Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Not only are false DMCA claims perjury charges, iirc they’re also a civil claim of their own and have statutory damages and nearly automatic recovery of legal fees on winning the case. Still a high bar though because you must prove they knowingly misrepresented the facts.