DMCAs and Google

[backdraft7]

Ok, so I'm knocked out of the SERPS. What's replaced me is surprisingly, ME!

Over that past two months I've filed several DMCA's against people stealing my photos and posting them on their wannabe sites. Today I'm just about ready to go ballistic with the proliferation of scrapers ranking in the top pages of Google with my content while Google continues with their apparent campaign against my site.

I was watching GA and saw an odd term appear on my scope. So I back checked in on Google...I wasn't on page 1, that was dominated by houxx. So was page 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. So I went back to page one and examined all the image results and BOOM there was my photo. I moused over it and HOLY SG*T! it's on another site! So, I try to collect myself and try stuffing the steam back in my ears as I navigate over to that site in hopes of finding a contact for the site owner so I can ream him a new one.

Guess what? No contact, no phone, no address, no nothing, yet ranking with my stolen content. How much more p*ssed off can a guy get?

How can Google continue to be so obtuse in their judgement of quality?
They are broken, their results stink and I am quickly becoming the biggest anti-Google advocate you'll ever meet. It's not that they removed my site, it that they promote THIEVES!

Now I have to waste more time filing a DMCA, while Google slaps another Chilling Effects notice on the page, making me look like a fool. This time I'm getting creative with the report, because everyone will be able to read the real story now.

[netmeg]

File the DMCA with the ISP.

[backdraft7]

@Netmeg - that would have been my second choice. The first would have been to contact the site owner and ask him to remove my stolen property from his MFA site. As I mentioned. I searched his site for any sort of contact, there was none, so, I did a whois on his domain, it was a private cloaked registration. The nameserver were there so I tried to search on those, but this guy knows how to hide and that was a dead end too.
So, a Google DMCA will have to do.

Not to sound like my usual broken record self, but what really steams my clams is that Google ranked this punk thief over my site legit, honest, easy to contact site. I don't know what their game is lately, but it's no good.

[Chuck Hamrick]

Try contacting the registrar and telling them you will be filing a DMCA complaint against them as well. Request that they drop the private cloaked registration. Seen that work many times in a trademark violation case.

[varun21]

In my case Google not only banned the scrappers, it banned me also. So I'm not doing any more DMCA's with Google.

< Discuss this specific issue here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 3:21 am (utc) on Apr 25, 2013]
[edit reason] Removed some specifics, added note [/edit]

[garyr_h]

In my experience, ISPs have ignored DMCA requests and so do MFAs. Filing through Google is the only time I have ever had any action taken. Sadly, it is to Google's own discretion and they have told me in the past that they will not do anything about Facebook pages, if they are the ones copying. They want you to go directly to Facebook with the request--and I've never had anything more than canned answers from them.

[backdraft7]

@varun21 - this is what I had suspected too. It also corresponds to the first DMCA filings I submitted.

It's bad enough we have to be content creators, take care of our customers, be software and hardware engineers and ensure our sites are neat as a pin in every imaginable way, but now we have to be private detectives and a police force to handle the scraper trash that Google is promoting?

That Wal-mart greeter position is sounding better every day!
I'm thinking I could possibly handle that!
Maybe...

[backdraft7]

garyr_h - agreed. Most ISP's side with their customers and MFA's never have contact info. I think if Google wants to ID "bad guys" they ought to require a full disclosure from site that runs a business. No disclosure, no rank. It's to the point that I feel buck naked out there having all my personal info ripe for the picking of any scammer. Even FB and especially G+ with their headshot requirement for authorship is a free gallery of fake Id's any scammer could use to access your financial or personal records.

They already know everything there is to know, they might as well give us a card, tattoo or implanted microchip to make it official.

[backdraft7]

Just found another scraper with another quick setup Wordpress MFA using a bunch of my images and guess who's ranking on page one of the serps, you got it, the SCRAPER site, right there in the image box, my photo, on his site. This is WAY OUTTA HAND! Google is currently a playground for scrapers and content thieves. They are as guilty as those who steal my photos. If they can recognize a face, they can recognize my images that have been on my site for over a decade.

Again, no contact info whatsoever and a half assed setup of wordpress.

[chrisv1963]

Google is currently a playground for scrapers and content thieves.

I have the same problem with content scrapers and Pinterest pages ranking above me on Google with my stolen content. I do not have this problem with Bing. Thus ... which one is the better search engine? Right ... Bing.

Google+ authorship, social signals and stuff like that are a huge joke. If you set up a Wordpress based site today with tons of stolen text and photos, you can be sure to rank on Google within a few days/weeks. Google is simply unable to identify stolen content.

When I sent Google Search DMCAs it used to take one or two days before stolen content got removed from the serps. Right now it takes at least a week.

[netmeg]

I understand the frustration, but I don't see Google volunteering to become Internet Police even more than they already are. That's a battle that doesn't scale, and they're not interested in anything that doesn't scale (even customer service). The first thing that would happen would be that the scrapers and thieves would turn around and start filing mass quantities of DMCAs against legitimate sites, just to stall for time and tie up their time and resources proving they're the originators. Google would pretty much have to devote the resources to arbitrate every battle. Bing and Yahoo too. No, I don't see that happening.

[JesterMagic]

I find trying to file a DMCA with a host is a joke most of the time.

What's the best way to file a DMCA against an entire site with Google? Most scrapper sites tend to steal 100+ pages of my site and it is a lot of work to copy and past the links and sample text for every single link.

[tedster]

it is a lot of work to copy and past the links and sample text for every single link

Here's a nifty trick for generating a .csv file for all the linking URLs
Tips for Writing a DMCA Complaint to Google [labnol.org]

[JesterMagic]

Thanks tedster. The article mentions that you should include all links in the DMCA or if they file a counter DMCA Google will not do anything further. Has anyone run into this problem? I tend to not file for all of my content just the important stuff else I would be at this forever. Plus you can only include 10 groups in one DMCA report and I would have run out of room anyways for a number of my reports.

[Lame_Wolf]

Here's a nifty trick for generating a .csv file for all the linking URLs
Tips for Writing a DMCA Complaint to Google [labnol.org]

At the bottom of the page it says... "The content is copyrighted to <removed> and may not be reproduced on other websites"

Sadly, someone has already taken some of his site and reproduced it.

[backdraft7]

@netmeg - my problem with that assumption is that Bing seems to be able to handle the issue of controlling low quality, thin, scraper sites just fine, while Google, the guys who constantly brag up their ability to detect and eliminate such sites, are doing just the opposite of what they claim...again.
Is it any wonder many of us are moving away from this mess of a search engine?

[edited by: backdraft7 at 3:09 pm (utc) on Apr 27, 2013]

[diberry]

I too have had no luck with DCMA'ing hosts. If your copycats are well hidden, they'll have chosen international fly by night hosts who don't respond to stuff like that. If you got the whole host shut down somehow, they'd just upload a backup to a new host five minutes later.

Side note: someone around here once told me they were talking to a Bing rep when they brought up the issue of why Google indexes so many blatant copycats. The Bing rep said they don't know why Google does, because it's very easy to track when certain things first came online, and just never index the same thing twice.

Of course, my guess is that this is why Bing indexes fewer pages than Google, and indexes more slowly. Google probably does things differently because they want the index to be more complete and up to date, which I can understand as a business model. They later implemented the DCMA options to address the problems, but clearly that's not enough anymore.

[carminejg3]

You need to track down the original host.. Not the reseller.

For example: A host will rent a dedicated server from SERVERCENTER who will will rent a vps to fastdom and fastdom will offer xyz a reseller account. You need to go to SEVERCENTER. not xyz.

The main datascenter will alert the chain. xyz doesnt care.

[carminejg3]

Update: I have found a nice firefox plugin for getting urls from a page helpful in reporting dmca's [addons.mozilla.org ]

[graeme_p]

A host in the US will probably respond to a DMCA notice.

A host in another country needs notification appropriate to their laws - so it depends on where they are.

[carminejg3]

I'm working on file a DMCA for a site with adsense and about 400 or my articles on his site. Godaddy sent me their request to take his site down, so now i have to match up my articles to his.

As a not make sure your first DMCA is good, i have heard if they counter, you will need a court order for the second.