TorrentFreak has discovered a huge amount of spam being hosted on Chilling Effects, in the form of bogus DMCA requests the site has published. And these requests all include huge descriptions filled with spam URLs of everything from viagra to designer handbags.
Here is a typical example:
The description looks like something you’d typically see in blog comment or forum spam.
The spammers are also filing them with all the individual services, such as Sites, Blogger, Picasa, and Android Market. And they are filing them heavily from many different random usernames.
As for the URLs being indexed, the majority of URLs on the Chilling Effects website aren’t indexed in Google (and Bing only has a single page indexed), a change that was primarily triggered due to complaints from copyright holders who said people were using the site in order to find the URLs of sites hosting infringing content, since the complaints not only have the copyright holder’s information but also a list of all the URLs where the offending content can be found.
That said, there are services that scrape Chilling Effects DMCAs to republish, and those could easily be formatting the URLs to be linkable.
When you start looking at the spammed URLs, you also see many of them popping up in garden variety blog comment spam as well as on hacked WordPress sites.
All these bogus DMCA filings mean that it could take longer to process new DMCAs but also because they could be reporting legitimate URLs are infringing ones, depending on what URLs spammers submit at the infringing URLs.
Jennifer Slegg
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