DMCA takedown Notice removed high ranking URLs from Google

What do I do?

[rdscx]

As a long time reader (since 200X) of this forum, but not a member, I finally came to an issue I kind of need to address here, so here it is.

Saturday I received a DMCA takedown notice for 44 urls of my site. It's a sports site (sports betting ads) I rely on sports matches to get some traffic from Google. Last update (26 May) pushed the site up a bit.

The DMCA was carefully done for all the upcoming important matches of next week. The claim was simple: livestreaming of audio/visual content copyrighted by UEFA. Of course, there's no such thing on my site as we deal with statistics. I wish I had more time to update all matches with official video highlights from official YT channels, but well... the irony. The outbound links are also 100% legit (two big european betting sites) and it was like that from the beginning.

So my traffic for next week is gone because of this DMCA removal. I've read about delisting of Moz.com homepage and other things like that, but it was solved in less than a day because, well, it's moz.com, not anybody.com.

I am more than happy to file a counter-notice but I need to fill out my personal data and, to be honest, the DMCA seems to be fake. I googled the company, absolutely no results. They have filled 3 DMCA requests: two on my site and one back in March, against a legit company from Germany which deals also with copyright protection - how ironic is that?

What should I do? Fill up my personal data and send it to this probably fake company (I understand they will receive my data once I fill up the form)? I get nothing on them, no contact, email, website, address, nothing - just a name.

Seems awfully unfair to disclose my business identity to someone which doesn't disclose theirs - and even if they did, how do I know it's not fake?

I have no issues contacting UEFA and let them know about this case, but I am not sure they care too much. Again, there's a big ZERO possibility of me doing something illegal and a 99% chance of this being a fake takedown. I still give 1% chances of being a bot action by mistake.

Even if I submit today, it will take 10 days to have the results back in and in the meantime I am losing all the traffic anyway.

What would you do?

[Webwork]

Food for thought . . and your considered reading: "UK House of Lords Confirms the Limitations of the Economic Torts of Intentionally Causing Economic Loss" [gibsondunn.com ]

If there's no basis in fact for the DMCA then that smacks of a form of fraud, which may open up the party to a claim for punitive damages (in addition to compensatory damages).

In the USA the claim is commonly known as "tortious interference" (with prospective economic gain, etc).

[rdscx]

A small update regarding the whole Google process of submitting counter-notifications for 48 urls :)

June 4: received the Adsense notification about DMCA for the whole lot of urls. DMCAs were also posted on Lumen on 3 and 4 June, which means I am out of the index but, NO notification in GSC console. So in the first day, I got 2 DMCAs (one for 4 urls, one for 44 urls).

June 5: since I had the whole bunch of urls on Lumen, I submitted a counter-notification to Google including 44 urls (one notice only). Let's call it CN1.
NO notification in GSC console yet.

June 6: Got the first notification in GCS console about a single DMCA (4 urls). Submitted counter-notification (CN2) by using the link provided in the GSC message.

June 7: Nothing happened. No new notifications about DMCA in GSC. Nothing.

June 8: Got the second DMCA notice in GSC (44 urls).
Got a reply from Google about CN2 (June 6) telling me they want my address in a special format. Sent the address and received back the reply they sent the data to the complainant, and in around 10 working days they will reinstate the content if the claimant doesn't sue me. CN2 is now sent, subject closed.

Also got a reply regarding CN1 (June 5) telling me this:
"We are unable to take further action on your request because it does not provide all required information." Ok, looks like I need to send it again.

I've decided to send 4 notifications (10 urls x 3, and 14x1). I can put screenshots of the rejected counter-notice and the approved counter-notice, but maybe you can trust me, they were both the same :) Nevermind, moving on...

June 9: Now I have the second notice from Google in my GSC Console, clicked and sent the 4 notifications to cover all 44 urls. Let's call them CN3 (10 urls), CN4 (10 urls), CN5 (10 urls), CN6 (14 urls). Never got any reply for CN6. Ok, maybe I forgot to send it :)

June 10: nothing

June 11: nothing

June 12: nothing

June 13: Wow, something happened. Google told me they need my address in the same specific way. Now, you can imagine that after the first email, I just copy-pasted in the counter notification the address as they wanted and accepted on CN2 (even though it was the same). So I sent another reply, copy-pasted. CN3 cleared => 10 business days as of June 13.

June 14: Same thing with CN4 (address issue). Same procedure, CN4 cleared => 10 business days.

June 15: Same thing with address, same procedure. CN5 cleared => 10 business days.

No sign of CN6. I will send it again, at some point. Maybe. I am sick of it. I'll just 301 all future DMCAs to new pages. So far I've made new pages for the urls, in order to keep the originals intact (for the sake of being transparent and all...).

[rdscx]

It's basically like this.
If you have no Adsense on your pages and you don't check your site too much, you'll get the DMCAs in GSC in around 2 days after you are out of search.

Well, seems fair, Google is a big company with lots of people checking things. While they don't check too much who is sending DMCAs, they check intensively if they should send you a notification. So expect that after a few long meetings in various locations of the world, a decision will be made and you will get an email.

Moving to the counter-notification part, while you can access the specific pages for sending counter-notices, mine got rejected. It was either because of too many urls (44) in one go, or because of some sort of memory overload at Google. They couldn't tell me why. However, if you click on the button in GSC (after 2 days), you are able to send counter-notices that don't get rejected. If (probably) you don't put too many urls in one notice (recommended by Google is 10-100). Maybe to not overload the system, and this you need to understand, the AI gets confused.

Of course a fraudulent DMCA can be avoided by making some rules (like establishing beforehand which company is allowed to send notifications for an entity) and actually checking, but this is left to the bots. The people are in a meeting, deciding if they should send you a GSC notification or not. Lots of wonderful stuff happening at Google nowadays. Brilliant!

[rdscx]

Another quick update. Just got this:
"Hello,

Pursuant to the counter notification you sent us, we have reinstated the following URLs: <list of 4 urls>"

Checked in Google, they are indeed reinstated. First thing, I'm glad I was right about this being a bogus/fake DMCA. Second, I kind of feel the claim was 100% fake anyway (not a mistake from a legit company), so I think Google alone is to blame for any losses, since the "complainants" abused the Google system, not the law.

Many questions still remain: how to handle the next "attack"? What happens to the people that sent the fake DMCA? How will Google handle a second round of fake DMCAs for my domain?

Edit: the notice is still live on Lumen, not sure if it will ever go away (it should, at some point).

[engine]

Thanks for the update, and well done on achieving a positive result.

This has been an awful distraction.

Google will probably handle another DMCA in exactly the same way, and i'm sure there are huge numbers going on each day.

Your experience in fighting this is valuable, and will help you greatly if it happens again.

What happens to the people that sent the fake DMCA?

IDK, but i'd like to think eventually they are blacklisted.

[RedBar]

Congrats however what's happened with all the other "pending" 44 urls?

[rdscx]

Thanks!

As mentioned a few posts above, 30 urls are in a queue and should be reinstated in the upcoming days.

14 urls are still to be sent because it looks like I did not send the last batch - will do that today. All should be cleared by July 15 or sooner. I'll keep updating here. I wasn't expecting such a quick recovery given the slowness of Google at dealing with the counter-notifications. Even more, there's no more traffic for these pages until September.

About a quick recovery when dealing with bogus/fake DMCAs.

What I did was to create new ids for the same content, so basically I created 48 new pages in the API. Not all new pages were indexed in the same week. I've recovered no more than 25% of the traffic.

Probably a 301 from old to new pages would be better - never tried it because I wanted to keep the original content live, for everyone to see it. So I can't tell if 301 will work better than "new content". Bottom line is that the attack did the trick and a quick recovery isn't very effective.

Loses? Not much in terms of Adsense revenue, but it's hard to estimate when it comes to acquiring betting customers. The whole thing did waste a lot of my time, though.

[JesterMagic]

Thanks for keeping us updated. Information like this is why I keep coming back to these forums.

[rdscx]

There are news in the outrageous case of Bungie vs "John Doe". At least one Joe Doe is no longer anonymous (and protected by Google, let's not forget that).

[storage.courtlistener.com...]

[rdscx]

Another batch of 10 urls made their way back into the Search today, I expect to have all 30 back this week. It's a very slow process, which makes this type of fraudulent attack effective.

Hopefully Google will change something in the way they handle/accept DMCA, otherwise be prepared, it can happen to anyone, anytime. No quick recovery is available unless you know someone that knows someone who works at Google (much as the Politburo worked in communist countries) and can speed it up.

BTW, the LUMEN notices are still online, I guess I have to talk to them independently to have them removed. More time, more emails...

If the Google system was good, this would never happen. Same goes for Bungie case and everything else.

[rdscx]

All pages have been reinstated in the index. I sent an email to Lumen today, to find out how to get rid of the notices (which are still live). I just don't want my site's name on Lumen, in relation to copyright infringement.

Now, who is accountable for the loses? Who will acknowledge the mistake and actually do something to improve? I just want the data of the account that submitted the DMCAs. From the Bungie vs Google (developing) case, I understand I have no chance of getting that data. Can I sue Google in Europe? :)

I feel like this is entirely Google's fault. It's their system that got abused, it's their system that did not perform a normal check.

[RedBar]

Congratulation and fingers crossed this does not happen again.

Insofar as legal advice is concerned we do not do that here however I'm sure that if someone knows "what to do next" they'll give their opinion.

[engine]

Can I sue Google in Europe?

Take legal advice as we are not lawyers, and if you did want to pursue it you'd need to appoint a lawyer anyway.

Glad to hear it's all been restored. :)