Filing a DMCA

DMCA

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was faced an apparent DMCA issue with Yahoo!.

That was prompted after Yahoo! search support repeatedly claimed Platinax had been issueed with a DMCA, and therefore entirely delisted from Yahoo!.

Today I’m on the other side of the fence. Today I filed a DMCA against another company.

In October I discovered that a competitor of one of my clients had illegally copied over pages I had built for a client site.

Not only that, but that the competitor was also using hidden links on their homepage to the stolen content.

The issue was acute because the stolen copies were ranking and my client’s pages had dropped on Google. Duplicate content filter unable to discern the originals, perhaps?

I sent a spam report to Google, then instructed my client to forward a Cease & Desist to the offending company, to lay the groundwork for a DMCA report.

Not surprisingly, after nearly three months, Google has not penalised the site pages using the hidden links to stolen content.

I don’t blame Google for that - they’re a huge company and no doubt receive a huge amount of complaints of varying merit.

I find Google’s attempts to algorthmically devalue documents a fair ideal, and much more preferable to human editing actions that could lead to inconsistent value judgements.

Filing a DMCA

I thought we should allow at least a month for a response from the company in question, after sending the Cease & Desist.

Unfortunately, they have resisted change, so today I filed a DMCA against them using the submission form at Chilling Effects.

The site additionally suggested complaints of copyright abuse be addressed to an agent at Harvard.

Let’s be clear - using a DMCA isn’t a solution for SEO or marketing concerns - it’s for dealing with issues relating to copyright infringements.

However, that a competitor site can feel free to steal content for commercial gain is obviously an issue that requires addressing.

I look forward to seeing the DMCA acted on.