A copyright complaint sent to Google on September 15, 2026 made a specific factual claim about who wrote what first, and it was wrong in the direction that mattered.
According to the Lumen record, a sender identified as Steven Nicholas told Google that the copyrighted content was his original written content, which he created and published first on his website, and that the reported URL had reproduced it without authorization. The notice named a Tumblr page as the original and HannahHowell.com as the infringer. Google acted on it, as the statute obliges it to, and the article came out of search.
The article was the November 2025 investigation into Michael Grochowski and the collapse of a Victorian land banking operation that took $24 million from investors. It was published on November 1, 2025. The complaint asserting that someone else had written it first arrived ten and a half months later.
On September 17, 2026, under case reference 3-9041000041073, Google reversed itself. Its notice states that the law requires it to act expeditiously on removal requests, that on review it determined that the request was invalid, and that it had restored access globally to the URL. That finding came from the company that received the complaint, not from the publication that lost the traffic.
A Ten Month Gap and a Spanish-Language Blog
The Tumblr page named as the source sits on an account posting under the handle elpuntoinformativo24. It is not linked here, for reasons the rest of this report makes obvious.
What the complaint asked Google to believe is that an account of that description published a detailed investigation into an Australian land banking collapse, and that a publication with a documented archive of financial fraud reporting then took it. The alternative explanation requires nothing unusual at all: that the article was copied after publication, and that the copy was presented to Google as the source.
Google’s reinstatement does not formally adjudicate which page came first. It establishes something narrower and still damaging to the complaint. A removal request is invalid when the representation supporting it does not hold, and the representation here was authorship.
What Lumen Calls the Back-Dated Article Technique
This is a named method with a measured scale.
In April 2022, Berkman Klein Center research fellow Shreya Tewari published findings on what Lumen calls the back-dated article technique. A copier takes a genuine article, republishes it elsewhere, manipulates the apparent date so the copy looks older, then files a takedown notice claiming the genuine article is the infringement.
Tewari found more than 33,000 such notices in the Lumen database, sent by roughly 30 notice senders and targeting some 550 domains, mostly news sites. A single fabricated domain, today-news.press, served as the claimed original across the set. The material targeted concerned allegations of misconduct and corruption against a recurring group of people.
Her method is the part worth noting. She used the Wayback Machine to check whether the pages claimed as originals existed before the articles they accused. That is the test that settles this class of dispute, and it is available to anyone.
Tumblr Has Been Used This Way Before
The closer precedent involves the same platform.
In January 2024, Pakistan Today reported that businessman Gaurav Srivastava had responded to critical coverage by copying the work to a new anonymous blog with no post history, often on Tumblr or Medium, backdating the post and filing a DMCA complaint with Google. The target included Project Brazen, the investigative outlet run by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright.
Automattic, Tumblr’s parent, did not treat this as a dispute between two authors. It assessed that the blogs had been set up to raise fake DMCA claims by people linked to Srivastava and removed them for violating its community guidelines. The company said it has a zero tolerance policy for blogs using its services to abuse the DMCA, and would keep manually investigating reports of Tumblr blogs used to publish content named in fraudulent takedown notices.
The shape is identical. Investigation published, article copied to a low history blog, copy presented to Google as the source, original delisted.
What the Record Does Not Establish
Several things remain open, and the piece is stronger for saying so.
Nothing reviewed here establishes who created the Tumblr account, or whether the person who created it and the person who filed the complaint are the same. Nothing establishes that any reputation management firm was engaged, or that anyone named in the Grochowski investigation knew the complaint was being made. The Lumen record shows a sender name and a date. It does not show a client.
Nor has an archival comparison of the two pages been published. Google’s finding of invalidity is a conclusion by the recipient of the notice, reached on whatever it examined, and it is not the same as a court ruling on authorship.
Those gaps are why this report names a method rather than a culprit. The method is documented, the complaint fits it, and the outcome is on the record.
Conclusion
A DMCA notice carries a statement made under penalty of perjury. The one filed on September 15 asserted authorship of an investigation published ten months earlier by someone else, and Google found the request invalid and put the article back.
The system worked here, slowly, and only because the article’s publisher contested it. That is the part that should trouble anyone who publishes. Removal is fast and automatic because the statute demands speed, and restoration is slow and discretionary because it requires someone to notice, object and wait. A publisher who missed the notice, or lacked the time to fight it, would simply have lost the article.
Nearly 34,000 notices already used this method against 550 domains before anyone counted them. The Grochowski complaint is one more, and it failed only after the damage window had already closed.
Disclosure: this report concerns a takedown complaint filed against HannahHowell.com, the publication on which it appears. The complaint details are drawn from the Lumen Database record and Google’s notice of reinstatement. The Lumen research and the Srivastava matter are drawn from the public record and linked above.
