Thursday, January 16, 2014

My first DMCA Takedown filed at Google

A Google Blogger account called "SW Test Engineers" has published a blog article that is a word for word copy of one of my company's web pages!

InterWorking Labs provides network emulation and protocol testing products.  One of our products, the Maxwell Network Emulator, has a set of protocol tests for the TCP, IP, UDP, DHCP, ICMP protocols.  A description of this product is here:

http://iwl.com/component/content/article/87-protocol-testing/372-testing-the-tcp-ip-dhcp-protocols

SW Test Engineers has copied it and published it here:

http://swtestengineers.blogspot.com/2012/02/testing-tcp-ip-icmp-dhcp-protocols.html?showComment=1389898903465

I submitted the notification of infringing material after searching for "Reporting copyright infringement on Blogger" and going to this page:

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

I followed the procedure.  I wonder how long this will take?

Also, just to drive home the point, I posted a comment on the SW Test Engineers blog that it was infringing material.

I believe that every occurrence of a registered copyright violation (and our web pages ARE registered with the copyright office) is entitled to damages in the amount of $20,000.

Just received the automated response from Google:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [8-0250000002609] Your Request to Google
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 21:14:26 +0000
From: removals@google.com
To:  Chris Wellens

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

We have received your legal request. We receive many such complaints each day; your message is in our queue, and we'll get to it as quickly as our workload permits.

Due to the large volume of requests that we experience, please note that we will only be able to provide you with a response if we determine your request may be a valid and actionable legal complaint, and we may respond with questions or requests for clarification. For more information on Google's Terms of Service, please visit http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS

We appreciate your patience as we investigate your request.

Regards,

The Google Team

--------------

It is interesting that Google takes this approach. I would prefer to have the contact information for the legal representative of the infringer, and then turn my lawyers loose on it and pocket the $20,000 times the number of page views.

Seems like some enterprising lawyers could make a nice business out of this.

2 comments:

Hamzah Mauzam Ali said...

then what happened?
did google remove the content?

Chris Wellens said...

MandT,

YES! Google did remove the content and sent me a short note. However, the perpetrator then blocked my access to the site and took another one of our white papers and posted it on the website without attribution!

So now I will have to do it all over again. I can see why many companies make you register to download and view white papers; I don't know if that would have helped in this case.