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The popular Toomics webtoon subscription service is quite active on the anti-piracy front. Unfortunately, the Korean company is not very specific because its takedown notices target perfectly legal content on Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and Netflix. Stranger still, Toomics has repeatedly asked Google to remove “fake” URLs from its own website.
Every two weeks, we take a look at the various opt-out requests that companies like Google and Twitter are receiving.
The vast majority of reviews are valid and refer to pirated material, but errors are certainly not hard to find.
These errors come in different shapes and sizes. An incorrectly identified URL in a list of thousands is somewhat understandable. However, there are also cases where it is difficult to find legitimate claims to begin with.
The Toomics Withdrawal Disorder
The latter applies to some of the DMCA notifications that webtoons publisher Toomics sent to Google. The company, which recently teamed up with other publishers to fight piracy, is building a horrendous track record.
We don’t even have to dive deep into individual withdrawals to show something is wrong. The overview of the areas most targeted by the company, which includes Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Wikipedia, speaks for itself.
There are a lot of mistakes we can choose from to illustrate that something is wrong. For example, in a review where Toomics is attempting to remove “pirated” copies of the “Sweet Bitter Love” webtoon, he targets a movie, BBC series, book and song that share the same name. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You have the wrong person …
In another takedown request, Toomics is trying to go after pirated copies of the “You Have The Wrong Person” webtoon. Instead, he asks Google to remove unrelated URLs, including the Wikipedia entry for The Magic Flute, various articles about being in love or married to the wrong person, and dozens of other mistakes.
We could go on and highlight hundreds of errors, but the data speaks for itself. The same can be said for Google’s response, as the company wisely declined to take action in response to some of Toomic’s takedown notices.
Toomics also targets its own site
There is another thing that stands out in the reviews, which we surely want to point out. Toomics also asked Google to remove dozens of URLs from its own website, Toomics.com.
For example, in the previously mentioned “You’ve Got the Wrong Person” notice, there are 14 Toomics.com links that point to the official cartoon. As a bonus, companies have also tried removing URLs from their own tweets. This model reappears in several reviews and shows that Toomics hasn’t even whitelisted its own website.
The good news for the webtoon publisher is that Google is good at spotting mistakes. This means that most legitimate links, including those from Toomics.com, were not removed from Google search results.
However, Toomics isn’t always so lucky. We have also spotted instances where Google has removed Toomic.com URLs. This Jeopardy webtoon, for example, was flagged automatically and no longer appears in search results. But they had that one coming. Hope this is a wake-up call.
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