Written by Otaku Apologist
While searching for new hentai fap fodder to post on my social media, I stumbled on to a notice on Gelbooru. “If you have a Twitter account, please retweet this message. We are going to be suing Google and need help getting the message around.”
From May 31st until July 15th in 2019, Gelbooru was delisted on Google’s search engine. Gelbooru received several DMCA takedown notices and rejected them, which they were punished for by Google. When the website owner filed a counter DMCA notice, Google was required to forward the notice to the original sender, and restore content within 10 days. Gelbooru remained delisted for a full month. The website owner is now looking to start a class-action suit against the corporation, to set a precedent for the future.
According to the owner of Gelbooru, Lozer T. User (posted 09/01/2019), “Months ago, Google delisted hundreds of websites from their search engine. Every counter DMCA we sent for our domain was rejected, with Google stating they will not be taking action. This is not how the counter DMCA notification system is supposed to work. Upon receipt of a counter DMCA notice, you are required to forward the notice to the original sender, and restore content within 10 days. Google has proven multiple times, over the course of a few years, that they are incapable of doing this. We are going to drag them to court to reveal the original sender of the notices that delisted our site, get an injunction preventing our main domain, and other related pages from being targeted by notices in the future, and hopefully set a good precedent in making sure Google, and others like them, comply with the law in the future.
If we can manage to locate at least 3 other admins of websites who were affected by this we can start a class action lawsuit, which will hold a lot of more weight in future instances of this company failing to adhere to a fairly straightforward DMCA law of taking down and restoring content.” – SOURCE.
Gelbooru has since been restored and once again shows up on Google’s search engine pages.
