CyberGhost DMCAs Our Story About Their Bogus DMCA (Yes, Really)

from the guys,-stop-it dept

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.

It seemed totally pointless to contest it, so we just wrote the article about how silly this was of CyberGhost—or whatever incompetent team it had hired to send poorly targeted automated takedowns—and moved on with our lives.

Until earlier this week, when we got an alert from Cloudflare that CyberGhost had issued a DMCA takedown notice. This time it wasn’t about us promoting them. It was about our articles about their bogus copyright notice.

Yeah, so the “original work” is some sort of promotional page on CyberGhost’s website, and they’re claiming that our article about their bullshit DMCA takedowns is infringing on their copyright?

What the actual fuck?

Anyone with any sense at all could see that our news article about CyberGhost’s bullshit copyright takedown of an advertisement for CyberGhost’s VPN service could not possibly violate CyberGhost’s promotion for its VPN service. That’s not how any of this works, and certainly suggests that CyberGhost is sending frivolous DMCA takedowns that clearly violate 512(f) of the DMCA, which says that sending a DMCA notice that misrepresents that the material is infringing “shall be liable for damages.”

Hey CyberGhost: withdraw this obviously bullshit takedown notice, fire your DMCA people. Stop being thuggish and incompetent at copyright law.

If you can’t manage those fundamentals, why should anyone trust you with securing anyone’s traffic?

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, vpns

Companies: cloudflare, cyberghost