A copyright complaint can remove a page from Google’s search results based on a notice, even if ownership claims are later disputed or inaccurate. Press Gazette saw this happen twice this year.
In late June, the journalism trade outlet reported that a second piece of its reporting about the marketing company Clickout Media had been removed from Google search following an anonymous complaint under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
An earlier March removal affected the original investigation in the same series. Both complaints cited unrelated content as the source. Press Gazette called both complaints spurious.
The details of who filed them are still a bit unclear. The March notice came through a “US Hub” from an anonymous private entity, while the June notice was from a sender the outlet couldn’t identify. In both cases, a live, original page was removed from Google’s results, and Press Gazette questions the ownership claims behind each notice.
In March, that supposedly copied work was a 2024 article on the tech site The Verge, which had nothing to do with the complaint. In June, it was a since-deleted month-old forum post about online casinos. Neither matched the reporting it was intended to target.
The March takedown didn’t stop at one article. It also removed a follow-up on the same story from another trade publication.
How The Removal Works
Under the DMCA, someone claiming to hold a copyright can send Google a notice requesting that it remove a page from search results. The page can be delisted if Google acts on the notice. The burden of disputing it then falls on the site owner.
Google’s account of the system leaves room for this outcome. In its Transparency Report, Google says that people who submit requests may provide inaccurate information, that it is not always able to verify the accuracy of a request, and that it cannot always notify a site owner before content is removed.
The law doesn’t require Google to decide whether the copyright claim itself is valid, which is why a disputed page can stay out of results for a stretch even after the owner objects. Roger Montti has laid out why the statute leaves Google little room to move. When a page is delisted, Google adds a line at the bottom of the affected results page. It indicates that the results were removed due to a DMCA complaint and provides a link to the Lumen database, where the notice is stored. A user only notices this gap if they read that far down.
A Tactic That Has Surfaced Before
Copyright takedowns have previously targeted search results. Back in 2018, I reported on a tactic in which people posing as rights holders submitted fake DMCA notices to push competitors lower in search rankings. Sometimes, they even used names similar to real companies to make their claims look credible. These targets ranged from pirate sites to at least one small business challenged by a competitor.
The weakness appears in other removal tools too. Roger Montti covered a…
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