Monday April 9 — Truman Boyes

After years complaining to Google about a blogspot account that purported to be my Blog, I have had it removed. It’s ironical that my method was to invoke the DMCA and refer to the content as being my own, since I have been against the general DMCA abuse on the Internet for years. In any sense, the site is down.

Spammers do some pretty clever things. I used to have a blogspot site hosted by Google, and I wrote all sorts of posts about traveling around NZ and such. After deciding to host my site on a private server with WordPress, I downloaded all my posts and then deleted the account. A spammer then picked up the (sub)domain and re-uploaded archives of my old site, however they also inserted some Javascript that loaded links/ads/etc as a sublayer ontop of my content.

With Google, I had tried to call, send complaints via a web interface for years, send DMCA take-down letters, photocopies of ID, and then finally I just tried a simple web form a few weeks ago. Finally Google listened. And good thing too. It appears, although I have no concrete evidence that this is the case, that Blogspot/Blogger content is ranked pretty high. In some cases the site would show up with a higher page rank that my own truman.net domain when searching for something found on my site(s).

Finally I get this:

Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

In accordance with the DMCA, we have completed processing your

infringement complaint and the content in question no longer appears on

the following URL(s):

http://trumanboyes.blogspot.com

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Regards,

The Google Team

Job done.

Originally published on truman.net. See the archived copy.