Technology

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.

I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.

There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.

Enter CyberGhost.

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.

For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.

At the risk of sounding like a shill, Mullvad is the answer.