DMCA Solutions for Entertainment Website

Issue:

• The client has copyright only for the SAARC countries. But the client website content was appearing all over the world due to that USA company has filed a DMCA complaint.

Challenges:

• We couldn’t counter their notice, because the client didn’t have rights for that countries.

Solution:

• Develop a sub-domain (for ex: xyz.abc.com)
• Apply 302 redirection whenever user visit website through non-copyright countries IP.

For Example:

• If user visit website (abc.com) from USA IP then he will 302 redirect to subdomain (abc.xyz.com) with the message “now this content is not available for this region”

• And block all the bots to crawl the sub-domain through robots.txt file (for ex: User-Agent: * Disallow: /)

• Add a Meta robots tag (<meta name "robots" content="noindex, nofollow">)

Reference URL:

• http://comingsoon.zee5.com/robots.txt

Client FAQ’s related to DMCA Issue:

1. Question - How to block content delivery to the USA or other non-copyright countries but still get crawled by the Googlebot.

• Answer - The simplest way is to add a banner message for US  and other non-copyright countries visitors only; Googlebot will see that too, but it will still index the rest of your content regardless.

Accordingly to John Muller - One potential solution would be to use a JavaScript-based interstitial that verifies the IP address and otherwise blocks access to your site. I assume you have to use JavaScript within your site, correct? If so, there would be no simple way for a user to selectively block the JavaScript interstitial and allow the JavaScript content. Assuming the JavaScript is in an external file that is disalllowed through your robots.txt file, Googlebot would not be able to view the interstitial and would be able to crawl the site normally.

Ref. URL - https://support.google.com/webmasters/forum/AAAA2Jdx3sUthqhs2Mrmtw/?hl=en&gpf=d/category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/thqhs2Mrmtw

Issues to block IP is following:

• Since GoogleBot lives in the US, blocking US based IP addresses, would likely also block GoogleBot. That would result in Google not indexing your site and you not ranking well in Google for the country you are targeting.

Other articles to deal with the DMCA:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018955.html
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/15105130?hl=en
• https://www.copyrighted.com/blog/dmca-guide

Please feel free to share other useful information related to this topic.