Google Sues Over Fraudulent & Weaponized DMCA Takedown Requests

Google has filed a lawsuit against two men who allegedly used Google’s DMCA process “aimed at removing hundreds of thousands of their competitors’ website URLs from Google Search results,” the lawsuit writes (PDF here).

The lawsuit says the “Defendants have weaponized copyright law’s notice-and-takedown process and used it not for its intended purpose of expeditiously removing infringing content, but instead to have the legitimate content of their competitors removed based on false allegations. This was first reported by Torrentfreak who said they targeted “up to 620,000 URLs.”

The two defendants allegedly created “at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party
website URLs.”

I’ve always heard of people claiming they can use the DMCA process to hurt their competitors, I guess Google had enough of this and wanted to send a warning to anyone using this on a mass scale?

Forum discussion at X and HackerNews.