If you are in the StudioPress community and write articles on Genesis, there is a good chance that Mr. Brad Dalton of wpsites.net may have gotten your blog posts removed from Google search index via DMCA copyright infringement removal notices (having no merit, whatsoever).
One of the recent notices (of several) he has issued against an article I published on this site is http://lumendatabase.org/notices/15090105.
A few others:
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/15090091
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/1479129
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/1881655
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/1073001
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/842558
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/843440
If you have been issued one similarly and wish to issue a counter-notice, do not click on “Create DMCA Counter Notice” button at the bottom of notice on the lumen database website. When you do, you are prompted to fill a form that is quite confusing and at the end of it, you will only receive a letter that you could attach URLs (from your site that got removed from Google) – on a paper and you have to manually send/fax that to Google. There’s a better way.
Follow the steps below:
1) Go to https://support.google.com/legal/answer/1120734. Click on “Web Search” under the “Counter Notificaton” section.
2) Select “One or more pages on my site have been removed due to a legal complaint, and I would like them restored.”
3) Click on Yes in
4) Click on “this counter notice form” link at the bottom of the page in the “Otherwise, please complete this counter notice form.” text.
5)
a) Fill in your personal details.
b) Enter URLs of content in question.
Note the text, “If you have many URLs to report, we recommend submitting between 10 to 100 per notice for the fastest possible processing time.”.
c) Under the “Why are you requesting reinstatement?”, select “The complainant does not have the right to submit this request”.
d) In the text area to provide more details, add the following sample template text:
The code in my blog posts is based on the source code from Genesis, WordPress and public properties like WordPress Codex.
Genesis is a WordPress framework and is owned by StudioPress. StudioPress does not have any objection with me writing tutorials on customizing their product.
Both WordPress and Genesis are GPLv2 (or later) licensed. Details: https://wordpress.org/about/gpl/.
I have not referred to Mr. Brad Dalton’s website (wpsites.net) when writing the articles on my website (yoursite.com).
e) Place a tick mark in the boxes to confirm that you are ready to face the legal battle if the infringement issuer decides to take it further. Type your name and submit the form.
Note:
- I am not a lawyer.
-
If you receive nasty emails like the following, take a day off.. spend time with your family, reassess what’s important to you in life and move on.
