May 19
Google DMCA Complaint - My Experience
I mentioned in an earlier post that several spam sites were stealing copyrighted content from one of our clients. This isn’t anything new, this happens all the time - so what can you do if you’re positive another site is stealing your copyrighted content?
First, have a chat with your IT team and put a strategy together to establish a list of IPs scraping the site (check log files, reverse DNS lookup, etc) and have these IP addresses blocked from accessing your site. Make sure this is set-up to recognize dynamic IP addresses, so that you’re not blocking AOL, SBC, etc users. Unfortunately, spammers & site scrapers are pretty sophisticated, so there’s a good chance they’re IP masqing & implementing other techniques that could put a kink in your plan…
Next, you should submit a DMCA complaint to Google. To do this, follow these instructions - you’re required to either fax or send via postal mail (no emails) - we did both just to be safe.
Our letter went something like this….
To Whom It May Concern,
We act on behalf of [our client] (the “Owner”).
The following information is presented for the purposes of removing web content that infringes on our copyright per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We appreciate your enforcement of copyright law and support of our rights in this matter.
I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Signed on this day, the 1st day of February, 2008, in North Canton, Ohio, United States.
7 days later, I received an email from Google confirming that they received our DMCA complaint - great news. I thought this was a sign that this process would happen fairly quickly…not so fast! On March 21st (7 weeks later) we heard from Google again, this time letting us know that they had completed processing our complaint and removed the webpages that were using our client’s copyrighted material!!
Although it took a little bit of time to get this resolved, it was well worth the wait. Plus, 7 weeks isn’t that long when you’re dealing with Google… I’m just happy this was resolved and that Google actually takes this stuff seriously.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
[...] handle the spam issue first, I’ve addressed the #4 issue (copyright infringement) from above in another post - So now [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 5:43 pm
First off, I’m glad to hear that this issue was resolved and that things have worked out well. However, I did want to offer some tips that might help you if you have to do this in the future.
1) Consider contacting the host first. If the site is hosted within the U.S. or the EU, you can contact them directly and demand removal. They respond much more quickly, usually within 96 hours.
2) Email Google. Google doesn’t advertise this, but if you can PDF the DMCA notice with your signature, you can email it to their agent at amac at google and get the takedown performed that way. It is much faster and is easily done with any word processor, including OpenOffice.
3) Don’t forget the other engines! Remember Yahoo! and MSN both have DMCA policies too.
I hope that helps some. It sounds as if you did a great job with this one and I’m glad it ended well. Seven weeks is a bit long, even for Google, but I’m not going to say that I am surprised either.
Just let me know if there is anything that I can do in the future to help!
May 27th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Thanks for your comment Jonathan.
1. What has been your experience dealing with copyrighted material lifted from page title & meta-tags? Did the host respond?
2. This is great information - thanks!
3. It was interesting, only Google was indexing the spam content - we didn’t notice this in Yahoo! & MSN; good to mention though that these engines are important to consider as well