Google has reportedly received a letter from the lawyers of Dinesh D’Souza whose film America is not showing up in search results how they’d like.
The Hollywood Reporter obtained the letter, which was sent to Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond, and reports:
The letter claims that Google has been confusing America with 2016: Obama’s America, which was D’Souza’s first movie and has been out of theaters for two years, while Lionsgate released America on July 2 and it is currently playing in about 1,100 theaters nationwide.
Google, according to the letter, has been “misdirecting many users who mistakenly believed the film was not playing in theaters. We understand this was brought to your attention for correction five days ago, yet the problem persists.”
In a search for “america movie,” some users have been getting the typical carousel movie results showing “movies frequently mentioned on the web” including various Captain America and Avengers-related titles.
We’re not even seeing that, but just the IMDb page for America as the top result.
A search for “showtimes for america” brings up a Captain America: The Winter Soldier times page from Fandango. That appears to be the real problem, because when you do the same query for other movies, you typically get stuff like this:
According to THR, the letter demands Google disclose whether “human or automated error was the source” of the issue, and if measures have been taken to fix the problem. So far, results aren’t showing the showtimes box, at least in my own testing.
Google has also reportedly been confusing the film with D’Souza’s other film 2016: Obama’s America.
Image via Google