Google Removes Article From Search After DMCA Claim From Uninhabited Island
The incident shows that Google's DMCA takedown process can be triggered by a clearly fraudulent claim, allowing a company or its associates to suppress critical reporting without any verification from Google.
Reporting from 1 sources: GIGAZINE.
Google removed a 2022 article about the bankruptcy of event startup Pollen from search results after a DMCA claim filed by someone claiming to be on Bouvet Island, an uninhabited island with no permanent residents. The article's author, Gergely Orosz, says the claim is false and that Google's system is easily abused.
Google removed a 2022 article about the bankruptcy of event startup Pollen from its search results after a DMCA claim filed by someone claiming to be on Bouvet Island, an uninhabited island in the South Atlantic. The article's author, Gergely Orosz, says the claim is false and that Google's system is easily abused. Orosz published the article in 2022, based on interviews with 20 former Pollen employees, detailing how the company went bankrupt after raising $150 million and laying off a third of its workforce. The DMCA request claimed the article copied a 1998 New York Post article about American football; Orosz says the two articles share no sentences in common. The requester listed an address on Bouvet Island, which has no permanent residents. Orosz speculates that Pollen's former CEO or someone connected to the company hired a reputation management firm to file the false claim.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.