Bogus DMCA claim from an uninhabited island scrubs Pollen exposé from Google

Gergely Orosz’s 2022 investigation into the collapse of events-tech startup Pollen has been pulled from Google’s search results by a copyright takedown request — one he says is entirely fraudulent. Pollen imploded weeks after announcing a $150M raise: it laid off roughly a third of staff, stopped paying wages, let pension and health contributions lapse, stiffed vendors (Atlassian eventually cut off its Jira), and a CTO-initiated $3.2M double-charge of customers was never reversed. The story was damaging enough to spawn a BBC documentary, and it reflected badly on CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright.

Four years on, someone filed a DMCA notice claiming Orosz’s piece infringed a 1998 New York Post article — two texts that share no common wording. The complaint came from “Ellie Piee,” a profile supposedly based in Bouvet Island, an uninhabited Norwegian territory near Antarctica. Orosz, the sole copyright holder of his own writing, only learned of the takedown after Google had already delisted the page, and has since filed an appeal.

The episode is a clean illustration of how trivially Google’s copyright-removal pipeline can be weaponized for reputation laundering: a fabricated claim, a fake identity in a zero-population jurisdiction, and no apparent penalty for filing falsehoods. Orosz suspects a reputation-management firm acting for parties tied to Pollen, and notes the irony — with lawsuits from unpaid former employees still active in California, the takedown attempt has only renewed his interest in the story. A textbook Streisand effect.