VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.
I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.
There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.
Enter CyberGhost.
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.
For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, Mullvad is the answer.
If you ask me, what we really need is an army of bots going around and literally DMCAing absolutely everything on behalf of every business out there that is submitting DMCA requests. Make the process practically impossible to police until someone forces a legislation action that fixes the whole system.
Erroneous DMCA requests should be so severe that once one is reported by a company authorized to perform the requests on behalf of the IP holder, the IP holder should be barred from any agents on their behalf performing them for a time period of at least 90 days… with treble fines. It would be so much fun creating content that baits DMCA but is clearly fair use to break all their shit.
Unless someone is copying what you do nearly 1:1, dmca should not be valid. These clowns and crooks running for office talk all about how regulation stifles innovation and this is a true case for sure. So many small business owners are getting fucked by the wild west of DMCA takedowns today.