Facebook has reinstated a number of sites' Facebook pages that were taken down due to bogus copyright claims this week. The company issued an apology for the inconvenience and says that DMCA notice abuse is an issue that Facebook takes seriously, but serious questions still remain about the effectiveness of Facebook's process for dealing with complaints.

"We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices. This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident," Facebook spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Ars on Thursday evening.

"Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures."

What the heck happened?

Ars found out about Facebook's DMCA takedown system the hard way on Wednesday evening when our Facebook page (now back up) mysteriously disappeared from Facebook's system. It turns out that a copyright infringement notice was filed against us—as well as a number of other sites, including Neowin and Redmond Pie—through Facebook, resulting in the automatic disappearance of our entire Facebook page and all the content on it. We, like many other news sites and blogs, make use of Facebook to share our own content and interact with readers, and it's one of our most popular referrers back to the site. The disappearance of our page and some 40,000 fans, with scant explanation and no clear way to appeal, was disconcerting to say the least.

After we reported on the takedown, stories began flooding in from individuals who had suffered a similar fate. A reader by the name of Mark Weikert told one of the most heartbreaking stories—he's a professional photographer who used Facebook to get exposure and increase the reach of his business, which was proving to be an effective tactic until his account was disabled due to an abusive claim. "And thus, my fan page was automatically assigned to some random 'fan' of the page. Of course they renamed it and stole all of my fans," Weikert told us via e-mail. "When contacting Facebook to try and get my main account reinstated and my fan page back, (7 total e-mails spanning a 2 week time) I got no response at all. My network had been crushed and I had to start from scratch."

Another reader and musician named Hassan from ApniISP, a popular site dedicated to Indian and Pakistani music, wrote in to tell us that his Facebook page with 44,000+ fans (more than Ars!) was disabled at the beginning of March due to a fake copyright complaint. "I am still fighting for my rights and trying to get it back," Hassan told us, but Facebook apparently told him to contact the complaining party to get the issue resolved. "The e-mail address they have provided me is not even working now," he said, adding that it bounces back all his e-mails. Hassan's issue remains unresolved.

Malicious individuals sure have an easy time taking down some popular Facebook fan pages, but sometimes it goes further than the lulz. ReadWriteWeb recounted a story from Hamad Dar's Rewriting Technology site, who had its Facebook page taken down over fake copyright claims, only to be threatened later with extortion by the party who submitted the claim. "He wanted me to pay him...to get the page back," Dar said.

Facebook's problematic reactions

Attorneys Ars spoke with told us that Facebook seems to handle the DMCA takedown process in accordance with US law—for the most part. There are a number of things Facebook needs to fix, however. Let's start with the vague notifications and slow responses: in nearly all cases, Facebook did not specify which content was supposedly infringing before taking down the entire page. According to Condé Nast's crack legal team, a proper DMCA takedown is supposed to specify the infringing material, and that content is supposed to be removed immediately until a counterclaim is filed. Facebook did not do this—instead, it claimed "Ars Technica" was the infringing material, and subsequently removed our entire page.

Facebook also did not tell us who filed the claim until moments before the publication of this article—not technically required for the DMCA process, but providing the name of the claimant is industry-wide best practice. So, Ars has only within the past couple of hours found out who filed the bogus complaint against us, and we still don't know why or for which content. (We're hoping to follow up with this person, assuming he's real, in order to find out his motivation for filing the takedown notice.)

Several other sites, such as Neowin, did manage to get the contact information for the person who allegedly filed their complaints, but in Neowin's case, that contact information ended up being falsified. This is a problem, because in some cases, Facebook has been telling "victims" that they must resolve the case with their complainant in order to get their Facebook pages back. How is someone supposed to resolve the issue if the person who filed the complaint listed fake contact info?

No e-mail verification

There's nothing in the DMCA that says Facebook absolutely must confirm the identity of the party filing the complaint. However, the way Facebook handles some of its complaints—by putting the victim in touch with the complainant—means that its current system is broken. How so? Because anybody could file a complaint against any site for any reason, and do so with fake contact info.

Some basic e-mail validation would help cut down abusive complaints significantly. All it would take would be an e-mail sent to the address in question with a verification link to complete the DMCA claim, similar to what many sites do when you register a new account. If the e-mail address is nonexistent, the verification would bounce and the claim could be put into manual review for legitimacy. If the e-mail address belongs to someone else, that party could ignore the message altogether or confirm that it wasn't them who submitted it, allowing Facebook to flag the claim as incomplete or fake. If it's real and the e-mail recipient confirms that he or she submitted the claim, Facebook could move forward with a takedown of the content in question.

Of course, e-mail validation like this won't help people like Hamard Dar, whose page was taken down by an extortionist. It would, however, cut down on what seems like a significant problem with anonymous and abusive DMCA takedown notices. We continue to hear stories about this happening to "little" and big guys alike, but Facebook would not confirm to us whether this is truly a common problem or not.

What else can be done?

Facebook also refused to answer questions about how often it gets hit with bogus claims, what happens internally when a complaint comes in, if a real person reviews counterclaims sent to Facebook's intellectual property team, and how long the process normally takes to get a Facebook page back up. (Our situation lasted about 24 hours from start to finish, but it was only resolved that quickly with the help of a major PR blast on our part and lots of Internet coverage.)

Those questions all remain unanswered, though we are told that Facebook is reviewing its current practices after this week's events and will consider changes as appropriate.

Don't go thinking that the problem is gone, either. On Friday morning, a plethora of political groups found their Facebook pages disabled, though none have confirmed to Ars yet as to whether they have any further details on the takedowns.

Facebook also declined to give us recommendations on how to avoid this situation in the future, or at the very least, how to better handle it to ensure incorrectly taken-down content is restored quickly. So until Facebook manages to tweak its policies—if that ever happens—Facebook page admins will continue to be faced with frustrating, vague, and fake DMCA takedowns sent through Facebook's system. We plan to continue pressing Facebook on this issue, but in the meantime, keep sending in your horror stories. We're sure there are plenty more out there.

Update 4/30/2011: Hamad Dar and Redmond Pie's Taimur Asad both contacted us directly on Friday evening to help clarify some points we weren't clear on with this situation thanks to Facebook's unwillingness to answer our questions. There are two types of takedowns: content takedowns (copyright) and entire page takedowns (intellectual property/brand ownership), and they depend entirely on what the complaining party claims is his or her work. The complaining party can, in fact, claim that an entire site belongs to them—this is apparently what happened to us and a number of other sites, leading to the removal of our entire pages.

Asad suggests that Facebook implement some sort of identity validation procedure when you start new Facebook Pages, similar to Twitter's verification system for celebrities and important parties. This would help cut down on incidents of fake ownership claims such as the ones that hit us this week.