Grey’s Anatomy, the show you didn’t mean to be quite so obsessed with, has just been renewed for another season. Guess which season the show is on now, I’ll give you a minute. Got your number ready? Ok, here’s the reveal: Season 23 is officially a go. You’ve been obsessed with the lives of the medical staff and students at Grey Sloan Memorial since March 27, 2005. That was 21 years ago, and at this point I think it’s safe to say that Grey Sloan Memorial has survived more disasters than most actual hospitals. 

If you didn’t already know that Grey’s Anatomy is officially the longest-running primetime medical drama on television, now you do. It surpassed ER for the title back in 2019, and was the #1 most-streamed show on Disney+ and Hulu in 2025. According to the Nielsen index, it’s the #2 most-streamed show across all U.S. platforms. Where other shows go quietly into that good night, Grey’s is like the freaking Energizer bunny. This show has the same hustle and dedication to its fans as OnlyFans models who just don’t stop (and good for them!). 

If you haven’t watched the show since 2009, now’s a great time for a quick refresher, so here are what I think are the Grey’s Anatomy greatest hits. 

The bomb in the chest cavity — remember in Season 2 when Meredith just… sticks her hand in a dude’s chest cavity to prevent a bomb going off? Casual. NBD. 

“Pick me. Choose me. Love me.” — ah, yes. Whomst amongst us didn’t create a playlist full of depression after hearing that line in Season 2? 

Denny dying at freaking prom — Izzie sobbing in the pink dress, the rest of us sobbing on our respective couches, because what a way to end Season 2!

The plane crash — speaking of wild ways to wrap a season, what the hell was that? Lexie? Dead. Mark? Dead. Arizona? Down to one leg. 

Derek’s death — Ok, I maybe had to talk to my therapist about this lovely piece of Season 11, because WTF?!?! Him being killed by an incompetent hospital after saving strangers was NOT OK. 

Meredith’s COVID coma beach — remember the moment in Season 17 when she got to reunite with a dead Derek? I love me a reality loophole in my fictional content. 

To give all credit where it is most definitely due, everyone take a knee and bow before our queen, Shonda Rhimes. She’s the one who created the show in the first place, and it’s spawned not one but two spinoffs since it’s debut in 2005. I love Shonda, she is Mother, let’s be honest. She’s a force of nature, and I’m not sure that it can be proven that she isn’t some sort of deity who blesses TV/digital streaming shows. She is the only person who could make me cry FOR TWO DECADES about fictional surgeons and still have me coming back for more. Why do you you think Bridgerton and Inventing Anna are as phenomenal as they are? It’s because they were created by the same goddess that has us still showing up for the medical team at Grey Sloan Memorial 23 seasons later. 

Season 23 may have been officially confirmed for ABC’s 2026-2027 lineup, but Grey’s wouldn’t be Grey’s without a shakeup. Kevin McKidd (Owen) and Kim Raver (Teddy) will be peacing out after the Season 22 finale. What awaits us when Season 23 kicks off? All we can do is stock up on our favorite cry snacks (I’m not the only one who has those, right?), and wait. 

Match Group can’t find a match in the big leagues, while the platform Wall Street won’t touch is quietly printing money.

On March 9, 2026, Match Group, the corporate umbrella sheltering Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and a graveyard of other romantic experiments, was officially ejected from the S&P 500. Its replacement? A cohort of AI infrastructure darlings: data center power supplier Vertiv, photonic chip companies Lumentum and Coherent, and satellite telecom firm EchoStar. The index, which announced the reshuffling on March 6, effectively decided that companies that help light move through fiber-optic cables are more valuable to American capitalism than companies that were supposed to help humans find love.

Jim Cramer eulogized the exit on Mad Money with characteristic understatement. Match’s stock, he noted, is down nearly 80% over five years. Its market cap has shrunk to around $7 billion, leaving it too small, too diminished, too cooked for the big league.

“I know nothing about online dating, thank heavens,” Cramer added. It’s the most self-aware thing he’s said in years.

Here’s the thing, though: Match Group’s collapse isn’t just a stock story. It’s the entirely predictable conclusion of an industry that spent over a decade treating loneliness as a product to be monetized rather than a problem to be solved — and got exactly what it deserved.

Think back to 2012, when Tinder launched, and the swipe mechanic felt genuinely revolutionary. A decade-plus later, we have a $6 billion global dating app industry, 350 million users worldwide, and, per a 2024 Forbes Health survey, more than three-quarters of Gen Z users who feel completely burned out on the whole enterprise. A systematic review published in late 2024, covering 26,000 participants across 23 studies, found that dating app users reported significantly worse psychological health than non-users across every metric measured: depression, anxiety, loneliness, psychological distress. The apps designed to connect us have, at scale, made us feel more isolated.

That didn’t happen by accident. It happened by design.

The swipe interface itself was always more of a slot machine than a matchmaker. The intermittent reinforcement of matches (sometimes you get one, sometimes you don’t, and you never quite know when) mirrors the same variable reward schedules that make gambling addictive. Researchers have called apps like Tinder “slot machines for self-esteem,” and the description has only gotten more apt as the platforms have leaned harder into gamification over the years. The goal was never to get you off the app. The goal was to keep you on it.

Then came the paywalls. Hinge’s “Standouts and Roses” system gates the most attractive profiles behind a premium subscription, creating what critics accurately describe as a two-tiered experience: pay up, or make peace with the leftovers. Tinder has long been accused of using bot-generated fake likes to nudge free users toward paid tiers, the idea being that if you can see someone liked you but can’t see who, the $30/month for Gold suddenly feels reasonable. It’s a protection racket with better UX.

The algorithms themselves are their own special disaster. Studies consistently show that the sheer abundance of options on swipe apps produces what social psychologists call “choice overload” — a documented phenomenon where too many options lead to worse decisions, less satisfaction, and higher rates of abandoning the search altogether. We evolved to choose from a handful of potential partners in a village. We did not evolve to scroll through thousands of strangers with the same thumb motion we use to skip YouTube ads. The brain responds to this cognitive mismatch not with romantic optimism but with paralysis and diminishing emotional investment. Every date starts to feel like a transaction with someone you could have swiped away.

Geographic filtering has been laughably unreliable for years, with users routinely matched with people well outside their set radius or, conversely, finding their location data exposed to people they’d rather avoid. Reporting mechanisms for harassment and abuse are bare minimum at best, performative at worst.

And then there’s the safety catastrophe, which is the part that should have gotten more people fired.

A landmark 18-month investigation published in February 2025 by The Guardian, The Markup, and The 19th, supported by the Pulitzer Center, found that Match Group’s internal safety system had been logging reports of assault and other safety breaches since 2019, with these reports being received in the hundreds each week by 2022. Internal documents reportedly showed the company debating whether to disclose this data publicly, with a 2021 presentation asking executives: publish what the law requires, or push back on even that? They chose strategic ambiguity.

The investigation spotlights one particularly damning case: a Colorado cardiologist who continued to appear on Match Group apps despite multiple user reports, and wasn’t banned until his arrest in early 2023. He was later sentenced to 158 years in prison after being convicted of 35 counts related to drugging and assaulting 11 women. Banned Tinder users, including those reported for sexual assault, could easily rejoin or move to another Match Group dating app, keeping most of their key personal information exactly the same. The company’s response to these findings, per a senior communications director, was to affirm its “role in fostering safer communities.” Cool.

In 2024, the remaining employees from the central trust-and-safety team Match Group had set up in response to earlier scrutiny were let go, with their jobs outsourced to overseas contractors. Safety theater, as one insider described it, eventually gave way to just not bothering.

Now for the punchline. While Match Group is shuffling out of the S&P 500 with a $7 billion market cap and its dignity in tatters, OnlyFans, the subscription content site that people still pretend to be unfamiliar with even though everyone knows what it is at this point, posted $7.2 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2024 alone. That’s not its valuation. That’s money that actually moved through the platform in a single calendar year.

You read that correctly. Match Group’s entire market cap, the number that got them thrown out of the most prestigious stock index in the world, is roughly equal to what OnlyFans processed in transactions last year.

It gets better. According to financial data from Fenix International Limited, the UK-registered parent company of OnlyFans, the platform posted $666 million in profit in 2024. (Yes, $666 million. The jokes write themselves.)

That’s up from a modest $7 million in 2019, which is a 9,414% increase in five years. The platform now boasts 377 million registered fans and 4.6 million creators, with the US accounting for the largest share of its revenue geography.

OnlyFans’ estimated valuation sits somewhere between $20 billion and $21.6 billion depending on the multiple you apply, making it roughly three times Match Group’s current market cap. The platform that Wall Street can’t touch because of reputational risk is worth three times the company that invented the modern dating app.

The symmetry here is almost too on the nose. One company built a business on the premise that it could help people find genuine connection, then quietly optimized for engagement metrics, paywalled good experiences, ignored abuse reports, let bots run rampant, and treated user safety as a cost center until the market got tired of paying for the privilege of being disappointed. The other company built a more honest transaction and got rich.

People want connection. They always have. What they don’t want — what they’ve spent the last decade quietly demonstrating through churn rates, burnout surveys, and declining subscriber numbers — is to pay a corporation to gamify their loneliness and look the other way when it goes wrong.

Match Group didn’t get kicked out of the S&P 500 because the market is cruel. It got kicked out because it made its bed, one bad algorithm at a time.

Google went from “Don’t Be Evil” to letting anonymous trolls delete your content from the internet in minutes — and has no incentive to fix it

In 2000, Google adopted an internal motto that would become one of the most famous phrases in corporate history: “Don’t be evil.” It appeared in their corporate code of conduct, served as the Wi-Fi password on employee shuttles, and was cited by Google’s own founders in their 2004 IPO letter as a guiding principle. It was, for a time, one of the few examples of a tech company articulating a moral compass in plain language.

Then, in 2018, Google removed almost every mention of it.

The phrase had lived at the top of the company’s code of conduct for nearly two decades. Following a corporate restructuring under parent company Alphabet in 2015, Alphabet adopted the softer “Do the right thing” as its own code. Google initially kept “Don’t be evil” — until late April 2018, when a revision scrubbed it from the preface entirely. One lonely mention survives at the bottom of the document: “And remember… don’t be evil.” A whisper where there used to be a declaration.

The timing was notable. The removal coincided with a wave of employee resignations over Google’s involvement in Project Maven, a partnership with the U.S. Pentagon to develop AI for military applications. Over 4,000 employees signed a petition against the project. A dozen left entirely. Google’s former Head of International Relations, Ross LaJeunesse, would later write that the motto “was no longer a true reflection of the company’s values; it was now nothing more than just another corporate marketing tool.”

You might wonder what any of this has to do with a copyright law written in 1998. The answer is everything. Because the same company that decided “Don’t be evil” was no longer worth saying out loud has also built the single most exploitable content-removal system on the internet — and has made deliberate choices to keep it that way.

The Weapon Google Hands to Fraudsters

Here’s what bad actors can do today: submit DMCA requests that look valid on paper, then let Google’s default “remove first” machinery do the rest. In practice, that can mean pages vanish from search results fast, with little friction up front and no meaningful verification that the filer is who they claim to be.

That isn’t a hypothetical. That’s how Google’s DMCA takedown process works right now. And while the Digital Millennium Copyright Act itself has serious structural problems, Google has made a series of deliberate choices that go far beyond what the law requires, turning a flawed system into a weapon optimized for abuse.

This is what a fraudulent-looking DMCA notice can look like: generic sender, vague work identification, and a sprawling URL list — exactly the kind of filing that makes abuse hard to detect at scale.

Who’s Getting Hurt

The damage isn’t theoretical. It’s happening to real people, and it cuts two ways.

First, there are the creators whose identities are being weaponized against them. Top OnlyFans creators have discovered that unverified filers are impersonating them to file fraudulent copyright claims, using the creator’s own name and content as the basis for takedowns against publishers who feature them. Many creators without professional representation are watching their traffic collapse and have no framework for understanding why. The mechanism of attack is invisible to them. They see the symptom. They never see the cause.

“My agent brought these fake reports to my attention — I didn’t even know this could happen,” says Kayla, a top 1% OnlyFans creator. “I was shocked. It’s almost as bad as finding out you’ve been leaked. Other creators who don’t have agency representation lose traffic to their pages and have no idea why it’s happening or what to do.”

Then there are the publishers. Ad networks, roundup sites, and independent media outlets whose legitimately published content gets ripped out of Google search results overnight. They lose time, money, and traffic fighting bogus claims — and by the time they successfully counter one fraudulent takedown, the damage has already been done and hundreds more notices are waiting.

Matt M., a top creator agency owner, describes the operational reality: “We lose time and money fighting these bogus claims. In the end, it’s the creator who suffers. Some of them have been manipulated into paying for takedowns to protect their brand. What really happens is they lose access to the promotion they’re paying for from ad networks, so they’re effectively paying twice and losing traffic. I don’t blame the creators for this — these scammers make it sound like they’re some kind of intellectual property lawyer protecting the creator against theft.”

On the publisher side, the operational toll is just as brutal. Benjamin, a COO at a web publishing company, describes a business that’s been forced to build an entire role around fighting fraud: “We manage dozens of niche websites where humans compose longform editorial content and perform investigative journalism. We’re overly cautious about ensuring the graphics on our sites are eligible and fair use. And yet, we now have to have a full-time employee who does nothing but receive DMCA takedown notices, respond to explain our position, and then track and follow up on each one because Google is only reinstating our pages about 60% of the time on the first attempt.” The economics of abuse have made it even worse: “We’ve seen a huge increase in unethical providers on websites like Fiverr who will file DMCA takedowns anonymously for less than $10. This DMCA fraud is a daily struggle.”

What connects all of it is the same structural failure: Google processes takedowns from unverified filers at scale — and the people on the receiving end have no fast, affordable way to fight back.

Seven Things Google Could Do Tomorrow (But Won’t)

The DMCA requires platforms to process takedown notices “expeditiously” to maintain safe harbor protection, but nowhere does the law require Google to accept unverified notices, prohibit identity confirmation, or prevent flagging suspicious patterns. Google has chosen to do none of the things the law would allow. Every change below is legally permissible. They choose not to because the current system costs them nothing.

1. Verify the identity of complainants. Anyone can file a DMCA takedown with a self-attested name and zero identity verification. Fraudulent senders routinely use generic names like “DMCA Manager,” burying their filings in a sea of identical-looking notices. Google could require verified accounts or confirmed business entities before processing notices. The law requires a perjury statement that the filer is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, but Google never actually verifies that claim. This is the single highest-leverage change Google could make, because every other reform depends on knowing who is actually filing.

2. Create a trust scoring system and verified publisher whitelist. Google processes millions of takedown requests annually. They have more than enough data to flag patterns of abuse — high-volume filers who get counter-noticed, notices that consistently target competitors rather than actual pirates. Google already does this in other contexts: think Google Ads quality scores, think search spam detection. The technical infrastructure exists. The will does not. Taking it further, Google could create a verified publisher whitelist — trusted publishers with clean compliance records receive “notice and review” treatment rather than instant “notice and takedown.” When a takedown targets content from a verified publisher, Google holds it pending brief review instead of auto-removing it. Unverified filers and unknown entities get standard processing. The current system doesn’t bother to distinguish between a publisher and a pirate. Google could make that distinction tomorrow.

3. Add a review window for suspicious notices. Instead of removing content the instant a notice arrives, Google could hold flagged notices for 24 to 48 hours of review. The DMCA says “expeditiously.” It does not say “instantly.” Google already takes days to process many notices anyway.

4. Require specific identification of the copyrighted work. Fraudulent takedowns are routinely vague about what’s supposedly being infringed. The law already requires identification of the copyrighted work — if it’s missing, the notice is technically deficient and Google has no obligation to act. In practice, they process incomplete notices because it’s easier to take things down than to push back.

5. Make counter-notices frictionless. Filing a takedown takes minutes through Google’s web form. A counter-notice requires the victim to provide personal contact information (which gets forwarded to the attacker), submit legal declarations, and wait 10 to 14 business days. Google could streamline this with an equally simple form and a one-click counter-notice option. They don’t.

6. Penalize repeat abusers. Google has a repeat infringer policy for people whose content gets taken down, but no meaningful repeat abuser policy for people who file fraudulent notices. There’s precedent for this: the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) imposes fines of $500 per violation for unsolicited robocalls — real financial consequences that changed the economics of spam overnight. Google could apply the same logic: track abuse, escalate consequences, suspend filing privileges for filers whose notices are consistently bogus.

7. Publish transparency data at the complainant level. Google’s Transparency Report shows aggregate data but doesn’t reveal which complainants have high rates of rejected claims. Publishing that data would let the public (and courts) see who’s actually weaponizing the system.

The common thread: Google has optimized entirely for minimizing their own legal risk and operational cost. Their safe harbor protection doesn’t depend on accuracy. It depends on speed of removal. They’ve outsourced 100% of the consequences to everyone else.

How Google Weaponizes “Transparency” Through Lumen

Google sends copies of DMCA takedown notices to the Lumen Database, a Harvard Law School Library–affiliated research archive housing nearly 70 million takedown notices referencing well over 10 billion URLs. In theory, this creates transparency: the public can see who is requesting content removal and why.

In practice, the transparency is far thinner than it appears, and that’s by Google’s design.

Google’s own policy states that it generally shares the requestor’s name on copyright and trademark notices sent to Lumen. But “shares a name” isn’t the same as “verifies an identity.” The system still allows completely self-attested identities — names like “DMCA Manager” — to flood the record unchecked. Google never confirms that the person behind the name is real, that they represent who they claim to represent, or that they have any standing to file in the first place. The result is a database full of names that may as well be pseudonyms, with no mechanism to connect patterns of abuse across filings or hold repeat offenders accountable.

This matters because the DMCA statute itself requires that a takedown notice include the identity of the complainant. The entire premise is accountability: someone is making a legal claim under penalty of perjury, and the target should be able to evaluate who filed it and whether to counter-notice. When the name attached to a filing is functionally meaningless — self-attested, unconfirmed, and shared by thousands of other notices — that accountability collapses. The filer’s identity exists on paper. It doesn’t exist in practice.

Compare this to other platforms. When Reddit, GitHub, Medium, or Vimeo submit notices to Lumen, the sender information is often verifiable and intact. Google, by far the largest source of notices in the database, accepts whatever name a filer types into a form and passes it along without verification. The sheer volume of unverified Google notices dilutes the entire dataset, making Lumen’s research mission exponentially harder.

And Lumen’s own researchers have documented exactly what this enables. In 2022, Lumen Research Fellow Shreya Tewari identified more than 33,000 DMCA notices that appeared to be part of a coordinated campaign of fraudulent takedowns built on back-dated articles used to suppress legitimate journalism. Follow-up research brought the total to over 89,000 apparently fraudulent notices, used to suppress news coverage of corruption, drug trafficking, and political misconduct. The playbook is repeatable, scalable, and — thanks to Google’s lack of verification — virtually risk-free.

Lumen’s stated mission is to provide transparency on who sends content removal requests, why, and to what ends. Google undermines that mission not by hiding names but by treating self-attested identities as “good enough,” flooding the system with filings that technically have a name attached but offer no real path to accountability.

Why This Is an Antitrust Issue

In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search. Judge Amit Mehta held that Google monopolized the markets for general search services and text advertising, controlling nearly 90% of computer searches and approximately 95% of smartphone searches. In April 2025, a second federal court found Google had also unlawfully monopolized the digital advertising market, with the DOJ declaring that Google’s “unlawful dominance allows them to censor and even deplatform American voices.”

As of March 2026, the fight continues. The case has moved into the remedies phase, where the DOJ has proposed major structural changes, including limits on Google’s search distribution agreements and the potential divestiture of Chrome. Google is simultaneously appealing the monopoly ruling. The case is expected to move to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Those rulings are what elevate Google’s DMCA choices from a policy problem to a structural one. When a single company controls the doorway to the entire internet — and two federal courts have confirmed that they do — running a sloppy, easily exploited takedown system isn’t just negligent. It’s a weapon that any third party can pick up and use to destroy a competitor.

Take the Button Away

Google doesn’t need Congress to stop making this easy. It can verify complainant identity privately, rate-limit high-volume filers, build an abuse score, and give verified publishers “notice and review” instead of instant deindexing. None of that requires a new statute — just the decision that the people who depend on Google’s index are worth the engineering hours.

Right now, Google’s DMCA pipeline is optimized for the only metric that protects Google: speed. Everyone else eats the consequences. They took “Don’t be evil” off the wall. The least they can do is stop handing strangers the button that makes people’s work disappear.

How a broken copyright law became the internet’s most effective tool for anonymous competitive sabotage — and nine ways Congress could fix it (if they wanted to).

Imagine you wake up one morning to find that your website, your YouTube channel, or your OnlyFans page have been gutted. Content you created with blood, sweat, and tears, content that you own, content that pays your mortgage, is just *poof*. Gone.

Not because you did anything wrong. Simply because a stranger (or someone you know!) filled out a form, clicked submit, and the platform holding your work decided that was enough to remove your content.

No verification. No burden of proof. Not even a phone call to give you a heads up. And you’re not even allowed to know who did it.

Welcome to the creator economy in 2026 where this is happening to people on a regular basis, all thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA was signed into law in 1998, the same year Google was founded, eleven years before OnlyFans as a concept even existed. The law’s famous “safe harbor” provision was designed to protect platforms from liability for user-uploaded content, as long as they responded to takedown notices. It was a reasonable framework for its era. That era is over.

Now, the law is so structurally broken that it has quietly become one of the most effective tools for anti-competitive sabotage on the internet. And the people abusing it aren’t even trying to hide it anymore.

This is the DMCA’s least-discussed design flaw: not that takedowns happen, but that they happen anonymously, instantly, at scale, with no verification required and no meaningful consequences for abuse. For independent digital creators, many of whom depend entirely on search visibility to reach paying subscribers, this isn’t a theoretical policy problem. It is an existential one.

What a Fraudulent DMCA Actually Looks Like

Pull up the Lumen Database,  the public repository where Google logs DMCA takedown notices. The goal of Lumen is to collect and study online content removal requests.

Though their goal is allegedly to promote transparency on these notices, they aren’t really able to because Google usually only shares notice details — not the requestor’s name or contact information. So even if Lumen wanted to share that information, they don’t have.

For What do they have? Pull up the Lumen database and search for a notice like #78071520. What you’ll find is someone listed as “DMCA Manager.” No company name. No individual. No verifiable identity whatsoever. All other identifying information is either redacted or was never required in the first place. The only concrete data point is a country of origin, which can be spoofed to any location on earth using a VPN.

That’s it. That’s the paper trail.

What makes this more than just an anonymity problem is what that single form submission can accomplish. A fraudster using a generic identity like “DMCA Manager” can file thousands of takedown notices in a single session. Because Google’s response to any DMCA notice is immediate deindexing, every one of those notices removes a competitor’s page from search results within hours. Everyone is treated as guilty until proven innocent, and their content is vanished from the internet for a minimum of 14 days.

And because Google holds a court-confirmed monopoly on search, being removed from Google search results is, for most practical purposes, being removed from the internet entirely.

The asymmetry here is breathtaking. A bad actor willing to commit fraud can delete thousands of a competitor’s pages from Google search results with nothing more than anonymous form submissions. An honest publisher who refuses to commit fraud has no equivalent weapon and no immediate recourse. By the time a victim successfully contests even one fraudulent takedown (a process that takes at least 14 business days), the fraudster has had two uninterrupted weeks to file thousands more. There is no ceiling on how many notices a single anonymous filer can submit.

The fraud is further camouflaged by design. When a fraudster buries their filings under a generic name shared by thousands of other notices, any pattern of abuse disappears into the noise. There is no mechanism by which a victim, a platform, or a regulator can look at the data and say: this entity has filed ten thousand notices and lost nine thousand counter-notices. The anonymity doesn’t just protect the fraudster. It actively prevents the pattern from being visible.

Who Is Actually Getting Hurt

Creators who have professional representation are catching this problem. Many are not.

“My agent brought these fake reports to my attention — I didn’t even know this could happen,” says Kayla, a top 1% OnlyFans creator. “I was shocked. It’s almost as bad as finding out you’ve been leaked. Other creators who don’t have agency representation lose traffic to their pages and have no idea why it’s happening or what to do.”

That last sentence deserves to sit for a moment. Creators without representation, which is the majority of content creators, are watching their traffic collapse and have no framework for understanding why. The mechanism of attack is invisible to them. They see the symptom. They never see the cause.

For those who do figure it out, the road to remediation is its own punishment. Matt M., a top creator agency owner, describes the operational reality: “We lose time and money fighting these bogus claims. In the end, it’s the creator who suffers. Some of them have been manipulated into paying for takedowns to protect their brand. What really happens is they lose access to the promotion they’re paying for from ad networks, so they’re effectively paying twice and losing traffic. I don’t blame the creators for this — these scammers make it sound like they’re some kind of intellectual property lawyer protecting the creator against theft.”

The scam within the scam: fraudulent filers aren’t just hurting creators through false takedowns. They’re also creating a secondary market for “protection” that extracts money from the very people being victimized. It is, in structure, indistinguishable from a protection racket.

The Structural Problem Congress Built and Won’t Fix

None of this is accidental. The DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system was designed to make it easy to remove infringing content. It succeeded, but at the cost of building a nearly frictionless system for abuse. The law’s Section 512(f) technically allows victims of bad-faith takedowns to sue for damages, but courts have interpreted it so narrowly, as seen in decisions like Rossi v. MPAA and Lenz v. Universal, that it is functionally useless. The standard requires proving that a filer knowingly misrepresented their claim; subjective good faith is enough to escape liability even when a claim is objectively absurd.

In practice, filing a fraudulent DMCA notice carries no criminal risk, no civil risk worth calculating, and costs nothing. The incentive structure is perfectly engineered for abuse.

Nine Ways Congress Could Fix This

The fixes are not complicated. They have been discussed in policy circles for years and consistently blocked by the entertainment industry lobbying. Here is what reform actually looks like:

1. Make fraudulent filings genuinely costly. This is the biggest one. As mentioned above, Section 512(f) technically allows targets of bad-faith takedowns to sue for damages but this section is virtually useless thanks to the standard set by the Ninth Circuit in Rossi v. MPAA and reinforced in Lenz v. Universal. Those decisions basically say that a filer only violates 512(f) if they knowingly misrepresent their claim, and “subjective good faith” is enough to avoid liability even if the claim is objectively ridiculous. Congress could flip this by making the standard objective rather than subjective. If a reasonable person would have known the claim was bogus, you’re liable. They could also add statutory damages for fraudulent filings (similar to how copyright infringement itself carries statutory damages), so victims don’t have to prove exact financial harm to recover. Right now the cost-benefit calculation for abusers is completely lopsided: filing a fraudulent takedown costs nothing and has no consequences, while fighting one costs time, money, and lost revenue.

2. Require verification of copyright ownership before processing. The law currently says the notice must include a statement under penalty of perjury that the filer is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, but critically, the perjury statement only applies to the authorization claim, not to the infringement claim itself. That’s an absurd loophole. Congress could simply extend the perjury standard to cover the entire notice, including the assertion that infringement is actually occurring. That single change would make fraudulent filers criminally liable rather than just civilly liable.

3. Create a “notice and review” option alongside “notice and takedown.” Right now, the process is brutally binary: content disappears first and questions get asked never, with platforms defaulting to immediate removal because the safe harbor incentive structure rewards speed over accuracy. A middle path, where certain categories of content are held pending brief review rather than auto-removed, without the platform losing safe harbor protection, would fundamentally rebalance that calculus. This reform is especially overdue for search engine deindexing, where the so-called “infringing content” isn’t even hosted on Google’s servers. It is a link. Removing it instantly, before any verification of the underlying claim, treats a URL like a live grenade when it is, at most, a question mark.

In a sense, Congress could make room for a verified publisher whitelist: trusted publishers with a documented compliance track record receive “notice and review” treatment because they’ve earned the presumption of legitimacy. Known piracy operations and anonymous filers get “notice and takedown,” because they haven’t. The whitelist transforms what is currently a blunt, one-size-fits-all instrument into something that actually reflects the difference between a publisher and a pirate — a distinction the current law, remarkably, doesn’t bother to make.

4. Shorten the counter-notice restoration timeline. The current 10-14 business day waiting period is arbitrary and punitive. A 3-5 business day timeline is more appropriate, with immediate restoration upon counter-notice unless the complainant obtains a temporary restraining order. If a copyright holder can’t get a TRO within a few days, their claim probably doesn’t justify keeping the content down. 

5. Establish a small claims or administrative review process. Right now, the only recourse for a fraudulently targeted party is federal court, which is expensive and slow. Congress could create a streamlined administrative process, something like the Copyright Claims Board established under the CASE Act in 2020, specifically for DMCA disputes. A low-cost, fast-track tribunal where targets of abuse can challenge takedowns and seek damages without hiring expensive litigation counsel would dramatically change the incentive structure.

6. Require platforms to track and act on abuse metrics. Congress could mandate that platforms track takedown accuracy rates by filer and implement escalating consequences, such as slower processing, required human review, and suspension of filing privileges for filers whose notices are frequently challenged or found to be inaccurate.

7. Add asymmetric bonding or fee-shifting for high-volume filers. If you’re filing thousands of takedown notices a month, Congress could require you to post a bond or escrow that gets forfeited if your notices are found to be fraudulent above a certain threshold. This wouldn’t affect legitimate copyright holders like movie studios or record labels whose claims are overwhelmingly valid, but it would make the economics of mass fraudulent filing untenable. Alternatively, mandatory fee-shifting in 512(f) cases where the losing party pays the winner’s legal costs would accomplish something similar.

8. Protect counter-notice filers’ personal information. The current law requires counter-notice filers to provide their name, address, and contact information, which then gets forwarded to the original complainant. For individuals and small businesses being targeted by bad actors, this is a serious problem. You’re essentially required to hand your personal information to the person who’s already attacking you. Congress could allow counter-notices to be filed through a registered agent or under seal, with personal details only disclosed if actual litigation is initiated.

9. Require verified identity for takedowns. Require notice filers to have verified identity with the platform (so Google knows exactly who you are and can hold you accountable), while allowing that identity to remain confidential from the target unless a counter-notice is filed. At that point, both parties should have to identify themselves to each other, because you’re now in a quasi-legal dispute that may be headed to court. And critically, the same standard should apply in both directions. If the counter-notice filer has to reveal their name and address, so does the original complainant.

The frustrating reality is that none of these ideas are novel or particularly controversial from a policy standpoint.

The current state of the DMCA in Congress

On its face, the DMCA was IP law written in 1998 by Howard Coble, a Republican legislator who was nobly trying to protect American creativity. In reality, the law was written by a congressman backed by entertainment industry interests. It was developed to protect big businesses that already have behemoth legal teams to defend their own IP.

Today, there is bipartisan support for DMCA reform, but not all of it is positive for creators. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has championed a Notice and Staydown approach that critics warn would lead to more over-removal of legitimate content. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) co-authored the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law by President Trump in May 2025, which uses a similar notice-and-removal mechanism to compel platforms to remove deepfakes and non-consensual intimate imagery within 48 hours. Representative Sam Liccardo (D-CA), whose district includes Google’s headquarters, has championed AI transparency standards — an approach that could have implications for DMCA abuse as AI enables bad actors to scale fraudulent filings. Finally, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has been one of the most active voices on creator-side copyright reform, but even her efforts stop short of addressing the core problem: Google can ignore infringement, and its negligent DMCA process hands a loaded weapon to fraudsters intent on destroying small creators.

Almost 30 years later, a law that removes the burden of proof from the accuser, imposes no cost on bad actors, and processes accusations faster than any human can respond isn’t a copyright protection system.

Even though Congress has the tools to fix it, they lack the incentive. So the law stays frozen in its 1998 form while the scale of abuse has grown exponentially with the internet. And creators are the ones paying for it. Literally.