Copyright Fraud Deployed To Silence Journalists In Equatorial Guinea
from the backdating-and-bullshit dept
The DMCA lends itself to abuse. The intent of the law was to limit copyright infringement on services hosting user-generated content by providing safe harbors for service providers who made good faith efforts to respond to DMCA complaints.
In practice, the law has forced providers to side with complainants and do very little in the way of due diligence when fielding DMCA takedown requests. Bad faith operators — who have little to fear from the law — have recognized the leverage they have and wield it abusively to take down any content they don’t like.
Even if it only works for a little while, it gets the job done. Very few platforms push back against removal requests, allowing those who want content they don’t like buried to heap dirt on the victims at the bottom of their memory holes.
One common tactic deployed by people operating in bad faith (which often includes so-called “reputation management” companies) is creating websites with news-y sounding names to host articles copied, pasted, and artificially backdated to create the illusion the original reporting by journalists is actually copyright infringement.
We’ve covered a lot of this in recent years. This tactic has always been popular but it’s seen a resurgence in recent weeks, thanks to leaked documents released to investigative journalists. And there’s no end in sight. A recent report from the BBC details yet another (temporarily) successful attempt to use copyright as a tool of censorship.
Journalists have been forced to temporarily take down articles critical of powerful oil lobbyists due to the exploitation of US copyright law, according to a new report.
At least five such articles have been subject to fake copyright claims, including one by the respected South African newspaper Mail & Guardian, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
The claims – which falsely assert ownership of the stories – have been made by mystery individuals under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law meant to protect copyright holders.
Just last month, three separate false copyright claims were made against Diario Rombe, an investigative news outlet that focusses on Equatorial Guinea.
The report from OCCRP says the complaints were filed by someone using a fake name and submitted to the newspaper’s hosting service, Linode. The articles were eventually reinstated but not without a long, stupid struggle to prove to Linode that its journalists had actually created the targeted content.
The same thing happened to another journalistic entity in the UK — one that had also covered the unseemly relationship between Gabriel Obiang (Equatorial Guinea’s minister of planning and economic diversification [and the president’s son!]) and attorney NJ Ayuk, who worked as an advisor for the African Energy Chamber while Obiang served as Equatorial Guinea’s oil minister.
Climate Home News, the UK news outlet, had its posts about these two government officials taken down while it attempted to convince its host that the DMCA claims submitted against these articles were bogus.
In both cases, the complainant referenced bogus articles copied, pasted, and backdated at sites created specifically to allow this sort of DMCA-enabled censorship to take place. The BBC article contains screenshots of the (shall we say) re-hosted content used as the basis for these bullshit takedown notices.
To stay on the good side of powerful corporations, other powerful corporations have decided it’s better to shoot first and get asked questions later. As long as DMCA complainants are given preferential treatment, this sort of abuse will continue to happen. And even though the articles were eventually restored to their rightful place, the bad faith operators were able to silence critical reporting about their questionable activities.
Unfortunately, the only way to prevent this from happening is to demand hosting services (and search engines) put their own safe harbor at risk by treating DMCA takedown notices as questionable until proven otherwise. That’s simply not going to happen and terrible people know this. As long as they exist (and they always will), this will be a problem without a solution that works for everyone involved.
Filed Under: abuse, copyrfraud, copyright, copyright abuse, copyright as censorship, dmca, equatorial guinea
Companies: climate home news
Comments on “Copyright Fraud Deployed To Silence Journalists In Equatorial Guinea”
A little disappointing that Linode didn’t do better here.
One piece of advice: don’t try to prove to the provider that you really own the piece or that the claim is bogus. Simply send a DMCA counter-notice as per 17 USC 512(g)(3), and note that per 512(g)(2) the liability shield granted in 512(g)(1) is not available if the provider fails to restore access per the terms of 512(g)(2).
512(g)(2) means that if they demand proof beyond the required contents of the counter-notice you can sue them for damages if they don’t restore access within 14 days, regardless of how you respond to their demand, unless the party who sent the DMCA notice actually files suit (which they won’t do for obvious reasons).
Re:
Meanwhile your article is offline for a couple of weeks, and that usually means the censors objectives have been met because the news has moved on to other things.
Re: Re: Streisanding is your friend in this case:
… unless you can reinvigorate the story with “look what they tried to do to hide the story…”
Re:
Heaping more legal pressure on a provider is a personal band-aid which doesn’t address the root problem: false DMCA claims and the lack of meaningful penalties for filing them. It also further undermines the “safe harbor”, even though your recommendation is nowhere near as bad as filing false DMCA claims. Meanwhile, most people have neither the time nor the energy to get a lawyer and sue providers to reverse a DMCA takedown. As a different AC commented, the minimum change for improving the DMCA would be to make the penalties for false claims worth as much as (if not more than, imo) statutory damages for infringement.
DMCA
if a false DMCA complaint was treated the same as a copyright infringement. $150k per violation! that would go a long way to slapping the shady criminals into not wanting to takedown someone elses work!