertaking a review of our processes to ensure this does not happen again. We apologise to all concerned for our mistake.”

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