Can Filing DMCA Requests Backfire?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

About two months ago, I filed two DMCA requests against two separate sites. One was a Yahoo answers page, and the other was an amazon page.

Both of those pages had do-follow links back to my site. they were using about two paragraphs of my content.

google de-indexed them within a week.

Over the next month, my traffic slid gradually about 10% (through the month of July. I have checked it against the dates of the Panda iterations that tedster posted and the drops do NOT seem to mesh with the Panda dates here in the US.

Is it possible that I lost a significant amount of link juice when google de-indexed those pages? After all, they were both on DOMAINS with high PR (yahoo and amazon).

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

It certainly does seem possible - although I would have expected the effect to be more in one shot, rather than a gradual decline.

The situation you describe doesn't sound like one where I'd want to see the quote and link taken down. It sounds like essentially a good thing to me - but of course I don't know your specific situation.

[Planet13]

The situation you describe doesn't sound like one where I'd want to see the quote and link taken down.

I think that I was a little panicked with the recent reports of scrapers outranking the original source, and also worried that I might become the victim of Panda if google saw content on my site that was the same as on "high authority" sites such as amazon and yahoo...

Oddly enough, the one page of mine that they had taken my content (both the amazon and the yahoo pages took content from - and linked to - the same page on my site) has seen a SLIGHT increase in traffic (+2.5%) and a VERY slight increase in entrances (+.22%). More surprisingly, that page saw a MAJOR jump in the SERPs (from about #25 to #9).

the way things are going, I will probably reach #1 just as the next total global economic meltdown hits and nobody can afford any of my products anymore...

[1script]

they were using about two paragraphs of my content.

Planet, I'm sure you toiled hard to get those two paragraphs of text produced.

[sarcasm off]

But why did you find it necessary to have them removed from a site such as Amazon, especially if they had a do-follow link! just makes no sense to me, you've over-reacted so badly, you're probably going to be beating yourself for it for some time to come.

In fact, I find it ridiculous that your DMCA was accepted - their use bears all the signs of fair use, and even if it wasn't exactly fair use (say, link was missing or the quote misappropriated) - do they not have anything better to do than to go after two paragraphs of text? It just goes to show that Google doesn't care about those DMCAs and just automatically accept them - a clear sign that this can, and most probably does, get abused all the time.

[Planet13]

@ 1script:

Just makes no sense to me, you've over-reacted so badly, you're probably going to be beating yourself for it for some time to come.

Did I over-react? Probably. Will I regret it? Quite possibly. But I am pretty proactive when it comes to link building, so we will see how it goes. I've gotten much better links since then so we will have to sit back and wait and see if the new links start to assist my rankings.

But why did you find it necessary to have them removed from a site such as Amazon...

As I mentioned, I was in a panic because of all the reports that scrapers were outranking original sources, and because I was afraid that Panda would come along, see similar content on my site and on theirs, and think that my site was copying them, and that MY SITE would be the one suffering the wrath of Panda.

The thing that was most worrisome to me was when I searched for a string of unique text from my page, the amazon and yahoo sites outranked me. Now, I know that in terms of RANKING, that isn't particularly significant (since no one is going to search for that particular string of text). But it did have me worried that google was somehow "devaluing" my site because of similar content to theirs.

It just goes to show that Google doesn't care about those DMCAs and just automatically accept them...

Not necessarily.

There was a third site (a small mom and pop type shop in the UK) that had also copied my text word for word. They DIDN'T link back to me.

I filed a DMCA request against them at the same time I filed the other requests, and it was (initially) rejected.

Google said they couldn't see the copyright violation.

I had to respond to their rejection and point out exactly where the violation was (the page in question had a LOT of text on it, and you had to read to about paragraph #13 of text before you came across my text). So they probably just didn't see it right away.

anyway, they finally JUST got back to me saying that they had accepted my DMCA request.

[indyank]

In fact, I find it ridiculous that your DMCA was accepted

Do you? But I didn't believe it when they removed a page of a client's competitor for just two lines of copied content. It was definitely content copied from the client but I wasn't sure they will act.

Google is very strict with this now and they do this when there is ample evidence. They weren't doing it in the early days of panda but they do it now.Because anything could hurt.

[Planet13]

They weren't doing it in the early days of panda but they do it now.Because anything could hurt.

That is what I thought. I could get hurt by NOT claiming that content as my own.

[1script]

Guys, I'm not against filing DMCA in principal. There has to be a recourse for the most egregious cases (I once had an entire website copied - they just substituted the phone number in the footer for their own).

But here we are talking about two paragraphs of text! I just think that regardless of the link situation (I think they were definitely worth two paragraphs of text) , raising the DMCA issue over this much text is a waste of your own time and Google's.

Additionally, I just can't believe that 2 paragraphs copied verbatim can hurt a website. First of all, it's VERY common and, IMHO, is a fair use if credited correctly (although, I admit, I don't know how long the paragraphs were). Second, this looks like too noisy a signal to be counted for much in terms of ranking. Well, unless, if you strip the HTML and other code, those two paragraphs are the only thing on the page . That would make it a somewhat different situation.

Anyway, my sincere hope was that Google has more important things to do, but it turns out, they not only responded to such a DMCA, they even found it necessary to change their ruling! Unless all that is an automated process (reject first; if they insist, accept) I think they've spent way too much time on this. Frankly, I think that you did, too.

Getting back to the initial question though (sorry for the detour) yes, I think that if there were good links and they got removed (regardless of how that came about) it can obviously hurt the linked pages and, subsequently, the site. So, I would always tread lightly whenever a link back to me is involved. I can imagine that in some of those cases, a copied paragraph can be turned into a guest post or maybe a good editorial link if you were to contact the site owner, thank them for citing you and asked for a proper link or just started building a relationship for more links in the future.

Cheers!

[Lapizuli]

Crediting a source has nothing to do with fair use - it's a common misconception I see floating around a lot. Not sure where it came from...perhaps scholarly guidelines about plagiarism? Plagiarism is different from copyright violation.

[fairuse.stanford.edu...] (scroll down to What If You Acknowledge the Source Material)

[copyright.gov...]

[Planet13]

So, I would always tread lightly whenever a link back to me is involved.

Lesson learned. Thanks!

[AlyssaS]

Lapizuli - fair use is based on the amount of text quoted. So if you have a 1000 word article, quoting two paragraphs is fair use. If your entire article consists of two paragraphs and these are quoted, that is plagiarism.

Planet13 - I've had stuff lifted from my sites too - but where the person lifting it has given me a do-follow link, I simply re-write my stuff. That way I'm still unique and get to keep the link.

It's not citations that you have to worry about, it's people trying to scrape your entire articles (usually without linking back to you at all).

[1script]

@Lapizuli: agree, "fair use" is a very ambiguous term and crediting a source does not automatically make it a fair use.
However, my point was that the copyright owner should have a sense of whether to invoke the law (and, by the way, why everyone assumes that the entire world abides by the same U.S. copyright laws? We know neither about Planet's location nor the offender's, although Google should obviously follow U.S. law)

I think that there may be situations where the copyright owner should consider the use "fair". After all, a do-follow HTML-formatted link is not just a citation, is it? With Google's help it pretty much became the Internet's currency, so you can say that the copyright owner was "paid" for the use. Too far-fetched? Maybe, if the link is on a junky spam site. Not necessarily if it's on a good site like the ones in the original message.

Cheers!

[Lapizuli]

AlyssaS,

Just semantics here, but don't forget that plagiarism and copyright violation are different things.

"...instances of plagiarism...can also constitute copyright infringement, though copyright infringement does not always constitute plagiarism."
[facpub.stjohns.edu...]

Also this great article:
[plagiarismchecker.com...]

But more importantly, the nature of the text copied makes a difference. It's hard to make generalizations about copyright law because so many subjective factors are considered by the legal folks - there are no simple objective policies you can safely go by, beyond asking the owner of the copyright for permission.

For example, if you copy just one sentence from an entire book, and that sentence is the thing that makes the book unique and valuable and is the difference between people buying the book and not buying the book, that could be trouble and not fall under the "fair use" exemption.

So for that reason, I believe (I am not a lawyer, yada, yada, yada) most businesses will want to establish just one thing in a DMCA - that the person filing the DMCA holds the copyright. Whether or not the material is a legal violation of copyright is often a place these businesses don't want to go too far into, because it's not just a matter of determining whether something is plagiarized or not.

It's interesting to me that the last decade has seen the issue of intellectual property being discussed like this more and more and always heatedly. It suggests we're going through some really major transitions about what intellectual property is, how it should be protected and shared and such - which makes sense, since the laws were set up before digital technology changed the nature of copying and since provenance is so tricky now. And since a new generation of Internet users tends to view IP very differently than previous generations.

Should be interesting.