Fighting the Fakers: A Guide to Dealing With Bogus Copyright Complaints on Google
More and more journalists are contending with fake copyright infringement claims. Here are some tips from OCCRP on how to handle them.
Frivolous defamation cases aren’t the only tools that powerful people use to silence investigative journalism. Reporters around the world, including those at OCCRP and in its network, also face bogus accusations of copyright infringement aimed at getting hard-hitting stories taken down or de-indexed by search engines like Google.
Since these platforms are predominantly based in the U.S., the complaints are typically made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires online service providers and platforms to react immediately to reports or violations. Big Tech companies rarely have systems in place to assess the merit of each report. Instead, all bad actors need to do is clone a story, backdate it, then demand the real thing be taken down.
You can learn more about how this works in Story Killers, a collaborative investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories that showed how certain reputation management firms invent fake DMCA violations on behalf of their clients — many of them accused or convicted criminals.
Experts say such firms are part of a growing industry focused solely on disinformation. For hefty fees, these reputation launderers help shady people and entities to clean up their online profiles. Tena Prelec, a transnational kleptocracy expert and research fellow at Oxford University told us:
“You have a whole series of professional service industries, such as public relations agents, lobbyists, lawyers … who basically help in this retasking of unsavory individuals and companies and governments as internationally respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans.”
This mercenary industry has also targeted OCCRP. For several years, we were inundated with hundreds of spurious DMCA complaints aimed at removing our articles from Google search, our number one source of traffic. Some of these complaints were successful — Google took down the contested articles from search, including some that had been part of award-winning investigations.
Google makes it easy to submit a DMCA complaint in less than a minute. But the process for countering such complaints is more confusing, with little guidance provided about the information Google is looking for. As part of my role at OCCRP, I was tasked with getting dozens of stories restored on the Google search engine.
My months of battling DMCA takedown requests highlighted the inequities in the media industry. We only managed to solve the problem in the end by finding the phone number of someone at Google via a friend of a friend.
From humble beginnings, OCCRP has advanced rapidly over the past three years — including a recent nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. But we’re still considered a niche organization in the U.S., especially outside of journalism circles. As a result, we’ve been a much softer target for DMCA abusers compared to legacy media outlets, which have the resources and reach to ensure that the world can hear their screams.
With this in mind, I wanted to write about our experience in dealing with DMCA abuses, in the hope that it will help smaller publications that continue to be targeted — especially those based outside of the U.S.
The Surreal Experience of Getting a Bogus DMCA Complaint
When I read my first DMCA notification from Google in June 2020, I assumed it was about a small piece of mistakenly copied text, or maybe a sloppy citation. Instead, we were accused of having infringed the copyright of an entire investigation about mafia links to a gambling operation — one that had been laboriously produced and written entirely by OCCRP and its Italian partners over many months.
The investigation had been republished, word for word, on an obscure website that looked like an amateur had built it in a coding class before abandoning it. The article on the fake news site credited an unknown reporter called David Russell as the writer of the investigation.
More importantly for the DMCA claim against us — which was made by someone who was involved in 6,000 other complaints — it falsely listed an earlier publication date than our story to make it appear that we had stolen their work.
This Potemkin website was an elaborate bit of gaslighting, but a quick query on the Wayback Machine, a site used to view legacy webpages, would have shown that OCCRP’s version of the investigation was published first. Google’s own system, however, did not appear to have even these simple measures in place to check the validity of claims.
Instead, Google sent us an automated notification saying our article would be deindexed from its search results until we formally countered the copyright claim that had been made against us.
We began receiving dozens more complaints that used this backdated article strategy. Some complaints, filed before my time at OCCRP, had actually been successful in getting our articles deindexed from Google search.
I began to dispute as many DMCA complaints as I could. In some cases I succeeded, but the strategy wasn’t sustainable. It would have taken me weeks to deal with the backlog of claims alone — let alone tackle all the new ones that were still flowing in.
At the time, I couldn’t find any information from Google on how to deal with these bogus copyright claims. Desperate to find a solution, my colleagues and I decided that several OCCRP employees would start making calls to anyone who might have an “in” at Google. One of them, mercifully, knew about the DMCA issue, and gave us the name of someone we could contact for help. In less than 72 hours, our problem went away: We stopped getting DMCA notifications, and all our deindexed stories were restored.
It’s not clear if Google keeps some kind of “whitelist” of organizations that are protected from frivolous DMCA claims. A spokesperson did not respond to OCCRP’s questions about whether such a list existed.
All I can say is that, based on my experience, if your legitimate news site has a DMCA problem, finding a Google employee who’s willing to help may be your best chance at solving it. If you can’t, here are some tips to make sure your articles don’t disappear from search results.
Tips on Beating DMCA Requests
- Webmaster account: Google will send automated notifications about DMCA complaints — and any other legal notice — to the webmaster account at your organization. So make sure that someone, preferably multiple people, checks the emails sent to “webmaster@yourorganization.com”
- Always date articles: Any page without a publication date is a sitting duck for a DMCA complaint. For our award-winning Azerbaijani Laundromat investigation, we wrote short profiles of key figures connected to the $2.9-billion money laundering operation. Some of these profile pages, however, did not include publication dates. Big mistake. Google deindexed at least one, which profiled the sons of a prominent Azerbaijani official, after a fake DMCA complaint.
- Bylines: Articles that fail to cite either the author or organization (or both) are also vulnerable to takedowns from Google, which sees such information as a form of accountability.
Even if you don’t have a DMCA problem, we suggest you follow these guidelines since other tech platforms, not just Google, may also use them to rate the quality of articles. They can also help you fight other types of frivolous claims made via another online arbitration system that Google oversees.
These claims involve privacy complaints.
GDPR Takedowns: Another Way To Silence Journalism
Over the past year, OCCRP has also received several notifications from Google saying that a person has claimed that our article violates their right to privacy under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This type of complaint is not as elaborate as a DMCA complaint since it doesn’t usually involve backdated articles, but it can be even harder to fight.
The notifications simply say that an anonymous complainant has filed a privacy request against a web page under “Europe’s data protection law.” If the story in question mentions multiple people, you are left to guess which one of these people complained.
Our first GDPR complaint was over an investigation into arms dealers who had helped funnel weapons into Syria during its civil war, but we had no idea which of the subjects of the story had filed the complaint, or why, since GDPR rules mean that this information doesn’t have to be disclosed.
Aside from not being able to figure out who complained about a story, it’s also hard to determine just how much a GDPR complaint affects an article’s reach. Unlike DMCA complaints, Google does not necessarily remove an article from search results, but instead deprioritizes it from “some search queries.”
For publications outside of Europe, GDPR complaints are less of a problem. But for outlets that report in Europe, they likely miss out on potential readers who search for information related to our investigations.
Take our Italian member center, IrpiMedia, which recently received a GDPR complaint about one of its stories. Thankfully, Google reversed its decision after IrpiMedia inquired about the takedown.
Ironically, the story in question is an investigation about spurious GDPR complaints and the reputation management firms that file them on behalf of their clients. Yes, Google deprioritized an investigation — albeit briefly — about bogus privacy complaints after receiving a bogus privacy complaint.
IrpiMedia asked the CEO of one of these shadowy companies if he filed the takedown request; he denied it. Thanks to Google’s opaque — and apparently undiscerning — system, we may never know who was behind it, or which search queries were affected.
Written by Charles Michio Turner
