Well, I sent out my first DMCA take-down notice last week when law.hukuni.net republished one of my blog posts without permission.  For those of you who don’t know, a DMCA take-down notice is a legal warning that you send to a website that infringes on copyrighted material, and the notice is usually sent to the webhoster, and sometimes the search engines too.  So here is how it went.

Last Sunday,  I posted a new blog post about going to court on a marijuana charges.  A reader informed me that my blog post had been republished on hukuki.net, and that the hukuki.net version was coming up first in Google.  I looked up where the hukuki.net domain was registered on whois.net, which led me to this page, which gave me the contact info for where to send this threatening letter.

I am the copyright owner of the article being infringed at:

//law.hukuki.net/charged-with-marijuana-possession-here-are-9-things-you-should-know-before-your-arraignment.htm

The article is a direct infringement of //www.grahamlawyerblog.com/2011/06/05/charged-with-marijuana-possession-here-are-9-things-you-should-know-before-your-arraignment/  which is owned by me.

This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to effect removal of the above-reported infringements. I request that you immediately issue a cancellation message as specified in RFC 1036 for the specified postings and prevent the infringer, who is identified by its Web address, from posting the infringing article to your servers in the future. Please be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to “expeditiously remove or disable access to” the infringing writing upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by me, the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I swear under penalty of perjury that I am the copyright holder.

Please send me at the address noted below a prompt response indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.

Sincerely,

/s/ Stephen Graham email: steve@grahamdefense.com

When I didn’t hear back right away, I sent a complaint to Google, and they responded:

Hello,

Thank you for your note.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed
processing your infringement complaint. The following webpages will be
removed from Google in a few hours:

//law.hukuki.net/charged-with-marijuana-possession-here-are-9-things-you-should-know-before-your-arraignment.htm

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Regards,
The Google Team

When I clicked on that link I confirmed that Google had, in fact, removed the page.  I was kind of hoping that Google might just nuke the whole hukuki.net site, but I guess that was too much to hope for.  The site law.hukuki.net is kind of like the Napster of law blogs.  All it does, apparently, is just pilfer law- related sites and republish the articles.   Then I went back online today, and wasn’t able to access any of law.hukuki.net so maybe the whole site has been taken down.

When hukuki.net republished my blog post, it did credit the post back to me with a nofollow link, but at the same time the site was cluttered up with a bunch of do follow links to mesothelioma lawyers. I probably wouldn’t have cared that law.hukuki.net had reprinted my post except for the fact that Google was applying a duplicate content penalty to my site.  And by that I mean that is Google had misidentified my original version as a copy and had ranked the hukuki.net version higher in their search engine.

So my advice to other bloggers would be to complain to Google.  I never did hear back from the hukuki site, which is based in Turkey.

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