Once again, Google can do nothing until they get a properly formatted DMCA notice. Legally, if they take down a site based on a copyright complaint and don’t have one, they could be sued.

There’s a well established procedure for filing DMCA notices with Google, many have done it before successfully, including myself. You just have to jump through a few hoops, but it can be done.

Good luck with it!

Google will do nothing about this site:
http://laptop-notebook.blogspot.com/

They’ve stolen reviews from me, from ZDNet, CNET, PC Magazine, other laptop sites, LAPTOP Magazine, etc. While my site is not oriented towards laptops at all, I wrote two reviews of laptops that I and a friend use to blog with, and they lifted it.

This is hosted on a BLOGSPOT account. They have ADSENSE and CHITIKA running on it. I do not fucking get it. Chitika did say they’d look into it.

I contacted a few of the websites mentioned above. One, which I will not name, said they were sorely disappointed with Google over the issue (I get the feeling they have tangled with Google over this site from the tone of their letter) and said they were pulling their AdWords advertising in protest, and going through the legal options they had – they were of the opinion this was the same people that had a similar site in the past. Another site said they were aware of it and that it was being handled by their legal department.

I’ve contacted Google AdSense and the Blogger side of Google, got nothing in response (this was months ago).

How fucking hard is it for the AdSense and Blogger people to do a check Google search on a few sentences from the first half-dozen reviews on the front page? Seriously, how fucking hard can it be? Are they too busy cashing in their stock options?

Best to publish excerpts ONLY (say 200 characters), then give free permission to publish those 200 chars but only with a direct link back to the original item, and put a short copyright note AFTER those 200 chars.

Then, if you really do want to publish full feeds, put the rest of the item (or the whole item again) after the copyright notice.

That way, responsible publishers/aggregators will only publish those first 200 chars – so no problem. Anyone publishing the full feed will also be publishing the nasty little copyright notice at that tells everyone they’re breaking the law.

Anyone reading the feed in an aggregator will still get the full feed.

All the links go back to the original source and there are no ads – am I missing something??