The Syla Pravdy Centre for Investigative Journalism has received eight dubious copyright infringement notices from Google in 2026. The team has received 26 such complaints via email since 2024.
Syla Pravdy considers such notices to be frivolous and views them as an attempt to disrupt their work, because the content their journalists create is original and exclusive, Syla Pravdy director Yuriy Horbach reports to Maya Holub, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Volyn oblast.
“I believe that this is an attempt to harm the media outlet by someone who is very bothered by our work,” he said.
Horbach explained that his team received four to five copyright complaints monthly. They have already received 8 such notices from Google since the New Year. For instance, for their January 2026 reporting on a then-upcoming corruption trial against a judge and for a 2020 article about another judge’s performance review.
“We received five [notices] in November, five in December, four in January and four in February. The mechanic is the same: disjointed words or phrases from articles the copyright for which is beyond complaint, one would think… Such as, ‘Abuse in Volyn families: numbers, stories, lawyer’s comments’, ‘BMW X5 and a 385 square meter house’, ‘Laska’, ‘A priest that gave into temptation’, and so forth,” he said.
He added that the team had received no takedown notices about any of the articles on their website.
According to Horbach, the 26 notices concerned articles seemingly picked at random and no connection between them could immediately be found. Some complaints listed entire tags or sections of the website as allegeldy infringing.
In February 2026, the team received a series of notices regarding articles released in 2018–2021.
Yuriy Horbach said that the notices seemed to have no negative impact on their website. Still, the team worries that the increasing number of such complaints may in time damage their search engine indexation.
Horbach said they had tried to appeal one of the notices, but the reply they received was nonsensical. The team is working to figure out what to do next.
As IMI reported, Google took down several articles by the Ukrainian news website Investigative Journalism Centre due to complaints by fake accounts.