DMCA Abuse by Robyn Burford of Jupiter, Florida

We received a copyright notice from Google recently stating that Robyn Burford of Jupiter, Florida had filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request against this website based on fair use compliant content posted by a user. Pictures of people, even those they created themselves for the sole purpose of posting them on their own social media pages, do not require permission from the copyright holder to be used for the purpose of comment or criticism. It is called fair use doctrine and/or the fair use exception to the DMCA. The post in question is clearly criticism directed at Ms. Burford and therefore falls outside the scope of the DMCA.

Our policy has always been not to engage in Google's counter-notification process and instead to simply help the content find itself back onto Google at a different URL. This is because people like Ms. Burford often use Google's DMCA procedure to force website operators to reveal their true identity, agree to accept service of process, and agree to go to court eventually or simply go along with Google's choice. We realized that there is another option that simply involves making sure URLs of ours always exist on Google featuring the same snippets or at least URLs of ours linking to the same content in a form capable of ranking for the same search terms.

When someone abuses Google's DMCA process to our detriment it has always been our policy to publicly criticize the person for doing it. We have a First Amendment right to do that and while we have not legally reproduced any of the images on this page we could legally do so, but to help Google's staff avoid having to remove this we are limiting the images to just those Ms. Burford couldn't possibly file a copyright claim against.

For more information you can see Robyn Burford's DMCA request on the Lumen Database website: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/80015360