![]() My research within the Lumen Database found 33,988 notices sent to Google between June 2019 and January 2022, by over thirty different notice senders, targeting over 550 online domain names. If the takedown notice is successful, this means the disappearance from the internet of information that is most likely to be legitimate speech. The wrongful notice sender then removes the fake original url after sending the DMCA request, likely in order to ensure that the article does not stay online in any form. ![]() Then, based on the claim that this back-dated article is the ‘original’, the copiers send a DMCA to the relevant Online Service Providers, alleging that the true original is the copied or ‘infringing’ article and that that the copied article is the original article - requesting the takedown of the true original article. With this technique, the wrongful notice sender (or copier) creates a copy of a ‘true original’ article and back-dates it, creating a ‘fake original’ article (an article that is a copy of the true original) that at first glance appears to have been published prior to the true original. The notices I found use the “back-dated article” technique. ![]() As a part of this research, I found a set of notices that are in strong likelihood an organised attempt to abuse the DMCA notice and takedown process in order to have legitimate news articles and related critical information taken down from the internet. Since February 2022, I have been researching the notices within the Lumen Database, looking for evidence of misuse of the DMCA process. In this post, I will discuss certain features of the notice set, including how I assessed them to be fraudulent, the likely motivation behind this abuse of DMCA and the potential impact of such organized takedown attempts. These copies form the foundation for a wealth of research related to, among other topics, illegitimate attempts at chilling online free speech.īetween June 2019 and January 2022, the Lumen Database received copies of almost 34,000 notices that appear to be deliberate fraudulent attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. Image #1 courtesy of nethope.or g and Image #2 courtesy of TorrentFreak.The Lumen Project’s database houses copies of millions of content removal requests originally sent to online service providers. With Google dealing with millions every week it is only a matter of time before they end up delisting something unjustly. It remains to be seen how much longer DMCA take downs can continue to go through unregulated. This was done in an effort to combat piracy of their Game of Thrones TV show. ![]() Invalid DMCA take downs are becoming a problem for small legitimate companies as demonstrated a few weeks ago when media giant HBO filed a DMCA take down against the search engine listing for the VLC Media Player website. Luckily for Microsoft Google didn’t comply with the request and the Microsoft links still remain listed in the Google search engine. The reason for such an “epic fail” is that Microsoft affiliates have automated systems which often end up requesting DMCA take downs on perfectly legitimate content, legitimate websites and sometimes even on their own content as this example shows. According to TorrentFreak Microsoft did exactly that. Google is bombared with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices everyday, but it isn’t everyday that Microsoft submits one trying to get its own web links de-listed from Google’s search engine.
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