How can they do that? Is it perhaps some automated system? Have they send those notices to Google as well?

Yes I actually noticed this over the weekend while I was researching DMCA’s to find actual pirate sites, I alerted another webmaster here of this also, they have thrown a DMCA at 4 of my blogs (some with actually no content), I also noticed today that gaydemon.com also has chaturbate DMCA’s against it so bjorn maybe worth looking into that.

For a check if you go to transparicy.google.com and check under “reported domains” in the copyright section you can see if your site is also effected.

It is also worth noting that just because it says chaturbate it could actually be anyone sending out the DMCA requests and saying they are chaturbate, I know some chaturbate straight models have done this in the past. and the DMCA forms are such that you can write any company in the box when sending a DMCA report. Although with the near 900,000 DMCA URLs they have reported I would assume they would have to be chaturbate themselves as sending this quota of notices requires membership of Google “Trusted Copyright Removal Program” (which is very hard to get into believe me)… As normal google accounts can only submit 1000 URLs daily.

They although need to be careful even if its an automated program doing so, each wrong DMCA can lead to $100,000 per offense in court, just ask Sony, they are currently in court over a dispute with rapidgator for doing this.

and to make matters worse the only way to get your URL’s reinstated at Google is to file a counter notice which requires your full name, phone number, mailing address and email address.

If what Chaturbate is claiming is true (a malicious and unknown third party has been submitting false DMCA takedown notices) do you want to provide them with your sensitive personal information? This is where your counter notice information is sent!

Being someone who has researched the Google DMCA process to within an inch of my life ending the past month, USUALLY no matter what the transparency report of google says, if you have not had a DMCA notice in your Webmaster Tools with google, its usually because the URLs have been rejected by googles systems.

Kevin made a point to me by PM here I am sure he wont mind me sharing, to counter the DMCA you need to provide full real details of your name, address, email ect ect, so it is possible this is a scam of sorts to try and get a lot of webmasters up to date contact details, possibly with the hopes of spamming you/selling your details/other forms of fraud from that point.

But as I have said above these URLs might not have even been removed from google anyway, best way to check is to try find the URL (in lumen, which I know yes has the worst search engine that’s ever existed), and then go a google search for “inurl:the-url-here.com” if its still showing in the results page, google has rejected your URL from the DMCA, it still will show in transparency ect as basically lumen and google transparency are just databases of legal complaints google has received, and its worth noting you would still show here even if you counter noticed.

I hope this helps, but know everyone is in good company, thousands of domains are effected by this, even if the crusade seems to have stopped currently, it is also possible whoever was doing this thought sending a DMCA for one URL would delist the whole domain, so its possibly a pirate/link wheel shitty tube trying to grab all the traffic from google. Google has recently said it will start to delist while domains, but only in cases where 70%+ of a sites url’s are reported, so I am sure we are all safe from this anyway, especially if the URLs were actually rejected by google.

Stay strong and try investigate this on a URL by URL basis for each of your reported URLs…