Circumvention
What is Circumvention?
Circumvention occurs when a product or service is designed to break a barrier put in place to control access to a copyrighted work. For example, a website that has a serial key generator for copyrighted software might be providing a circumvention service.
Who can file a circumvention request?
A circumvention request can only be filed by the rights holder, their authorized representative, or a licensed vendor of the copyrighted material in question.
You can report circumvention by following the steps below
- Select the relevant Google product where you believe the circumvention appears
- Select Legal Reasons to Report Content
- Select Intellectual Property
- Select Circumvention
Counterfeit
What are counterfeit goods?
Counterfeit goods mimic the brand features of a product in an attempt to pass themselves off as a genuine product of the brand owner.
How does Google respond to sites with possibly counterfeit content?
As part of our terms of service, we may take action on individual Google accounts that allegedly provide or promote counterfeit goods.
On Google Search, upon notice, we will remove web pages selling counterfeit goods. Through our removals process, we may identify sites found to be consistently selling counterfeit goods. We will use these insights to update our ranking systems and limit the visibility of these sites in Search.
You can file a counterfeit notice by following the steps below
- Select the relevant Google product where you believe the counterfeit content appears
- Select Legal Reasons to Report Content
- Select Intellectual Property
- Select Counterfeit
Court Orders
Does Google accept third party court orders?
If a court has ruled that web pages in Google’s search results or content in a Google product is unlawful, you can submit the order here for our review. Please note that we accept only valid court orders signed by a judge. We may voluntarily remove the content from our services if the order identifies specific URLs and indicates that the content violates the law.
How do I send Google a copy of an order?
You can upload a valid court order by following the steps below
- Select the relevant Google product where the content appears. For example, you would select "Google Search" if the webpage is linked from Google’s search results.
- Select Legal Reasons to Report Content
- Select Other Legal Issues
- Select Court Order
Once you have reached the appropriate webform, we ask you to provide the following information:
- a copy of the court order,
- the URL for each web page that contains the allegedly infringing content,
- the exact text or content from each URL that violates the terms of the order, and
- the specific section or page of the court order that mandates the removal of these webpages.
What if the court order names Google?
We use our webforms to receive and review court orders against third parties who have posted allegedly unlawful content. If your court order is directed at Google, please don't submit the order through our webforms; we do not accept service of process this way.
Please note, in an effort to remain transparent, certain details from each legal notice we receive may also be sent to the third-party organization, Lumen, for publication. A link to a Lumen notice, which includes your court order, may be displayed at the bottom of Google’s search results or on the Google webpage in place of the removed content. The Lumen notice may include your name, but will be redacted of any personal contact information. You can see an example of a published legal notice here.