DMCA – Terence Eden’s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog Regular nonsense about tech and its effects 🙃 Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:19:54 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cropped-avatar-32x32.jpeg DMCA – Terence Eden’s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog 32 32 <![CDATA[DMCA as a vector for pornographic spam?]]> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/dmca-as-a-vector-for-pornographic-spam/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/dmca-as-a-vector-for-pornographic-spam/#comments Mon, 08 Jul 2024 11:34:05 +0000 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=51055 There's a law in the USA called the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Amongst its myriad provisions is the ability for copyright holders to send takedown notices to service providers. If someone has ripped off your content, you can send them a legal letter saying "take that down".

People often send DMCA requests to Google saying "this site has stolen my copyrighted content - please remove that page from Google."

Google, to their credit, let me know that they'd recently received a complaint about me 😢

To: Webmaster of https://shkspr.mobi/, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of the material found on your site allegedly infringes upon the copyrights of others. We’re in the process of removing the allegedly unlawful materials from Google Search results. The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, may be found on the website of Lumen, a third-party aggregator of legal complaint notices, at https://lumendatabase.org/notices/42788513.

Ah, dammit! What photo had I inadvertently copied?0 Here's what Google said:

Two URls from my blog. Both relate to CSS.

Huh? Back in 2020, I wrote a blog post called "This blog strips off for CSS Naked Day". It contains a single image:

Firefox menu. Go to View, the Page Style, then No Style.

That's a screenshot that I took of Firefox. My use of my image on my site isn't a copyright infringement.

WTAF?

Scrolling through the legal complaint I found I was in illustrious company.

A long list of adult or explicit URls. My domain name is snugly nestled in the middle.

After accessing the full report, I discovered that the complaint was made on behalf of an OnlyFans user called "firefoxs" who has - to quote her bio - the "#1 Nicest Tits On OF"1.

Needless to say, I dispute the allegation and I've filed a DMCA Counter Notification.

Perhaps this is just a case of an overzealous lawyer hitting every website which contains an image called "Firefox"? Or perhaps it is a ploy to get a bunch of irate webmasters to visit an OnlyFans page to assess the evidence?

Either way, I think the biggest pair of tits on the Internet are firefoxs' copyright lawyers!

  1. I try to use Creative Commons or copyright-free images where possible. But I'm only human and sometime slip up. ↩︎

  2. A claim which I am unable to substantiate. ↩︎

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