TorrentFreak is a news site covering the copyright business. It's the frequent target of abusive takedown notices, even though it hosts no infringing material, and reports that last year every single DMCA notice filed against it with Google was fraudulent. Every single one.
without the diligence of the Google Search team, at least 150 articles published on TorrentFreak.com would've been disappeared over the years due to bogus DMCA notices. We very much appreciate that first line of defense; since we don't have to commit resources towards countering wrongful complaints, we can concentrate on our reporting.
To that end, today we can report that DMCA notices continued to be filed against us at Google, all of them demanding the deindexing of links to our news reports in Google search. We also received a few direct to us via email, more than usual in 2023. All complaints/takedown notices had something in common; 100% bogus, right across the board, and a complete waste of resources for everyone involved.
The fake takedowns all seem to be generated by shady third-party copyright-enforcement companies, some located in the developing world, acting on behalf of the real rightsholders. Rightsholders use such companies to avoid the work and the potential (if evidently trivial) liabilities, and the funny thing is they're essentially being defrauded by them because the takedowns are automatically-generated garbage. The model looks like bottom-tier PR where the PR just uses lists and scripts to generate masses of make-work spam. But unlike PR spam, DMCA takedowns must be addressed.
