We license a lot of content through the Meshbox Design division of Proactive International. Meshbox primarily focuses on original 3D content that is licensed to digital production houses, film studios and individual artists. Meshbox also makes the original Santa that is the mascot Santa for NORAD’s annual NORAD Tracks Santa site.
There are evil scum who repost our 3D content as well as are market images. Sending out DMCA takedown notices is a very tiresome task. Usually it doesn’t do much good to contact the warez site where its being given away, but more effective to send DMCA takedown notices to the sites that actually host the files.
One problem with this is that Google indexes just about everything it finds, and sometimes the warez results end up being higher in Google’s search than the original creator. Ive decided to see what I can do about that.
I found some of our models on a warez site, and already got the 3D models themselves removed from the file sharing sites that host them. However, this same warez site took our original marketing renders and reused them. These images have been indexed by Google. We are trying to get Google to remove those links to those images.
After following the reporting methods provided by Google, we’ve gotten our first feedback from Google – stating that they got our DMCA takedown notice, but do not understand it. They also replied asking for links – which were already included in our original post. Now, Ive followed this up with a more detailed explanation. It seems clear to me: you are linking to our images, and caching those images in the Google web search. The original images they are indexing are illegal, therefore they are copying illegally posted images into their search engine – pretty clear to me – remove the links and the associated images.
Ill follow up with updates on how this goes.