VPN Company Cyberghost Says We Infringed Its Copyright In An Advertisement We Ran For Them A Decade Ago

I rarely log into Facebook these days, but I happened to do so last week and was a bit surprised to see this pop up saying that an advertising post we had put up for the VPN service CyberGhost nearly a decade ago had to be removed:

That’s a notice saying that Facebook had removed a Techdirt post from way back in 2016 (simpler times!) and a button saying “See why?” The link in question was to one of our “Daily Deals” that we run in conjunction with the eCommerce company StackCommerce. They source deals for us and we sell them to our readers via our Daily Deals feature. In this case, it was a deal for a VPN service from CyberGhost.

It seemed very weird that this old post was suddenly removed, so I clicked through to “see why” and was told it was… for copyright infringement?

In the “options,” it says that I can appeal directly to Facebook or I can email the original reporter, who turns out to be CyberGhost themselves:

Yes, that’s right. CyberGhost issued a copyright claim against our post promoting their own VPN service from nearly 10 years ago. It’s hard to fathom what possible copyright we could have violated by literally advertising the service they asked us to advertise.

So, it doesn’t exactly seem worth it to me to email CyberGhost to ask them why they sent a copyright takedown over an offering they did with StackCommerce and where we were advertising their VPN service. I mean, fine, if that post is no longer available on Facebook, so be it. What are they going to say — “Sorry, we didn’t mean to claim copyright on the ad for our own product that we asked you to run”?

But this raises a bigger question — what is CyberGhost’s endgame here? Are they just going around issuing bogus takedowns for ancient posts advertising their service? Do they want to memory hole their own marketing history for some reason? Or was this just an overzealous bot or confused employee clicking the wrong buttons?

Whatever the explanation, it’s yet another example of how widely abused and broken the copyright takedown system is. When companies can blithely claim copyright over content promoting their own products, it shows how little checks there are on false claims.