The Curious Takedown Notices of ‘Tongues of Glass’ Poet Shaun Shane

The poet heading by the identify Shaun Shane has appear to the forefront once more, half a decade right after his a single-line poem activated a takedown controversy. In a collection of DMCA notices despatched to Google, the poet posits that folks are employing black hat Search engine optimization to get to him. Specific websites involve BoingBoing and Techdirt, but also completely unrelated ones, including the homepage of the business ‘Shaun Shane Bricklaying.'

In excess of the years we have printed numerous content on dubious or inaccurate takedown notices, both of those from large media conglomerates and impartial copyright holders.

One of the most curious circumstances is with out question that of Shaun Shane and his poem ‘Tongues Designed of Glass.’

Five yrs ago the circumstance very first built headlines when On Push Inc. started off hounding folks on social media because they dared to recite the solitary line poem, which is composed of just eighteen words.

At the time, Techdirt described on the difficulty, which was quickly picked up by others which includes BoingBoing, professor Michael Geist, and lawyer Ken White at Popehat. Useless to say, the amount of poem recitals only amplified.

On Push Inc. wasn’t joyful with the coverage. Responding to the media focus, the organization questioned Google to take out links to the poem from its search motor.

This work backfired in an even bigger way. Not only did it guide to much more article content, Google also turned down most of the requests. Even even worse, the poem was also posted in comprehensive in the Lumen database, in which copies of Google’s DMCA notices are published.

Speedy forward five years and the Tongues Designed of Glass poem is back on the radar. This time it appears to be author ‘Shaun Shane’ himself who’s sending takedown notices to Google.

As prior to, the DMCA notices are mostly focusing on posts that reference the earlier debacles, which include our possess, but the accusations now go far outside of that.

In accordance to Shaun Shane, folks are utilizing black hat Website positioning bots to fool Google’s lookup algorithm and make these posts rank higher for his name.

“Someone is applying Bots for the reported Url to artificially raise its rating in Google search results for the research terms ‘Shaun Shane’ beyond what Googles lookup algorithm would normal assign it and are participating in Black Hat Search engine marketing [sic],” he writes in the takedown notices.

We’re not absolutely sure what these alleged black hat methods have to do with a copyright assert. What we do know, having said that, is that the repeated protection of the poem’s doubtful takedowns might have one thing to do with the higher rating.

It does not finish at these accusations nevertheless.

Looking a lot more closely at the reported URLs we see some normal suspects, which includes BoingBoing, TorrentFreak, Techdirt and Popehat hyperlinks. On the other hand, there are also many innocent bystanders getting dragged into the drama.

The poet also targets the web-site of the organization “Shaun Shane Bricklaying,” the Linkedin profile of profits manager Shaun Shane, a piece on Legend Photo voltaic founders Shaun Alldredge and Shane Perkins, and the TripAdvisor profile of Shaun & Shane Tour Operators.

Needless to say, none of these hyperlinks are even remotely infringing, and we significantly doubt that they are utilizing Black Hat Web optimization. They just materialize to use the keyword phrases “Shaun” and “Shane”.

Google, luckily for us, denied all of the takedown requests that we referenced listed here. We did see a person URL that was taken out, which used an image with the poem, with no any context.

This indicates that the conclude consequence for Shaun Shane is not extremely uplifting. Most of the content he reported stays on the net and with new information experiences becoming revealed (which includes this a person), they will only close up larger in the search results next time.