Google will Start Punishing Sites With Too Many DMCA Takedown Notices

Is this going to be the new negative SEO?

read more at techcrunch..

 

Yeah I read that on Engadget(i believe) earlier today. Personally, I understand the bad side of DMCA and illegal use of copyrighted stuff but personally i feel as if this goes against a lot of what google stands for as far as openness goes.

 

To copy one of the comments, does this mean YouTube will lose ranking?

 

If you don't get any takedown notices, nothin to worry about I'd say.

 

Oh, this is going to work real well...

There's no guarantee any DMCA notices are for legitimately illegal things, they can easily be either be trolls (and in the case of Google listening to them, people trying to get their competitors banned/their competitor's page rank dropped). Not to mention a lot of major companies who basically demand instant takedown for every minor thing, see Youtube.

Similarly, I suspect this will just punish sites seen as 'controversial' more than anything, it's all too easy to see legal but 'edgy' sites sent these notices in a poor attempt at damage control, and this is certainly not a good thing for Google to get involved with.

 

I once had my site taken down because one of my members posted a few lines from a poem they found inspirational. It took me 2 hrs just to find out the who, what, where and why from my host provider. I would hope that Google takes into consideration the amount of takedowns that occur over the life of the site.

 

I wouldn't worry much about it. Are DMCA's typically published? I know Google publishes theirs as do a few other large companies on Chilling Effects but the DMCA's I've dealt with have been between the rights holder and me.

 

I read that youtube for now is not going to be affected by this because they have a different way of handling claims of copyright.

 

^
Of course Google won't punish Youtube. They paid an awful lot of money for that site and they are still collecting the revenues. They won't let anything happen to one of their cash cows that's for sure.

 

Well it did say -valid- removal notices. You're not going to be able to just file lots of complaints and get someone's site brought down unless they're legitimately doing something wrong.

And I'm actually pretty okay with this. If they're doing something wrong enough to get REPEATED complaints filed against them, then I don't think they should be ranked high in the first place.

 

Where do you see your DMCA takedown notices?

 

People like you and me don't have to worry about this, this is more to do with site owners like Kim Dotcom, and other copyright infringement sites.