It can, and it cannot.
Take for example the Wikipedia page for a book. The page can quote passages from the book to give examples of the writing, which should fall under fair use and not considered piracy, but quoting the entire book would be unlawful reproduction, thus piracy. You then enter a whole mess of "How much can I quote and still fall under fair use?".
Add to the above sound and images, and it is quite possible for a Wikipedia page to contain material that should be removed.

Its kind of ironic really, I mean the Harry Potter novels basically rip of every story through Greek mythology, through viking saga and LOTR. And now they are ranting against copy policies what a laugh. Maybe old Dan Brown with his blatant plagiarism, could also jump in on this. All signs of a desperately broken IP system.

I'm so glad I haven't read any of the HP books nor seen any of the movies. Now I never will.

SPOILER: The books intentionally don't give you details only to bring it up later as something that would have obviously tipped off what was going on. The movies do slightly better but still obfuscate and then shove the answers/information down your throat if you didn't get it in the exact 30 second timeframe you were allotted.

It took me this long to realize this was a "Bizarre anti-piracy rampage" and not "Blizzard's anti-piracy rampage"...

so much scandal for such a mediocre (at best!) series/saga.
meh

Now that you mention it ... I also misread as Blizzard.

Problem would be solved if we could charge $1 for every DMCA takedown request. That should at least filter out all the bot abuse. Few companies have the money to mail in a million random take-down requests, if you need to pay for them.

I'd add that the $1 must be paid to the accused if the DMCA appears to be erroneous. If one would have to pay even if the DMCA is legit, that would lead to a spam of identical websites that just link to the same place.
Or have the $1 refunded once the DMCA takedown request is approved

How cute.

The DMCA provides a safe harbor provision for service providers, granting them immunity to liability for copyright infringement that is conducted by others. In the case of your example, this means Google is not liable for search results that contain examples of copyright infringement. However, the safe harbor provisions come with conditions, and one of those conditions is what is known as a takedown notice. Rightsholders can send a complaint to these companies detailing alleged copyright infringement and request the page be removed. Google is not technically required to comply with these requests, but should it elect not to carry through it would lose the safe harbor provisions and become secondarily liable for the copyright infringement alleged in the takedown notice. Because copyright judgements can be positively massive, denying these takedown requests is actually a huge liability for Google and they only do it in cases where it's very obviously wrong.

As I discussed earlier, there are technically provisions to seek damages from takedown notices made in bad faith, but proving bad faith is so difficult that you will virtually never pull it off. This has created a horrifically lopsided system where rightsholders can send out automated requests with impunity based on nothing but a rough algorithmic match, the service provider faces massive financial risk for backing you up and as such is overwhelmingly likely to block you, and you face an arduous process for reinstatement with a mandatory wait period... and no assurance you won't just receive another takedown again in the future.

It's frankly a ludicrous system that allows powerful corporations to bully individuals and small companies, and provides little to no recourse to those caught as collateral damage.

For locations with huge amounts of DMCA spamming like YouTube I'd have it much higher, say oh $1,000 or $5,000. Sending a thousand requests and suddenly having a million dollars being held while they figure it out, along with false claims quickly getting paid to the accused for false claims would QUICKLY fix things. I'd think the algorithms would still be used, but they wouldn't do automatic takedown notices, they'd actually get reviewed :P

Clearly Google should just sue Pottermore and the others*. They've got more than enough of a case if this is accurate.

*If I was them I'd leave Digimark alone as the repeated lawsuits might prove to be a good sideline income.

I'm half tempted to try for copyrighting 0 and 1, as per used in digital systems, then if I get it I can sue anyone that released anything on any computer or used any software because binary uses 0's and 1's in it's system and it's utterly unavoidable. Although getting 0 OR 1 would do the job too :P