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If there’s one thing that jumps out from the new Google copyright removal request tool released last week, it’s that Microsoft is number one, having gone after 2.5 million URLs that may infringe on the company’s copyright. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that around 2 million of those URLs were reported by a company called Marketly LLC, which tops the list of reporting organizations.
Given that the next highest is only around a million URLs, as reported by NBCUniversal, followed by Degban, a company that openly advertises its services, it seems a bit odd that Marketly seems to have popped up out of nowhere. It remains a bit of a mystery as to what Microsoft’s and Marketly’s relationship is exactly and how Microsoft selected this tiny company to become its copyright attack dog.
Pulin Thakkar, a 15-year veteran of Microsoft, is the company’s founder. He has a background in VoIP and SIP protocols (with several related patents to his name), and no legal background. Thakkar left Microsoft in 2010 to found his company.
"I was looking to have a bigger impact with my skills," he told Ars on Tuesday. “So I left Microsoft to address some real-world problems, and this is a problem that I came across.”
Thakkar said his interest in counterfeit issues and digital piracy came after reading a story about a child being killed because of a counterfeit mobile phone charger bought by his parents while on a trip in Thailand.
“At a high level, I help [Microsoft] deal with online counterfeit,” he said. “We watch on the Internet to find such incidents, and help them move.”
But when Ars pointed out that people dying from faulty mobile phone chargers was a far cry from keeping unauthorized copies of software at bay, he re-iterated that his main interest is to protect consumers: “At the end of the day, consumers to get harmed because of this.”
Marketly’s website offers a fantastically vague description of what the company does: “Our mission is to help enterprises gain a competitive edge by integrating rich data from the Internet with existing software solutions resulting in improved business decisions. We offer software solutions that find relevant data from web, analyze it to extract relevant information and integrate it with your current infrastructure seamlessly.”
Thakkar declined to provide revenue details, nor explain what the contractual relationship between Marketly and Microsoft is, nor how sites are targeted for takedown notices.
"As a search engine and copyright owner, Microsoft appreciates the need for responsible enforcement online,” wrote a Microsoft spokesperson, in an e-mail sent to Ars. “So each month, Microsoft requests the removal of links to web pages that infringe Microsoft’s copyrights so that customers are not deceived into purchasing or downloading counterfeit software.”
Public records show that Marketly was founded just over two years ago and incorporated out of a residential address in Bellevue, Washington. Under "special address" information, the business license also lists an address for a "Mailbox and Shipping Center" in Redmond. The company’s site says it’s based in Redmond, Washington, with a "satellite office in Ahmadabad, India," which appears to be a few nameless people listed on LinkedIn.
However, Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that outsourcing copyright enforcement to smaller companies is not uncommon, as it does not require a legal background.
"Unfortunately, when you outsource this activity you may increase the likelihood of improper takedowns," she wrote in an e-mail to Ars on Tuesday.
Thakkar said that despite his lack of legal training, Marketly remains "very careful" to be sensitive to fair use and other legal concerns that may crop up.
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