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How Copyright Law Is Being Misused To Remove Material From the Internet (theguardian.com)
London-based resident Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet. She noted in her review that her ceiling fell down in an upstairs bedroom. The Guardian reports about what happened to her in the aftermath of posting that review. Building firm BuildTeam sent a letter to Mumsnet, which the site passed on to Narey. According to Narey, BuildTeam found Narey's comment defamatory and untrue, and asked for the removal of the comment from the website. The original comment saw several other users also post similar grievances, though many of these users pulled their comments in response to the legal threats from BuildTeam. Narey wanted to keep hers up. Then things got even weirder, reports the Guardian. Narey says BuiltTeam staff visited her apartment, and instead of offering any apology, asked her to remove the comment. Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request under DMCA, alleging copyright infringement. This led Google to de-list the entire thread. From the report: No copyright infringement had occurred at all. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled "Home Improvement Tips and Tricks". The post, headlined "Buildteam interior designers" was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it. BuildTeam says it has no idea why Narey's review was reposted, but that it had nothing to do with it.The Guardian deep dives into what is wrong with the copyright system, the issues Google faces in dealing with them, and the consequences many users are facing because of this.
She wrote all her own stuff; the company she reviewed bitched about the bad review; someone in Pakistan copied it to his blog and backdated it several months; and then Google got a DMCA take-down.
In other words: the copyright claim is fraudulent.
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"someone in Pakistan" - AKA the guy at BuildTeam using TOR to make his DMCA claim look legit enough for Google to reject any appeals from the original poster.
Funny thing is, the Streisand Effect will most likely kick-in hard for them, especially once it made the papers there.
Seriously - a multinational corporation can put up with bad press and survive, but most smaller businesses cannot.
Given that this is a UK company, I'm rather surprised that they didn't reach for the libel laws - even if the lady was absolutely correct and true, the legal costs would have likely ruined her faster than a DMCA takedown would have.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Britain has a problem with the building trade, in particular the self-employed small business building trade. It's why there are TV shows like Cowboy Builders, and bad building work is commonly on other programmes like Watchdog and so on.
The biggest surprise is that this company hasn't made itself bust and reopened under a new name - a very common solution in the UK. I suspect maybe the law has been tweaked to make this less of a solution?
Build Team have not worked for this client, and having undertaken a Google search we cannot trace the individual.
So how do they know that they haven't worked for this client?!
With building companies, word of mouth reputation from people you know seems to be the best solution in the UK. And always pay attention to the bad reviews first and foremost. Sadly, with marketing, people don't do due diligence on things they are about to spend tens of thousands on. Sure, you can't always avoid bad businesses this way, but clearly a line of poor reviews that have been hidden should set of alarm bells.