I had to take down a post today - updated

I received the following email from my bloghost:

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to "draft" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.

A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_counternotice?product=blogger.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Lumen at https://www.lumendatabase.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Lumen page, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.

 If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

Sincerely, The Blogger Team

Affected URLs: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2014/10/motor-vehicle-services-looks-like-scam.html

I had originally written the post in 2014 to decry what I perceived as a marketing fraud related to an "expired factory warranty" on my car; I reposted the item in April of this year after receiving another similar item in the mail.  I hope the post served its purpose while it was up, because this is a hobby blog, not a business, and I don't have the time or energy to fight this kind of thing, and have therefore taken the post down.  You can't win.

Addendum:  A hat tip to reader J.H. Wagner, who recognized that what happened to me is a standard ploy of using copyright law to force takedowns of negative reviews:

As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam – or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place, but since the site couldn’t verify that its users weren’t actually posting copyrighted material, it would have opened it up to further legal pressure.

In fact, no copyright infringement had occurred at all. Instead, something weirder had happened. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled “Home Improvement Tips and Tricks”. The post, headlined “Buildteam interior designers” was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it, and was signed by a “Douglas Bush” of South Bend, Indiana. The website was registered to someone quite different, though: Muhammed Ashraf, from Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Quite why Douglas Bush or Muhammed Ashraf would be reviewing a builder based in Clapham is not explained in “his” post.

Full details at The Guardian.

Also this, from AgencySpy at AdWeek (more at the link):

There are a number of firms specializing in “reputation maintenance” that engage in this sort of activity in the hope that an editor or legal advisor will do exactly what we did: Take a story down after receiving an official-sounding email complete with vaguely threatening legal jargon because they would rather not deal with it.

There's also a discussion of this tactic at TechDirt(more at the link):

It appears there's still no shortage of quasi-reputation management efforts being deployed in the form of bogus DMCA takedowns issued by bogus "news" websites.

Pissed Consumer uncovered this shady tactic back in April, noting that legitimate-sounding sites like the "Frankfort Herald" and the "Lewisburg Tribune" were issuing takedown notices on complaints posted to the gripe site. These fake news sites tended to be filled with a blend of scraped content and and negative reviews/posts from sites like Pissed Consumer and Ripoff Report copy-pasted in full and backdated to make them appear as if they'd appeared at the bogus sites first.