You're assuming that their law firm sent Bing the takedown request of which there is no evidence. Also, they're completely within their rights to host links of which they own copyright on their own search engine.
If there was a search engine out there that had 10 uniques per month would you expect people to care enough to send take-down notices to them? So where do you draw the line... for some people, you draw it between Google and Bing, not below them both.
This is interesting though, when I saw the headline about Microsoft making so many takedown requests to Google I assumed the items to be taken down were found by the Bing team, but it seems that isn't the case.
So the fact that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing is probably quite accurate in this case.
Maybe MS agrees with the Pirate mantra that piracy doesn't hurt, but help sales. What would happen if pirates, even casual pirates learned that Bing results weren't filtered but Google's were? I would suspect a massive uptake in usage if this was proven. And who are these pirates? They're the most geeky of your friends, the ones who influence and tutor the non-tech savvy about what tech products and services to use (Bing, Windows, Office etc.)
Crazy? Probably. But still fun to consider. Too bad MS is too big, slow and traditional to do something this radical.
Even if they lose some sales to piracy, as long as network effect work to their advantage, it's worth to lose it to a free version of their product than to a competitor.
It's unsurprising if they turn a blind eye to piracy when they judge it benefits them.
Having said that, this looks a lot like incompetence, or a contractor that's being paid to issue takedown notices only to Google.
First there's the matter of whether or not TechDirt is "journalism." I'm not saying that to be snarky, just pointing out there's still a lot of debate surrounding this issue.
I doubt that Microsoft is streamlined enough to allow different departments (Bing and whomever handles DMCAs) to effectively communicate. Microsoft is an immense bureaucracy.
Anything more would require additional effort and initiative and coordination between the contracting team, the contractor, and the Bing team. Probably someone just hired the third party, turned them loose and didn't put any more thought into it.
"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction" is apparently a Ubisoft product, which is a publicly traded company distinct from Microsoft.
Copyright in "Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga" is apparently held by LucasArts.
While they all appear to be Xbox 360 games, being a platform manufacturer doesn't usually mean you own the content produced for that platform. It is possible that the games linked against a Microsoft library, and are infringing against the Microsoft's rights in the library, but then the declaration needs to declare that "that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" - which means that the allegation of what is being infringed (i.e. a library and not the entire work) should have matched the work Microsoft owned.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Or.. perhaps comically. This is a third party issueing takedowns on Microsofts behalf. Isn't submiting to Bing due to lack of market share?
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...
Perhaps this is the solution to the entire problem, trap the whole system in a recursive loop. Although then perhaps all the telephones in the world will ring until Douglas Hofstadter answers one of them.
[edit] but with Douglas Hofstadter. And a kitten. But the kitten is just out of shot, so we can't really see it.
