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 BestNetTech 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
Comments on “CyberGhost DMCAs Our Story About Their Bogus DMCA (Yes, Really)”
Well, you see, it’s because you’re making them look bad.
As opposed to, say, them making them look bad.
I don’t even understand what they’re upset about. Did someone dose their lawyer or something?
Because copyright has become nothing more than a censorship tool of the rich and powerful.
In the TV show Brooklyn 99, there’s a character who’s handing out bagels to his colleagues, shouting BAGEL as he does so. Here, it’s CyberGhost and DMCAs
DMCA! files bogus claim DMCA! files bogus claim DMCA! files bogus claim
I mean, the worst of the worst a VPN provider can do is a lot worse than frivolous DMCA takedown notices. But yes, this is still disqualifying.
Re:
I’m absolutely baffled whenever any sort of security provider behaves this way; the single most important thing any infosec company absolutely must have is trust. When they behave like this, they demonstrate they can’t be trusted, and there’s simply no market for untrustworthy infosec providers.
Sometimes the cover-up's worse than the crime
I’m really struggling to think of a non-damning story about why they’d be so desperate to scrub any mention of the company and I’m coming up blank.
The first DMCA I could maybe buy as someone using a bot to spot potential ‘infringement’ and no-one at the company double-checking before filing the DMCA claim. Plenty of stories in TD’s archive about that sort of thing so it’s not like it would be the first time a company had done that. Still damning, but not necessarily malicious.
This second DMCA though… yeah, this just screams ‘We screwed up and rather than own it let’s try to bury the story’, which is not a good look for any company, never mind one that wants you to trust that they’re on the up and up when dealing with your privacy and private data.
Re:
It also just draws more attention to it too. The first time might have slipped under a lot of people’s radar but this is just drumming up awareness of it. The Streisand Effect was coined as a term over 20 years ago (by the author of this article too https://www.bestnettech.com/2005/01/05/since-when-is-it-illegal-to-just-mention-a-trademark-online/) so surely you’d think that CyberGhost might bear that in mind but apparently not
Re:
Sometimes it is just massively incompetent.
Doesn’t help the copyright and trademark ‘protection’ racket is starting to bleed into each other. So you have people who are not lawyer and ‘trained’ on both and understand neither.
So you get fools who think any reference to a trademark not done by the trademark owner is copyright infringement eligible for DMCA takedown. And if you’re going that’s just completely wrong. Yes.
Going for the hat trick, eh?
Prima regulă a gropilor este să nu mai săpi.
Re:
Let me find them a ladder to get out of the hole they’ve just dug!
Imagine Jim Sterling got his video taken down talking about a bad asset flipper's bad behavior of taking down his review video
Yeah, he made a video talking about the slaughtering grounds. Dev took that down. Jim Sterling makes another video about the Dev’s behavior of him banning steam users criticizing the game for it being poorly made.
Now imagine he sends a second DMCA against the video talking about that.
Re:
I take it you haven’t watched in a while – James Stephanie Sterling is genderfluid and has they/them pronouns.