Techdirt discovers it was hit by a bogus DMCA Takedown Notice on a key SOPA post
Oh this is interesting.
It seems that Mike Masnick, owner of the Techdirt blog, discovered; while doing a search on Google, that one of Techdirt’s key posts about the whole SOPA/PIPA affair got hit with a DMCA Takedown notice.
For those of you not familiar with the site Techdirt is one of the premier sites in the tech blogosphere that centers around privacy and security as well as copyright and trademark issues. While not everyone might not agree with what gets posted on Techdirt both Mike and the site have earned the respect of many of us in the tech world for his work in these areas.
So it was both interesting and humorous to find out that one of the site’s key posts about the important subject, and the resultant discussion had been removed from Google’s search index.
Mike only found out by accident as he was doing a search on Google for something else to do with the site when he notice at the bottom of the search results page that two results had been removed due to a DMCA takedown.
It turns out that the takedown came from a company called Armovore, a company that specializes in sending out DMCA notices on behalf of other companies. In this case they were acting on behalf of a company called Paper Street Cash which is, as Mike discovered, a porn company; and the claim they made was that the takedown was about content from a site called TeamSkeet.
If you’re scratching your head, you’re not the only one. There’s clearly nothing infringing in our post. I just wasted too much time going through all 300+ comments on that post and I don’t see anything that includes any porn or even links to any porn as far as I can tell. Instead, it seems that Armovore and Paper Street Cash sent a clearly bogus DMCA takedown notice, which served the purpose of censoring our key blog post in the SOPA fight. And they did it on January 20th… the day that SOPA was officially shelved.
Between this and the bird chirping story that I posted earlier we are being give a perfect example of just how flawed, and a joke that this whole DMCA idea is.
At the end of his post Mike said that they will be looking into their options and I for one hope that Mike and Techdirt go after these idiots one way or another because this was just wrong.
