Our friends over at Redmond Pie have also been suffering similar issues to us, although theirs was a bit more malicious, and if you're a regular reader of their page, you’re most likely to know that their Facebook page is inaccessible. To put it simple: You can disable and/or hack any Facebook page that you may like by requesting Facebook user operations support to help you through it.
Folks at CrunchGear think Facebook imperfectly complies with DMCA only when Facebook delayed restoration of Facebook group on counter claim. What exactly would you call it if you don’t even have the choice to counter a complaint?
Our (combined) efforts to resolve this:
- We told Facebook that reports originate from third party email service providers and not from reporter’s own TLD.
- We told Facebook that we have checked with USPTO database and the complaint registered is invalid but they refused to look into that.
- We have written to Facebook support with legal proofs of our ownership and Facebook decided to ignore them.
- We have asked Facebook (after restoration) to please preserve our page from such future fake claims but they ignored it.
- We have written to Facebook that we will have to write about this matter here if they don’t stop closing our page but Facebook refused to stop.
As for our case, Facebook have not responded to the email requesting information on why the page was taken down, even though it's perfectly within our rights to request the information. Facebook also says that they will delete the content of repeat offenders, in our case, the "offenders" are the people making the bogus complaint, not us!
Below is our communication with Facebook, as yet no reply:
Response
Hi,Can you tell me why the page was shut off and who made the claim?
I am the page administrator of https://www.facebook.com/Neowin the creator (hidden) is no longer a staff member at Neowin.
Thanks in advance
Steven Parker
www.neowin.net
Original email
From: Facebook
Date: 26 April 2011 22:13:59 GMT+01:00
To: hidden
Subject: Facebook warning
Reply-To: FacebookHello,
We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third party that the content infringes or otherwise violates their rights:
Fbpage: Neowin
We strongly encourage you to review the content you have posted to Facebook to make sure that you have not posted any other infringing content, as it is our policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers when appropriate.
If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please visit https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1108 for more information.
The Facebook team
Read how it unfolded for Redmond Pie, here.
Disclaimer: Redmond Pie studied a lot of cases of Facebook pages that accumulated over a million fans to reach this conclusion. This article has been written in hope to bring the issue to light in hope to enforce Facebook to change their policies. None of this information has been provided to be misused in a similar offense.
Update: We've also caught the attention of Violet blue over at ZDNet. Thanks Vi!
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