Have you ever received a DMCA complaint?

[MichaelCorfman]

Nearly a decade ago I posted a poll question asking "Have you ever filled a DMCA complaint?"

In that poll I noted that "One of the techniques webmasters can use when material is stolen from them and used on other sites is to issue DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints. Frequent recipients of DMCA complaints are hosting companies, where the person filing the complaint is asking that the hosting company remove the offending material from their servers. And, of course Google, for complaints to remove stolen material present on other sites from inclusion in search results."

This week I turn that poll question around and ask if you have ever received a DMCA complaint. That question is on my mind because I received one, I believe for the first time, from Google earlier this week.

The complaint was filed on behalf of NetEnt for the following article:

NetGame Entertainment secures SoftSwiss partnership

The notice I received from Google read as follows:

Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search

To: Webmaster of https://online.casinocity.com/,

Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of the material found on your site allegedly infringes upon the copyrights of others. Although some of these URLs may not be available in our search results now, we are retaining these notices and will act on them if at some point in the future we do crawl these pages for inclusion in search results.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, may be found on the website of Lumen, a third-party aggregator of legal complaint notices, at https://lumendatabase.org/notices/34240166.

Please note that it may take several weeks for the notice to be posted on the above page.

What you can do next:

File a Counter Notice

If you feel that your sites or pages were mistakenly removed due to a DMCA request filed against you, Google can reinstate these materials into our search results upon receipt of a DMCA Counter Notification.

Speak to a lawyer

If you have legal questions about this notification, you may wish to speak to your own lawyer.

Here are the affected URL(s):

https://online.casinocity.com/articl...nership-143203

Need more help?

• The DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. We’re in the process of removing from Google Search results the materials that allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. If we didn’t do so, we could be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. See this DMCA FAQ for more details.
• Read about the Google legal removal process in Legal Removal Requests in our Help Centre.

In this case, the complaint was fraudulent. The article was a press release provided to us by a PR agency working on behalf of NetEnt, and we published the article with the explicit permission of the PR agency. We were clearly authorized to publish it, so our doing so was not copyright infringement. Accordingly, the action I took was to file a DMCA Counter-Notification with Google to prevent the content from being removed from their search results.

Besides voting in the poll, if you have received a DMCA complaint, please share the details in a poll, including how you responded to the complaint.

Michael

[baldidiot]

Yeah we had someone file one once. Their writer had clearly copied our content and they hadn't noticed, then later on thought we'd copied them and filed a DMCA. We submitted a counter notice and that was the end of it (thankfully).

[Former Member 14]

Frequent recipients of DMCA complaints are hosting companies, where the person filing the complaint is asking that the hosting company remove the offending material from their servers.

If the stolen content is not being served with shared-hosting etc., then the DCMA, along with all your personal details, will be given directly to the owner of the server etc., etc. Basically the person who either stolen you content or knows it is stolen.

In which case the hosting provider washes their hands of the entire issue.

And, it should also be pointed out, a DCMA is ONLY applicable in the USA and its territories.