Bogus DMCA notice removed a Pollen exposé from Google search results

Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer, says Google removed one of his articles from its search results after a copyright complaint that could not have come from a legitimate rights holder — because he is the author and copyright owner of the text in question. The article, published in 2022, documented the collapse of events technology company Pollen.

What the original article reported

Orosz's 2022 account described a company that appeared to have built a real business in a low-margin industry, survived the pandemic and announced $150 million in fresh funding in April 2022. Three weeks later, Pollen laid off about 200 people, a third of its staff, while leadership said all was well. Slack was cut off, wages went unpaid, pension contributions went missing and vendors were left unpaid; Atlassian suspended the company's JIRA access on 9 August 2022. On 10 August 2022 Pollen went bankrupt and entered administration.

The story also covered a $3.2 million double charge to customers that was initiated manually by then-CTO Bradley Wright. Reversing it would have been straightforward, but the reversal never happened, customers were not refunded and the incident postmortem was never shared with staff. The BBC later made a documentary about the collapse, "Crashed: $800M Festival Fail".

A takedown filed from an uninhabited island

Four years on, Orosz was notified that Google had de-indexed the article following a copyright infringement claim. He has appealed. Searching the Lumen Database, he found the complaint: it claimed his original reporting was a copy of a New York Post article from the late 1990s titled "Band Leader Hits Winning Chord". Orosz notes the two texts do not share a single sentence, and that the complainant, listed as "Ellie Piee", gave a location of Bouvet Island — an uninhabited Norwegian territory in the South Atlantic.

He writes that he has no information about who filed the claim, but speculates that Pollen, its former CEO Callum Negus-Fancey, cofounder and COO Liam Negus-Fancey or someone else connected to the company may have hired reputation management firms to scrub coverage. Google has not commented in his post.

Litigation is still running

Orosz also notes that lawsuits against Pollen continue. In California, Tayler Ulmer and five other named former employees are pursuing a case on behalf of themselves and "all similarly situated employees", claiming they were laid off without paid wages and benefits and alleging possible fraud. The filing names executives Callum Negus-Fancey, Liam Negus-Fancey and James Ellis as personally liable, and seeks unpaid wages, unpaid severance, restoration of lost 401(k) contributions and a ruling that the named entities and individuals are jointly liable, including successor entities. Orosz says the attempt to silence coverage has only renewed his interest in the case.