Someone Calling Themselves Elon Musk Has Issued Google With Takedown Notices

Someone using Elon Musk’s name and likely impersonating him has asked Google to remove hundreds of links for alleged copyright violations. 

According to TorrentFreak(Opens in a new window), the requests ask the search engine to remove listings on various online stores for T-Shirts with memes that the billionaire and Twitter CEO shared online. One request takes aim at an exclusive design for the official Tesla AI Day T-shirt(Opens in a new window). 

One of the DMCA requests, listed here(Opens in a new window), reads: “The following websites have stolen my copyright and they have no right to sell them, please remove the following links from search results.” The request alleged that 15 separate sites selling Musk emblazoned merch infringed copyright by printing and selling t-shirts of a meme(Opens in a new window) the Tesla billionaire posted of him throwing the peace sign in front of a gravestone titled ‘bots.’ 

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

It’s highly unlikely that Elon Musk himself is filing these DMCA requests, as the vast majority of the meme formats flagged in the requests aren’t original creations of Elon Musk, like, for example, the Lego Doctor meme(Opens in a new window) which Musk altered to read “It’s dangerous to believe anything blindly.”

According to the National Law Review(Opens in a new window), memes can generally only be profited from by  the original creator of the format, or the “owners of the media used in the underlying meme.” In every claim, the copyright claim sender uses Musk’s tweets as proof of copyright, which anyone could do, and is likely not enough evidence. 

The copyright claims become harder to believe given one notice appears to be filed from Turkey and is completely in Turkish(Opens in a new window).

As Gizmodo notes(Opens in a new window), submitting a copyright complaint to Google doesn’t exactly require hard-to-find information. For example, no verification of identity is necessary; all that’s needed is a name, email address, and digital signature. 

In a statement to Gizmodo, Adam Holland from copyright database Lumen, said they were “paying a lot of attention internally to the broader phenomenon of possibly fraudulent DMCAs and other takedowns.”