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How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censor Google results (2017)
- speeder 8y agoTo 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.
- sneak 8y agoDMCA notices are required to be sworn statements under penalty of perjury. It sounds like that that isn’t being enforced at all by DoJ. Just another example of how a corrupt government can selectively enforce laws to give its crony friends a leg up.
- Natsu 8y agoNormally, DMCA notices for non-infringing works can't trigger the perjury clause, because the lawyers really do represent the owner of the copyrighted work that's allegedly infringed, it's just the infringement claim itself that's bogus. Here, if the article is correct, they're actually claiming to own works they do not own at all. So if they get called on it, they actually could end up having to answer perjury charges. The real question is who gets to enforce that? I'm not sure if it's the DoJ, you might have to bring a civil suit for slander to title first to get a criminal referral or something. I really don't know how that's supposed to play out because I think I've only seen one case where someone complained under the perjury clause and they settled, so it was never a criminal matter.
- codedokode 8y agoWhat if the company that have sent the notice is outside of US?
- reaperducer 8y agoIn my experience, what happens is the company hires a representative inside the United States to file on their behalf. There is an organization inside Belgium that hired a law firm in New York to file claims against a web site I once owned in Texas to remove people’s vacation photographs taken in Belgium, under threat of legal action. (This was pre-DMCA. The web site was sold long ago and is now defunct.)
- WillPostForFood 8y agoIt would be worse without it. Google would be liable for copyrighted material, and likely would preemptively ban suspected material to avoid liability.
- izacus 8y agoWhat exactly are you basing that on? The previous law said nothing about hosters being liable for any copyright.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoThere was no previous law with respect to the internet. The specific purpose of the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA was to exempt ISPs and content providers from liability for hosting copyright infringing material. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
- jijji 8y agoThe law previous to DMCA was "common carrier" regulations. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/chapter-5/subchapter-II/part-I https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/chapter-5/subchap...
- icebraining 8y agoI don't think that applied to most services, though, including Google.
- 0x00000000 8y agoThey really need a reverse three strikes. Once you make three blatantly fraudulent claims, you are banned from making any more claims. Automated claims should not be allowed ever, they should all be verified by a human. Alternatively, if you want to go full accelerationism, people should start abusing the system more and spamming fake takedowns on anything they don't like completely flooding it and getting legitimate content of important people taken down. There is probably no other way anything will change
- andybak 8y agoIsn't a false DMCA claim a criminal offence? The question is whether it's realistic that someone will be prosecuted over this.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoOnly if you can't claim it to be a mistake, unfortunately.
- reaperducer 8y agoTo be honest I believe DCMA is a entirely negative law I’m not a huge fan of DMCA, but it’s not entirely negative. Without DMCA, there would be no YouTube, Imgur, Twitter, or pretty much any other site that allows the public to upload content. It’s an ugly compromise, but one that allowed a significant portion of the web to exist and grow. Hopefully it will eventually be replaced with something more nuanced.
- chii 8y ago> there would be no YouTube, Imgur, Twitter, or pretty much any other site that allows the public to upload content. why?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoBecause they themselves would be liable for copyright infringement instead. Servicing DMCA lets them run safely, as long as they respond to takedown notices quickly, and the complaining party usually won't bother going after the individual that posted the infringing work.
- Natsu 8y agoThe 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. 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.
- DeusExMachina 8y agoAre you sure about that space thing? I live in Europe and I have been browsing the Internet for 20 years now, and this is the first time I hear about it. Also, I visit plenty of Eropean news sites, and none does that.
- seba_dos1 8y agoIt's a somewhat common error, but I don't think it's ever used deliberately, especially in any professional setting.
- Natsu 8y agoIt seems to be pretty common among the French at least. I haven't seen it in print media, only from individuals.
- tajen 8y agoIn French, no space before a comma or a period (unless want to explicitly communicate your disdain for computery things or you’re above 60) but we do put a space before : ? ! Example: « Pas de palais : pas de palais ! » (^Quote from the Asterix movie that will be way more useful to you for making French friends in a bar than saying « I can’t speak French » in French)
- ChristianBundy 8y agoThis is actually a really interesting example of the "space before punctuation" thing rather than " space before punctuation ". Also: it looks like we're using colons differently, is that right?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andybak 8y agoThe Torrence Boone thing is quite remarkable. 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. Have they made any public statements on the matter?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ubernostrum 8y agoConsidering a fake DMCA carries the same penalty as perjury (correct me if I'm wrong) The only part of a DMCA takedown that's under penalty of perjury is the assertion that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. The infamous Diebold case -- where they did get penalized for a false DMCA notice -- involved Diebold more or less admitting openly in court "yeah, we knew it was wrong but we sent a notice anyway". Which means it's extremely difficult to get someone on a false DMCA notice.
- hyperpape 8y agoIsn’t this a case where they’re falsely claiming to be a copyright holder?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago> The only part of a DMCA takedown that's under penalty of perjury is the assertion that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. But that's exactly the fradulent claim, and unlike other cases that are understandable genuine mistakes (even though the mistakes would be avoidable if the claimants put a reasonable amount of care into checking their claims), in this case, it's clear that the claimant knew the claim was false, and they falsified documents to support that claim. I highly doubt courts would appreciate this sort of behavior, it's just that the victims of the censorship likely don't know, don't care, don't have the resources to fight, or don't catch it before the statute of limitations expires. Unfortunately, it seems like the maximum penalty for perjury is five years, and I assume it's rare that anything near that is imposed, so I guess someone decided it's worth it.
- petecooper 8y agoI saw Scottsdale, Arizona mentioned and straightaway remembered that GoDaddy is based there. Coincidence? 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.
- ohashi 8y agoGoogle 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? 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.
- jobigoud 8y ago> That seems like an easy check. Do we have an index of this domain? Was this backdated? How do you know it's backdated if by the time you crawl the articles have appeared on both sides. How do you know which was published first? This attack can be performed faster than the re-crawling frequency.
- ohashi 8y agoIt could be, but from the article that came out, it seems like it's a lot slower. This example was over a year later.
- iliketosleep 8y agoThey surely have both the capability and data to thwart this type of fraud. There are only two possibilities that I can think of. One is that it's a business decision, where they know these cases may exist but they took the decision that it's not worth the extra overhead. Second possibility is that it's an oversight, essentially a "bug" in the system. Either way, it appears that Google had not yet identified this as a serious problem. I give credit to them for having a Transparency Report so that others can pick up fraud and abuse which they themselves may not have already found to have been a problem; an essential safeguard. I also view projects such as Lumen as being of increasing importance.
- amygdyl 8y agoif I suspected my services were being manipulated by fraudulent activities, for potential political influence, I might just pay out enough rope for fraudsters to hang themselves by. if I really hated holding the poison chalice to be the arbiter of so much public credulity, I think, possibly, I might not react to this kind of publicity about my apparent oversight, to see who I could catch..
- danielvf 8y agoI'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).
- timClicks 8y agoReally interesting, this behavior implies that Google hasn't figured out a way to verify what a page states as its creation date.
- askmike 8y agoGoogle crawls the open web non stop. They definitely have this data. It's just not exposed to the (legal) team dealing with DMCA takedown requests.. EDIT: Or as to the example above: whatever application is responsible for picking the main article to show somewhere.
- codetrotter 8y agoThey crawl the web non-stop yes, but how often an individual site is crawled varies. > Our crawl process is algorithmic: computer programs determine how often we should crawl each site. If you post new articles on your site throughout the day, you should be able to see them appear on Google News fairly quickly. > [...] > From the moment we discover a new article, we'll keep re-crawling it looking for changes. Since we noticed that most changes to articles occur just after they're published, we revisit articles most frequently in the first day after we've found them. After that, we visit them less often. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40392?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/4039...
- askmike 8y agoFair point, if your content gets copied to unknown website X which Google hasn't crawled for days they might not be able to tell where the article appeared first.
- m-p-3 8y agoWould it be possible to content providers to send a URL to Google basically saying I made this, here's a timestamp 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? 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.
- chii 8y ago> I made this, here's a timestamp to prove... a timestamp can't prove anything. What stops somebody else from copying your content, but timestamping it earlier and submitting it as proof? How can google verify it? In fact, google may have an incentive to allow this - since those scammy sites may actually be using google ads, while legit sites may have their own ad-nework which google may not be part of...
- nielsole 8y agoBy having the timestamp be signed by a trusted party. Either a single entity or e.g. the blockchain
- cheeze 8y agoI agree that would be a potential solution but it's too far removed from reality to even be a consideration imo. You'd need some sort of negative affirmation as well. "when I published this article, searching for it yielded nothing" signed by a trusted party would be a stronger statement. But no clue how you actually do that.
- smelendez 8y agoThis is basically the purpose of copyright registration and filing your work with the Library of Congress
- Too 8y agoEven if the third party reliably proves your article is published october 1, what prevents the scammer from publishing an article with a fake date of june 21 on plain www-internet? It's not like the scammer is going to publish the article hash on any block chain. Something like this can only work if all news publishers always publish the article hash and those that don't will simply not get crawled and not be valid as proof in DMCA takedowns.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoSomebody 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. 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.
- yoz-y 8y agoIndeed. Currently it looks that many of the mechanism originally made for defense get turned around. Another example would be reporting content or people for violations they did not make.
- jacquesm 8y agoSee: Sony music vs some guy playing piano on youtube.com.
- winkeltripel 8y agoI mean, SONY did have a reasonably valid claim to that copyright, even if the work SONY did to modernize the piece was obvious and trivial. Copyright terms ought to be much shorter. This is the root of the problem.
- boomboomsubban 8y agoThe EFF have been pursuing this for decades now. An appeals court upheld the law and the supreme court wouldn't hear the case. Not a ton more they can do, suing individual offenders doesn't solve much.
- ezoe 8y agoAny settlement without first going to the court will be abused and exploited. DMCA is a just bad law.
- kanyethegreat 8y agoPractically all the links (e.g. the ones that were allegedly restored like the Adweek article on Torrence Boone) were still removed.
- oliwarner 8y agoA 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. But setting up a news site to inject a backdated and infringing article would seem to be several, moderately serious criminal offenses. If someone does this to you, push back hard. They're facing prison and fines.
- michaelmrose 8y agoThe DMCA has been abused quite a lot. How many people in history have been sent to prison? Can you find one? The laws in the US are laws to control the behavior of the weak not the strong.
- oliwarner 8y agoMy point was this is very far beyond the typical takedown abuse. Creating (itself infringing) content on a for-purpose site ticks the "wilful" requirement of the DMCA's defined requirements for perjury.
- dschuetz 8y agoSimilar thing seems to be going on on Youtube.
- dunkelsten 8y agoInterestingly 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. Now comes the interesting part: Google won't even autocomplete "torrence boone enfatico" — Shame upon him who thinks evil upon it... If you've been wondering about the moral decline at Google, this is the kind of people they hired as top management.
- PeterisP 8y agoIs hiring privacy-conscious people a sign of moral decline? I'd argue that it's a quite good idea to keep your LinkedIn profile looking exactly like that, unless you've decided that you need a good-looking profile right now for "advertising" because you're looking for a job, and you're going to use LinkedIn for that, which many job-seekers won't do.
- dunkelsten 8y agoIf you'd be working in defence or infosec, I'd be with you about being a little more diligent about too many details in your employment history. Then again, it's not like he's shy about clearly lining up all of his jobs before the Enfatico disaster or his Harvard/Stanford alma maters.
- sct202 8y agoIt doesn't auto complete on DDG either, so I don't know if that would even be like popular enough to auto complete? I just read the AdWeek article that came up first in it and it's from like 2010.
- stef25 8y agoIt 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. 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? 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. 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?
- amelius 8y ago> 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? What if the article wasn't even online? I.e., some journalist "wrote" the article for some local newspaper without internet presence.
- coldtea 8y ago>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 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.
- amadeuspagel 8y agoWhy have laws at all. Why not just let a "jury of experts" punish anyone in anyway they please. /s
- coldtea 8y agoLaws already codify experts' opinion of what should be punishable and how (both legal and domain experts). The "jury of experts" role wouldn't be to punish "anyway they please" but to what is implied by their choice and description (as experts): to rule in accordance with their domain knowledge. And of course their job would be judged in turn. If a society can't trust a jury of experts on a domain to clearly and effectively judge issues related to their expertise, then it has bigger problems, and laws wouldn't save it from them.
- meshr 8y agoIt 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.
- winkeltripel 8y ago> This problem can be solved if Google search result would be driven by rules/smart contracts How would that fix the issue? It wouldn't change legal obligations, AFAIK. Confused.
- meshr 8y agoYes, introducing SERP rules intends obligations. The obligations could be enforced by legals or by union of “angry” users who will stop fighting with each other for SERP but start fighting with Google instead who treats them as useful idiots.
- mathattack 8y agoLinks in the article are broken. Also DMCA takedown related?