Interestingly enough, this Torrence Boone guy working now at Google seems to have had lots of success keeping his #1 SERP clean. His LinkedIN tells us he worked as "Global CEO" at an unnamed agency before, he got zero recommendations, but is now Vice President at Google.<p>Now comes the interesting part: Google won't even autocomplete "torrence boone enfatico" — Shame upon him who thinks evil upon it...<p>If you've been wondering about the moral decline at Google, this is the kind of people they hired as top management.
Somebody needs to take a stand against fraudulent DMCA notices. The escape hatch built into the DMCA to absolve the slimeballs of culpability doesn't nullify other applicable laws.<p>It clearly constitutes a form of libel against the victims falsely accused of a civil violation. The lawyers involved are violating their ethical duty as court officers and should be charged with barratry. The ACLU/EFF ought to be pursuing this tack to curb the abuse.
I've had something like this happen to a customer of mine. Some of his content posts were being copied by random sketchy sites, then backdated by a couple hours. Google would show the copied content as the main link in Google news, and his actual article would be buried somewhere under "more like this" link (or whatever it was called in news).
Google is crawling all over the web but cannot detect these as fraudulent requests? That seems like an easy check. Do we have an index of this domain? Was this backdated?<p>But they could be blocking it with robots.txt or some other excuse. It seems like an incredibly rare exception, what news site would block being crawled and indexed? They also are archiving domain info I'm sure. If they wanted to stop this, they have the data.
The Torrence Boone thing is quite remarkable.<p>Considering a fake DMCA carries the same penalty as perjury (correct me if I'm wrong) then I would have expected Google to have taken some action. A suspension pending an internal investigation or something similar.<p>Have they made any public statements on the matter?
I saw Scottsdale, Arizona mentioned and straightaway remembered that GoDaddy is based there. Coincidence?<p>Edit: actually, answering my own question -- when a domain is reg'd at GoDaddy and privacy is enabled, it's then "owned" (in the whois sense) by DomainsByProxy at GoDaddy.
It seems almost impossible to reliably backdate articles, especially if supposedly original domain name wasn't even registered at the time the supposed copy was posted.<p>The only scenario I could think of is claiming Google didn't index the original because it was blocked by robots.txt. Apart from that, how could Google not know the original date of publication?<p>I guess Google doesn't have systems in place to do this verification and they just remove from the SERPS anything and everything that has a DMCA violation, just or otherwise.<p>Another scenario I've witnessed myself is someone using a copyright free image (Unsplash) and then someone else claims a violation, saying they are the actual copyright holder and it was fraudulently posted on Unsplash by a third party. Google removes your homepage from serps, traffic tanks, business ends and there's no way you can even fight the decision. In the end who knows who's the actual copyright holder?
Would it be possible to content providers to send a URL to Google basically saying <i>I made this, here's a timestamp</i> to prove that you actually released it first, and whoever copies it and backdate it won't have any reliable proof they actually did publish it first?<p>Whenever I publish something I made, I submit the URL to the Wayback Machine so if it gets hugged to death at least there's a public copy somewhere else.
The space before punctuation thing might simply indicate a European writer. Several countries in Europe do that deliberately and I notice it with a lot of my colleagues.<p>It's interesting to note also how they appear to use the Fox News trademark while having no apparent affiliation. Also, although I don't know suite numbers, it's interesting that the address on the domain registration looks to be very close to a UPS store.
><i>Businesses have become increasingly creative in their attempts to misuse the DMCA to remove negative reviews from the Internet. They have gone to great lengths to falsely claim copyright infringement with the intent of taking down content from Google’s search results and review sites.</i><p>I dream of a world where companies doing any consciously shady shit like that are automatically slapped with a huge (1/2 their annual revenue would be a good start) fine, even if it's nominally legal, as long as a jury of experts decides their actions were harmful to society/transparency/the environment/etc.
A lot of the direct DMCA problems come from improper use needing to be demonstrably wilful in application. When algorithms send out these notices, you get some plausible deniability.<p>But setting up a news site to inject a backdated and infringing article would seem to be several, moderately serious criminal offenses.<p>If someone does this to you, push back hard. They're facing prison and fines.
It happens because doing fakes is free but struggling with them costs money. This problem can be solved if Google search result would be driven by rules/smart contracts but not by the income of Google's shareholders.
To be honest I believe DCMA is a entirely negative law. Even the legitimate strike claims were used in ways that help noone, sometimes hurting even the person doing the claim in first place, for example Nintendo been so agressive on YouTube, taking down for example videos of conventions that happened to have a Nintendo trailer or game playing somewhere on camera, that journalist stopped covering Nintendo because doing do cause strikes against you.