Or: No Justin, keep your fingers out of the meatgrinder.

When running a website you might have to face the wonderful invention called "DMCA take down notice" sooner or later. Personally I host about 200 websites, and because complainants usually swing a bit on the coward side paired with the inability to talk in a normal way to a website owner and kindly ask for removal of what they don't like, they tend to send their complaints directly to the host. I guess it is also supposed to look more serious and impress the website owner that way.

When such a complaint is made it lands in my inbox because I am the contact person for the host. And here is the hilarious (ongoing) story about a powerful tool named Justin and a SEO company of the "slightly different" kind, and it also contains info for people who also get such complaints and why you should not let yourself being bullied.

It started about 2 weeks ago when I got an abuse notice by my provider, topic was a website hosted by me (I was actually surprised it wasn't from the losers at fetlife.com complaining about suck-o again this time). The website is rinf.com, which is a site about conspiracy theories, alternative news, things like that. They moved to me as hoster not too long ago because they had a lot of trouble on their old host (technically and as I have been told now also in context with baseless DMCA complaints which the hosts cowardly followed before even investigating).

As professional with an old school hacky mindset I of course didn't simply forwarded the complaint to the website owner to tell him "take that shit down!", especially because I had to deal with such silly complaints against suck-o on a personal level already before. So I had a closer look and it got quite interesting and hilarious at the same time. But now to the facts:

-The complaint-
The complaint was written by someone called Justin Chafer, working for a "company" called linkaudit.co.uk (which appears under many different names, such as potentlinks.co.uk or links-management.co.uk, which is always good for an eyebrow raising). On a personal, more IT literate remark: A SEO company running their website with and without "www." so it's labeled as duplicate content sites by Google? Now that's what I call skills...not.

On their website they claim to "use powerful tools" to remove content from the net, I wasn't really aware that sending a mail is labeled ad "powerful tool" now, but ok, to honor the powerfulness of the complainant it will call him from now on powerful tool Justin.
Can you imagine powerful tool Justin, in his 5000 bucks Armani business suit, standing in the conference room in the Googleplex, Mountain View, hammering his powerful fist on the table and commanding the "google webspam team" (what?) to remove that stuff from google, or else!!!
Ok, me neither.

Here they show the actual nature of their complaint: They want the content to be removed because it's a "toxic link" as they call it on their website (don't look at it, it's suspected to give you eye cancer). This makes even more sense due to the fact that there is no "duplicate content to find via google full text searches, just the one they are complaining about...which makes it original content.

The fun part in the last image is that they obviously aren't even able to do a WHOIS lookup, they seem to think "all IPs in a range belong to the same person" or something equally IT illiterate like that. Regards to the owner of beep.com at this point, a site I have never heard of before, but obviously it's mine now. Leave the keys on the table. Thanks.

-The reply-
So it was quite clear their complaint is absolutely baseless and would fail in court like OJ Simpson would have done without extreme training to increase his hand size, and so my reply wasn't what they expected:

First of all, this DMCA complaint is invalid because it does not provide the "original" URL to the supposedly duplicate content.
Second, google "penalized" NOW for the supposedly duplicate content after MORE THAN 3 YEARS after the queried post was made (2010/08/26)?
Don't get me wrong, of course I would take down the content on any hosted website if it violates copyrights, but this complaint seems to have a frivolous nature. I did a full text search on google and it came up with NO other result for the content than the supposedly "duplicate" one. How is this supposed to make sense?

-A display of true power-

There must have been a power outage in Sheffield, because I didn't heard anything from the powerhouse of powerful tools. Until today.
And now I am totally struck due to the awesome display of power that even makes a tsunami or a h-bomb explosion look cute:
Powerful tool Justin hit the red button in the secret drawer of his executive desk and: Sent the same DMCA take down notice. 4 times.

I am 4 times more impressed like the first time, what's 4 times zero again?

-And another reply-

Once again, I sadly can't provide a reply that they expect, sorry my powerful friend.

This complaint has a malicious nature because there is no copyright violation by the post https://rinf.com/alt-news/contributions/chatroulette-update-new-chat-roulette-imminent/7593.
It is no duplicate content, because for being "duplicate" there is the need for an "original" content which was duplicated, the complainant did neither link the supposedly "original" content, nor can it be found by a full text search on Google.
The true nature of this complaint is some sort of SEO which is done by the linkaudit.co.uk company called "toxic link removal". The wocchat.com site is linked in the mentioned post on rinf.com, and they want it to be removed, which is no reason for a DMCA complaint, so this is nothing but some form of legal bullying, therefore the request is refused.

More to come....I am pretty sure about that.