Terrible People Are Still Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like
from the shitheels-are-forever dept
Copyright is still high on the list of censorial weapons. When you live in (or target) a country that protects free speech rights and offers intermediaries immunity via Section 230, you quickly surmise there’s a soft target lying between the First Amendment and the CDA.
That soft target is the DMCA. Thanks to plenty of lived-in experience, services serving millions or billions of users have decided it’s far easier to cater to (supposed) copyright holders than protect their other millions (or billions!) of users from abusive DMCA takedown demands.
There’s no immunity when it comes to the DMCA. There’s only the hope that US courts (should they be actually involved) will view good faith efforts to remove infringing content as acceptable preventative efforts.
But terrible people who neither respect the First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act have found exploitable loopholes to disappear content they don’t like. And it’s always the worst people doing this. An entire cottage industry of “reputation management” firms has calcified into a so-called business model that views anything as acceptable until a court starts handing down sanctions.
“Cursory review” is the name of the game. Bullshit is fed to DMCA inboxes in hopes the people overseeing millions (or billions!) of pieces of uploaded content won’t spend too much time vetting takedown requests. When the initial takedown requests fail, bullshit artists (some of them hired!) decide to exploit the public sector.
Bogus litigation involving nonexistent defendants gives bad actors the legal paperwork they need to silence their critics. Bullshit default judgments are handed to bad faith plaintiffs by judges who can’t be bothered to do anything other than scan the docket to ensure at least some filings exist.
At the bottom of this miserable rung are the people who can’t even exploit these massively exploitable holes effectively. The bottom dwellers do what’s absolutely illegal, rather than just legally questionable. They forge court orders to demand takedowns of content they don’t like.
Eugene Volokh of the titular Volokh Conspiracy has plenty of experience with every variety of abusive takedown action listed above. In fact, he’s published an entire paper about these multiple levels of bullshit in the Utah Law Review.
Ironically, it’s that very paper that’s triggered the latest round of bogus takedown demands.
Yesterday, I saw that someone tried to use a different scheme, which I briefly mentioned in the article (pp. 300-01), to try to deindex the Utah Law Review version of my article: They sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice to Google claiming that they owned the copyright in my article, and that the Utah Law Review version was an unauthorized copy of the version that I had posted on my own site:
Welcome to the party, “I Liam.”
But who do you represent? Volokh has some idea(s).
The submitter, therefore, asked Google to “deindex” that page—remove it from Google’s indexes, so that people searching for “mergeworthrx” or “stephen cichy” or “anthony minnuto” (another name mentioned on the page) wouldn’t see it.
So what prompted Google to remove this content that “I Liam” wished to disappear on behalf of his benefactors (presumably “mergeworthrx,” “stephen cichy,” and “anthony minnuto”)?
Well, it was a court order — one that was faked by whoever “I Liam” is:
Except there was no court order. Case No. 13-13548 CA was a completely different case. Celia Ampel, a reporter for the South Florida Daily Business Review, was never sued by MergeworthRX. The file submitted to Google was a forgery.
And definitely not an anomaly:
It was one of over 90 documents submitted to Google (and to other hosting platforms) that I believe to be forgeries.
You can’t blame Google. Google deals with millions of content removal requests a year. It can’t be expected to scour every local court’s docket to ensure the court order it’s presented with is actually legitimate.
So, the bad guys get unearned wins. The only backstop tends to be the people targeted by bogus takedown notices. And they’ve got the fewest tools at their disposal.
Multiple nations all want Google to target different things. Millions of Google users expect Google to provide factual information when they perform searches. In the middle of all this, there’s a multi-billion dollar company that cannot possibly satisfy everyone, no matter how much money it earns. And so we end up with things like these, where the unpaid users are expected to police the internet to push back against bogus takedowns.
But that’s not on Google. It’s on the people who willfully abuse the system for their own gain. This is on people like Stephen Cichy and Anthony Minnuto who — along with MergeworthRX — previously used a fraudulent court order to get Google to delist critical content about them.
The problem is too big to solve. Only those hit with bogus takedown demands are able to bring these matters to the attention of the public. Google has to do what it does because it’s simply impossible to moderate content perfectly, much less at the scale Google deals with. Unfortunately, this means the good people are expected to police the bad guys using inadequate tools and limited funds. The bad guys know this and that’s why they know to head to the biggest tech shop in town and wave legal-looking paperwork around until the internet believes they’ve done no wrong.
This won’t always work and the longer these people engage in the same tired tactics, the less likely they are to work the next time around. The internet is forever. Opportunists like Stephen Cichy and Anthony Minnuto and “I Liam” are only a blink of an eye. At the end of the day, they’re still terrible people who engage in fraud to get what they want. The rest of us are at least self-assured and self-aware enough to recognize our reputations are earned.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, eugene volokh, forged court orders, suppressing speech
Comments on “Terrible People Are Still Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like”
When the authorities
The parents,
The teachers,
The preachers,
The judges,
The lawyers,
The police,
Are all ignorant, on purpose, because it’s not their place, and they will be punished, unless they do as they’re told.
Fraud is working. No reason to fix what isn’t broken…
/S
//note big-time sarcasm//
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Interesting. But could you explain how it is relevant to the post at hand?
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If I had to guess, the OP is suggesting that a root cause of DMCA-based abuse and fraud is a culture of blind obedience and ignorance that we’ve created. Problematic, fraudulent DMCA notices get passed on and accepted because we’re conditioned to never question authority and give orders a constant benefit of the doubt. It was only a matter of time before a confidence trickster waltzed in to take advantage of that.
Of course, it’s not the only reason. But I feel that it’s why judges have given copyright holders a blank check to do whatever they wanted, until Prenda Law came along and forced them to ask some very uncomfortable questions about their standards of evidence and end goals.
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Important to note that it was the DMCA itself which created that culture of blind obedience when it came to taking shit offline.
In practice as soon as the topic is copyright the DMCA reverses burden of proof*, meaning that unless you want to risk your safe harbor the **only way for any platform to act is to treat every takedown request as legally valid without question but demand actual proof when the uploader wants to reinstate or re-monetize their content.
Guilty until proven innocent is the legal logic as soon as the DMCA gets involved.
And this is of course, by design. Not only does it mean copyright trolls need no further proof than what can be produced by an automated trawler/mass-mailer but anyone trying to publish outside of major publishers gets hit hard with this – as illustrated by the amount of time youtube channel owners need to waste on a daily basis fending off automated takedown requests generated by one bot trawler or another.
The problem?
If any company is equipped to have the sort of data collecting and categorising capacity for associating docket numbers with actual case law, it is Google.
So they cannot really put this in the “somebody else’s problem” drawer. If they would be unfairly burdened by having to cater to this nonsense, there is nobody that would be unfairly burdened less. So, like it or not, it falls to them to make their case to lawmakers and get them to understand the inherent problem and arrive at a financially and legally better sustainable solution than “Google needs to fix what isn’t Google’s fault”.
Yes, they are uniquely positioned to help with devising technical tools that could become part of a solution that can be billed to those responsible for the problem.
But that does not make them responsible.
Re: Engineering the Law with software
There are plenty of attorneys that can program. Very few of them can architect a solution of more than possibly a few hundred servers.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. I am saying I’m not one that could (I’m not an attorney for example and I didn’t stay at a Holliday Inn last night), and I don’t think there are too many that can, since it would be limited to American jurisprudence. Alphabet’s strength is that they can draw from all over the world. That isn’t operative in this situation.
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Problem is, for this issue to be addressed at all, Google would have to lobby in order to get several key provisions of the DMCA overturned or seriously altered. That’s the law which reverses burden of proof in practice and ensures that any online platform needs to treat every takedown request as legitimate without proof or questions asked, lest they risk their safe harbor.
Meanwhile anyone having their content taken down due to false claim only gets to reinstate that content by delivering actual evidence.
Google may have a lot of money but the amount they’d have to spend in lobbying and legal fees to get the DMCA brought in line with fundamental principles of law isn’t going to be peanuts even for them.
DMCA – the crypto of law.
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The center of the venn diagram:
How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to verify whether a case number is a real case and is about your whatever in question?
If a claim is made, shouldn’t a bit of evidence be provided?
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It depends on the court. Some courts make it easy. Some make it difficult. Some make it nearly impossible. Really every court document could be online, searchable, linkable, and downloadable, but that would take some amount of money, and some people don’t like the idea of public documents being available to the public.
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Joke: If PACER were constructed to sane software practice, this would be trivial.
Seriously: If only checking the case number, it “shouldn’t” be very difficult to check that the case number is a valid one. Checking the context of the case and citation would involve “fuzzy search”. When learning engineering (hardware as it happens at the time) I was required to take a few basic law classes. My introduction to Black’s dictionary forever changed my outlook on law to match that of Dickens.
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass — a idiot.”
Computers suck at actually understanding anything. The developed responses mimic thought, and thus lull the unwary into assuming an intelligence that simply isn’t there. And never more so with the baby steps AI is taking at the moment. Add in the twists and turns and rabbit holes in the law I see as a simple layman, and whoa boy! We in for da ride!
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Wrong question. You should ask how much would it cost to hire enough competent people to do basic research on everyone of thousands of requests and notifications received every day.
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Oh idk … I thought the burden should be upon those with the accusations.
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Should be but isn’t unfortunately, when it comes to copyright the law is hilariously one-sided in favor of those making the accusations, with all the penalties on the other side.
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You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, for decades copyright enforcers and interests have convinced judges that it isn’t necessary. It’s not even necessary for the evidence to be accurate, so long as they can find a body to hack a pound of flesh from.
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“If a claim is made, shouldn’t a bit of evidence be provided?”
Under normal law, yes.
Under the DMCA, in practice, no.
Problem there is the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. Due to how it’s worded any online platform needs to err on the sight of utmost caution – because they risk losing safe harbor if they refuse as much as a single takedown request which turns out to be valid.
When, courtesy of bots, Youtube alone receives 4 million takedown requests daily it’s obvious no one has the resources to investigate or fact-check even a thousandth of them beyond what a programmed algorithm can produce. And there is literally no burden of proof required – or sanctions possible unless it can be proven that a given takedown has been sent in bad faith. Which, ironically, is easier to do when the takedown has, as in the OP, been manually generated.
Re: Re: When you can just blame the bot and escape any penalties they don't exist
The second a court accepting bot generated and sent DMCA notices as valid was the second the idea that that there is any risk of penalties for sending bogus ones went right out the window.
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This is crap and I’m not happy theses two what about taking without my consent 215billion and donated it to the Russian government and why are they on every bank account I have isnt that enough proof theyve already been convicted down in california for idenitity fruad this year and we’re found guilty why are they using my name on all of what they own they just changed the names to my name John gerard Iannielli just 4 months ago after the court hearing s on idenitity fraud
I’m probably tilting at windmills here, but could we please stop using ‘disappear” this way? There are many language constructions that work as well, or better, than that single word-
“..court orders to hide content..”
“..court orders cause content to disappear”
etc.
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Better call Sancho! (Panza)
Games and games on games
There are so many words for this happening, based on WHO is doing it.
The real Problem is enforcement. HOW to track back the problem and figure out Who is who.
I still think a collective location of ALL ownership of ????, would be a wonderful business.
And Just a Q:.
HOW are things in court that are supposed to be Public, have a DMCA?
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I think it was intended to be sarcastic, however, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and fire codes are frequent offenders in that the laws incorporate them, but only by reference, which isn’t included in the published law.
But I’m not an attorney, I’m just a computer dweeb. I should likely let a real lawyer answer this.
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The solution to this censorship is simple
Abolish copyright.
Of course, the greedy fascist USA would never do that. Seems like the US Constitution is irrelevant when it comes to US profits.
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How’s Pooh Bear doing? Still ripping off the people of China?
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You mean, other than almost first striking Taiwan with nukes?
Gee if only there were penalties for bogus claims.
Gee if only the public had access to all of the court records like is required by law and shit.
Gee if only they’d stop flipping out over tiktok and deal with actual problems.
But that’s not on Google. It’s on the people who willfully abuse the system for their own gain. This is on people like Stephen Cichy and Anthony Minnuto who — along with MergeworthRX — previously used a fraudulent court order to get Google to delist critical content about them.
Tried to post a comment yesterday with a code block for the broken html and paragraph above. Still broken.