DMCA Takedown and counter notice when service provider

Question

There's something I have trouble understanding.

My app is considered a service provider and registered with copyright.gov

Some time ago someone found some copyrighted work and filed a DMCA notice to google to remove my app.

I tried explaining in the counter notice that I'm a service provider, and that I publicly displayed the address and the template DMCA notice that should be sent to us.

Google's response has been so far nothing, just that the request is denied. I'm a bit lost as to what I did wrong and what I should have done.

The app had 500K+ downloads with a very high rating and it's all lost now.

Answer 1

You are not supposed to "explain" anything. See this site:

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-notice-targeting-your-content

What you have to do is to state, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that your material was wrongly removed. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Google (or whoever the host is) doesn't care and shouldn't care about the actual copyright situation, only whether you supplied a counter notice where you state that your material was wrongly removed.

Now Google should reinstate your app (however, since nobody can force them to host your app at all, I suspect they can remove it at any time for any reason), and whoever put in the DMCA claim can then go and sue you for copyright infringement. If they do, you can use as a defence that they could have and should have a DMCA notice to you.

The whole DMCA is about your host, here: Google, to remove itself from any copyright infringement case. By following the rules for a proper notice and proper counter notice, they achieve that. And then the matter is between the complainant and you.