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A software review site started a DMCA campaign for words such as “Outstanding”, sending outrageous requests, after outrageous requests to Google. Hilarity ensues as you can imagine. The name of the company? ThinkMobiles, a software review company registered in Ukraine.
Understanding the DMCA and EUCD
To begin with, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or the DMCA, is a U.S. copyright law created to prevent piracy that criminalizes the unlawful use of copyrighted materials. This is significant for both companies and individuals since it offers them a way to protect their content if their work is being unlawfully used on a U.S.-hosted website. The U.S. specification is important in this case because although most websites can be accessed worldwide, the law that is applied is the one belonging to the country where the website’s servers are. That means that even if one is German if the website they are uploading an essay to is American, the content falls under US law, and not German law. The EU also has its equivalent in the form of the European Union Copyright Directive or the EUCD.
Here comes the troll think tank
This makes ThinkMobiles‘ execution even more interesting. The website is quite restrictive with its written material and does not fail in warning website visitors that “all articles are subject to copyright and can not be reproduced without permission,” which is after all standard policy in most cases. But according to a post on TorrentFreak, a few weeks ago, ThinkMobiles sent a series of DMCA requests, asking Google to remove pages containing copied content that included common words such as, ”here is a brief introduction,” “and click export,” and even the word “outstanding.”
The takedown notices then alerts the search engine to the “copyright infringing” links which the company in question wants to have removed. In this case, the “and click export” takedown notice showed URLs results from high traffic websites such as Google.com, Adobe.com, Google.com, and Microsoft.com while the “outstanding” copyright infringement claim asked Google to remove the URLs of websites such as Cambridge.com and Merriam-Webster.com. In these cases, it was plain that the listed URLs had nothing to do with the material posted on the ThinkMobiles website, and in the end, Google rejected the DMCA takedown requests.
Google handles 75,000,000 Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests every month
According to Google’s latest transparency report, the company handles 75,000,000 Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests every month for search, which translates into a whopping 2 million requests per day. Since 2006, the number of takedown notices has increased by 1.000.000.000%, a significant leap from a manageable couple of dozen requests that the tech company was facing back in 2008.
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