Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Google Negligently Issued A Blogger Blog Takedown Notification

A company like Google is presumed to be an organised and properly managed one. Not necessarily. Today we received a notification from Blogger platform that reads:

”Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.”

We produce original contents and we do not lift contents of others. So prima facie the DMCA complaint filed with Google is mala file and wrong. Even Google is negligent in changing the status of our posts as draft without verifying the truth of the claim either itself or with our assistance.

The notice further reads:

”A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects. You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.”

Till now Google has not provided us any information as to how we violated the copyright of any person or individual. Even a search at Chilling Effects has not produced any results. Clearly, Google has wrongfully suspended the posts without application of its mind.

On top of it the notice reads:

”If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.”

It is clear that there is no copyright violation on our part. Rather Google has been used as a platform to harass us and Google willing complied to do so without examining the truth of the compliant. We would publish our response to Google soon.