Many Organizations and individuals have begun seeking services from reputation management firms to help elevate their names or websites on search engines. However, there are many who offer services for suppressing or removing any negative results. This industry is completely legal but when reputation management companies start to file fake DMCA reports in order to remove legitimate content, that is downright fraud.
What are DMCA’s? It stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and essentially this allows organizations or individuals to remove any unauthorized content from the web by sending a notice to the infringing party. There is a trend where reputation management firms are filing for DMCA in order to remove legitimate content where there are no violations of copyright issues of any kind. A good portion of those fraudulent DMCA’s were made after the content was released online. There are legitimate services where they help take down unauthorized content but what these fraudulent firms are doing is practically a crime.
Web activism is an anonymous group online who help investigate fake DMCA’s in order to protect the removal of real content. In April 2016, Tim at Techdirt revealed fake DMCA notices that were used to attempt at taking down a legitimate news source and their content. Tim stated that reputation firms risk civil damages when executing a fake DMCA since the payout is far higher than the risk. If they somehow get caught, they would simply settle matters with the actual copyright owner quite easily.
The way reputation management firms have changed over the years, the harmful ones, they create dozens of fake sites and blogs; they commit identity theft, impersonation and perjury. On a single client, they can make $3000.00 up to $10,000.00. The shocking thing is that this has been going on undetected for a long time.
Web activism started their hunt after encountering their own problem when they posted a news video on YouTube about a sexual assault charge on Sheikh Saud Bin Saqr Al Qasimi. Within days of uploading the video, the Sheikh’s reputation agency used a fake DMCA to get them to take down the video (didn’t know it was a fake at the time). They always wondered how an Indian from Delhi who claims copyright for an interview recorded in Minnesota. One of their friends who’ve gone through a similar case, found out the DMCA was a fake. Then it took web activism about a month to fully comprehend the reputation industry, especially the unethical organizations.
Web activism spent many of their days searching and analyzing DMCA reports to spot the fake one’s and what they found just baffled them. They have found a little over 5000 fake DMCA reports and started to investigate them. Web activism starts to investigate and gather substantial evidence and then they pass on the material to prosecutors, judges and even Google to pursue in order to shut down these crooked reputation firms.