8 comments

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  cybele

  11 months ago

  My biggest annoyance with Google, besides that I've been faxing them, is that their response is canned. It consists of referencing the date of my filing (which may have been as long as 10 days ago) and assigning a case number. However, they NEVER include what the domain is that the complaint was about. I've asked a dozen times for them to include that in their canned response and in their counter notification, but they never do.
  
  Not only that, for the counter notification it's attached as a TIFF file. Which is usually ten times larger than it has to be (and often has a squished aspect ratio ... one I got was in Chinese so I had to email them and ask for a translation).
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  Jonathan Bailey

  11 months ago

  I think the canned response comes from the fact that Google likely gets more DMCA notices than just about anyone on the planet. Granted, they're a big enough company to handle it and could put a little more effort into it, but still, I am not without all sympathy in that area.
  
  I also agree that the nature of their response is fairly useless and they need to include more relevant info. I'm having that problem regularly.
  
  Not having seen a counter-notice or any putback notice involving a Google case, I can't comment on the Tiff issue but I have no reason to doubt that's the case. I've always wagered that faxes there are converted straight into images and processed that way. Sounds to me as if Google might need to get some new scanning software.
  
  As for the translation issue, I don't know how much faith I'd have in that, considering the "success" of Google translate these days.
  
  Five bucks they just ran it through that and sent it on...
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  steve

  11 months ago

  Jonathan - your downloadable DMCA form suggests inclusion of one's postal address and telephone #, yet google's own information on http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html (referring primarily to DMCA submission via post or fax) merely says :
  
  "Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred)."
  
  This would seem to suggest that providing email alone would be sufficient; given that most of us don't want to provide our addresses & phone #s on documents that might be seen by the spamming & scraping fraternity, I'd be interested to hear your take on that.
  
  Incidentally, we've just emailed Google with a copyright complaint after following your tips, and received a preliminary reply. So the email procedure still works; many thanks.
  
  Unfortunately, it's one step forward and two steps back as a post on my blog yesterday was scraped within an hour of posting....*sigh*....here we go again....
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  Jonathan Bailey

  11 months ago

  Ok, this is worth taking a minute to talk about.
  
  Section 512(c) of the copyright code says the following:
  
  "Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted."
  
  Technically speaking, submitting just your email address *should* be adequate for getting action on a DMCA notice. However, I can tell you straight forward that providing a DMCA notice with just an email address will, very likely, result in your notices being bounced at many hosts.
  
  My goal when creating the stock letters, which were then later used in the section, was to create notices that worked as close to 100% of the time as possible. Considering that a sizable number of hosts rejected DMCA notices without full address and phone, it seemed worthwhile to include.
  
  To be certain, you can try with just an email and, if it is returned, then file with full information. While I agree that many would prefer not to expose their personal information, remember, this is just information that can contact you. You are free to use your lawyer's office, a P.O. box or anything else.
  
  Considering I had one DMCA notice bounce years ago because I didn't provide a then-non-existent fax number, I would much rather give too much than too little.
  
  Certainly though, you are free to try whatever combination of information you wish, I just put in there what worked best for me.
  
  Please note that I have not tried with Google using just an email address, so I can not comment on the effectiveness of that. My issue was with other hosts, mostly free Web hosts.
  
  Hope that this answers your question!
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  steve

  11 months ago

  OK, that seems clear. Better to be thorough with these things, as you say! Thanks for the clarification.
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  Jonathan Bailey

  11 months ago

  No problem, I guess it's a matter of trading off privacy for likelihood of success. Tough call here...
  
  Thanks for writing!
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  BC

  9 months ago

  Helpful article, thanks. Last time I was looking for an email address to send these two (before this article was published) I couldnt find anything. Sort of ironic that I'm seeing it just an hour before it becomes October 1st! My faxed and mailed letters to Google are only responded to 1/4 of the time, or less.
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  Jonathan Bailey

  9 months ago

  You might want to check and see if you have the latest email address for Google. They recently changed it to DMCA-agent@. It's on the PDF that I linked in the article.
  
  If you are still getting a weak response, please let me know!
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