Google announced their latest update on Transparency for copyright removals in search. They receive more than 250,000 requests per week, it's not a shocking number by my expectation. If people knew we can submit removal requests via a webform, I am sure the number would be much higher, and I am intended to submit my removal requests in the feature.

I have seen some of my contents were duplicated on Google Search results, though some claimed that's for mirroring lest sudden unavailability of access, but that's just pure non-sense in these days. Unfortunately, I licensed some works under the Creative Commons, which rendered me useless to take any action if I wanted to.

I have written a post telling you not to license your work and you should follow my advise, so you can take down those garbage websites when they ripped off you Flickr photos or your articles.

Recently, one of my popular-free-to-rip-off Flick photo gets ripped again, which is not even a good photo by any means. those rippers don't even care about the quality of the photos. They find whatever the photo relates to the keyword they need, then just shamelessly use the photo with same generated text in multiple sites.


It's not only the copyright being violated but also your reputation, which is a severer issue for everyone. See how my username gets attached to that page in red box in the preview image? It uses "by livibetter," that may read as if like 'this page is written by livibetter' if the reader doesn't read carefully. I doubt any human would even pay attention to read that page. However I am more consider how Google's bot thinks about it than real people and you can see the text preview, it sort of confirms my worry.

Sigh... if I didn't license that photo, then I could take it down since it would be violating my copyright. It's not only good for me but might also help a tiny bit for other people. For example, you wouldn't see that entry if your search unfortunately could hit on it.

There are plenty of pages like that if you have tried to search your contents, I am sure you will find your works are being violated. This world is filled with good people but also shameless people as well.

In the Google blog post, there is one thing very interesting:

For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. [emphasis mine]

So, shameless people, again, huh? They do whatever it takes to abuse you in every way they can to screw you up. Producing bad TV shows result bad ratings, that is the perfect logic. But they want to fix it by muting other people's voice, how absurd is that? They maliciously use and copyright claim as censorship tool and attempt to manipulate people to think that's legit and ethical, sounds familiar to you? Those people truly have no moral standards in their hearts, wait! I doubt they even have a heart.

I wish Google would release such information in the future, I tried to find about denials in Transparency Report, but I can't see anything about the result of a request. That would be great to see those people being exposed their ridiculousness to the public.

By the way, GitHub has a repository about DMCA takedown requests they receive, read those commit messages, a few of them are quite funny.