Recently artist and actor David Choe made headlines by citing alleged copyright violations to scrub the internet — including journalists’ social media accounts — of clips from a 2014 podcast where he seemingly admitted raping a masseuse. He later claimed that he made up the story for shock value and said it should be taken as performance art.
The incident exemplifies the frequent abuse of copyright law to silence the press. It also previews how public figures could abuse defamation law to do the same if Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which shields platforms from liability for defamatory posts by users — is either repealed or recklessly reformed.
Choe’s copyright claims are baseless for a number of reasons, first and foremost that it’s a “fair use” of copyrighted material to post and comment on excerpts of newsworthy footage of public figures. Recordings of alleged admissions of rape by a celebrity (Choe currently stars in the Netflix show “Beef”) are certainly newsworthy, regardless of how Choe spins his remarks. In fact, his explanation makes the recording even more central to the story because the public needs to hear, not just read, what he said to decide whether they believe he was being serious.
But Choe is far from the first to use copyright law to try to remove unflattering news stories from the internet. Earlier this year The Washington Post reported on a shadowy “reputation management” firm that specializes in sending frivolous copyright takedown notices to remove stories about its clients. It reported that from 2015-2021 the firm, Eliminalia, sent “thousands of bogus copyright infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had been published elsewhere and stolen.”
And the problem extends beyond the United States. The BBC reported on oil lobbyists and former government officials in Equatorial Guinea using U.S. copyright law to force takedowns of critical news articles published by South African news outlets. There are countless other examples, like when Stevin John, who plays children’s TV star Blippi, tried to remove BuzzFeed’s reporting of a video that parents might find difficult to reconcile with his wholesome image.
The law enabling these censorship efforts is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It gives internet platforms immunity for user-posted copyright violations of which they don’t have “actual knowledge.” That immunity is necessary — otherwise it would be impossible for platforms to monitor millions of user posts for infringement.
But copyright holders can give platforms actual knowledge by filing a takedown request. Platforms that don’t comply risk liability, and they usually aren’t eager to stick their necks out for alleged infringers. There are procedures to challenge takedown requests and restore removed content, but even temporary takedowns are costly to journalists because news cycles move fast. And journalists might not have the time or the legal knowledge needed to file challenges — especially independent journalists and international journalists unfamiliar with US law.
Abuse of the DMCA is problematic in its own right but it also provides a preview of how online journalism might look without Section 230, the law that immunizes platforms from, among other things, defamatory content posted by users. It was relatively uncontroversial until recent years but now is the subject of bipartisan calls for reform as well as pending Supreme Court cases.
If it’s repealed, or if a knowledge-based standard similar to the DMCA is added (as some legislators and commentators have suggested), would platforms risk liability by keeping a post online after someone claims it defamed them? Of course not. They have no stake in individual posts and no interest in mediating defamation disputes. They’d err on the side of censorship.
And if platforms did attempt to police defamation, doing so would be even more inefficient and error-prone than policing copyright violations. While copyright violations can, at least sometimes, be self-evident, figuring out whether an allegedly defamatory statement is false (not to mention all the other gray areas in defamation law) is a fact-intensive inquiry that internet platforms are not qualified to undertake. A lot of judges can’t even get it right.
People who would like to know whether the star of the TV show they’re watching might be an admitted rapist, or about misconduct by crooked lobbyists and politicians, should oppose not only abuse of the DMCA’s procedures but also proposals to open the floodgates to similarly frivolous defamation takedown requests. We’re not saying Section 230 should be reformed at all (it shouldn’t) but, if it is, any reforms need to take into account the risk of enabling censorship of important news by people like Choe.
Seth Stern is Director of Advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation where this article was originally posted.
There’s that old saying: the coverup is always worse than the crime. There appears to be something of a corollary to that: the freak-out over a leak is always worse than the leak itself. Let’s call that Geigner’s Law, because why the hell not?
You should recall that Nintendo has been in full freak-out mode over the past few weeks as a result of its Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom title leaking early. Even before the leak, Nintendo went after a bunch of YouTubers via DMCA notices, all because those YouTubers were showing other Zelda titles incorporating mods into the gameplay. After the leak, Nintendo decided the best course of action was to sic its legal teams on all kinds of tools and content that had anything even tangentially to do with Switch emulation, even if those tools could be used for non-infringing purposes.
But none of that represents Geigner’s Law, really. For that you need to witness the mayhem Nintendo has introduced by improperly DMCAing all kinds of content that ultimately redounds to sanctioned Nintendo content.
Ever since copies of Tears of the Kingdom leaked early and started spreading online due to piracy, Nintendo has been in a frenzy, removing social media channels and Discord servers promoting leaked footage and secrets from the game. At first slow to react, the company now appears to be hitting anything that remotely looks like a leak with a takedown notice.
“lol my Twitch just got suspended mid-stream because I was reacting to @SkillUpYT’s Zelda preview video,” [Alanah] Pearce tweeted on May 8. She was in the middle of streaming footage from the YouTuber SkilUp’s Nintendo-sanctioned preview of Tears of the Kingdom when her channel was taken offline due to a copyright strike by the company. “Absolute banger of a week this week tbh,” she wrote.
The original video was all aces as far as Nintendo was concerned, but a reaction video to that same content somehow was worthy of a DMCA takedown notice? Super cool stuff. Pearce is a former games journalist and writer for IGN, among other things, so exactly the right person to piss off with a DMCA notice issued in error.
But hey, copyright enforcement is hard and one-off errors happen, amirite? Surely this couldn’t be something that Nintendo would screw up multiple times… oh wait:
Nintendo YouTuber Austin John Plays shared a tweet with a screenshot from one of IGN’s previews that was also seemingly removed at the company’s request. “I received a DCMA takedown of my tweet from anti-piracy Nintendo of Japan for my tweet about IGN’s video and the word [autobuild],” he wrote on May 8. “They took mine down but haven’t [done] anything about IGN’s 1.2M video.”
Okay, fine, it happened twice. But even that is understandable, right? Austin John Plays may have tweeted an IGN preview screenshot, but something about the tweet must have set off the DMCA alarm bots and caused them to issue a takedown notice. Who the hell knows who this YouTuber even is, right? Not the folks at Nintendo! They wouldn’t issue takedowns haphazardly against entities Nintendo would know for sure are legit distributors of sanctioned Nintendo content, right? Right!?!?
Nintendo even accidentally hit itself with a takedown notice. Yesterday, a tweet by the official Zelda Twitter account in Japan temporarily had a “media not displayed” error after a screenshot from the game was removed “in response to a report from the copyright holder.” “How the hell do you copyright claim yourself,” one commenter responded.
At this point, we may need to crowdsource some kind of wellness check on Nintendo. The company appears to be so completely spun out of control over the leak of a game a week or so before its official release that it’s flailing about, causing all kinds of collateral damage, and even engaging in some unintentional self-harm.
Nintendo… buddies… just take a deep breath and relax, would you? The whole Geigner’s Law thing could end right here. I don’t actually want it to become a thing anyway, but you’re not helping.
Searching out stories we have done on intellectual property conflicts surrounding the Pokémon franchise will give you no shortage of results. Part of that is that there is simply a ton of content out there: books, cards, video games, animated TV shows, movies, and mobile games. It is also the case that there are a ton of rightsholders to all of these different content categories and many of them are quite aggressive when it comes to intellectual property. I mean, Nintendo’s involved, so how could it be otherwise?
But like I said, Nintendo isn’t alone on this. ShoPro is the publishing house for the Pokémon animated series. ShoPro is also at the center of a copyright strike blitz that has caught up a whole bunch of YouTubers engaging in very clear fair use of stills from the anime in order to discuss episodes.
As explained in a Twitter post by Pokeferlax, YouTubers using still images from the Pokémon anime have found themselves hit with a sudden barrage of copyright strikes. This has resulted in the removal of their content from the platform.
While YouTube responded to that tweet stating that it would look into the issue, Pokeferlax’s YouTube channel has basically had all of its content removed as of the time of this writing. Other YouTubers have also chimed in stating that they’re dealing with similar copyright strike issues.
Now, what is important to keep in mind when it comes to the Pokémon community and the franchise’s popularity is that it thrives on the exact kind of commentary content these YouTubers are engaged in. Be it for the games or the shows, the Pokémon fanbase is a rabid one and part of the reason for that is all of the engagement the community has with one another.
In other words, ShoPro’s actions are harmful to its own product. Or, certainly more harmful than the use of some still images of the show in a YouTube video.
Fans in the comments are outraged, encouraging those affected to attempt contacting ShoPro for an explanation. The accounts experiencing strikes repeatedly state that they are not in violation of YouTube’s Fair Use requirements, but three strikes result in the complete removal of the offending account. Because of this, many content creators are at risk of losing years worth of work.
Additionally, Twitter and YouTuber user, CoreySpikeChase, has made a video in response to the copyright strikes against Pokemon Anime accounts, stating, “ShoPro, YOU Are Hurting Your Fans & Community! STOP THIS NOW!”
Perhaps ShoPro will get the hint and stop cutting off their nose to spite their face. After all, I have heard that actually being human and treating your biggest fans well is, ahem, super effective.
It was a couple of weeks back when we highlighted the story of how one game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, was suffering as the victim of very clear DMCA abuse. If you don’t recall the post, you can get all the details in the link. The short version of it is: a fan of the game and member of the game’s community wrote a guide for making the game more realistic, the publisher liked it so much that they wanted to incorporate some of it into a new “realistic” game mode they were already creating, they offered to give him credit after the game mode was released, and then everything went sideways.
This community member, who the publisher claims is a lawyer, began DMCAing everything about the game, from the website for the game to the game listing on Steam. And… it all worked! The sites went down. The game got delisted from Steam. The studio’s YouTube videos for the game got taken down. All fraudulent, none of it legit. That was middle February.
We are pleased to announce that our game is now back in the store! We thank you for your patience, support and understanding as we navigated this tricky situation.
We want to apologize to those who were looking to purchase the game and were unable to. We realize that we underestimated the situation, and it quickly escalated to a point that posed a threat to our game. We greatly wish that this had not been the case.
But we are now back on track and you can fully enjoy the game! We are excited to get back fully to the development and put this matter behind us.
How many potential sales were lost due to this whole episode? It’s impossible to say. How much reputational damage was done due to it? Also impossible to say. But the answer to both of those questions is absolutely not zero, that much is sure.
And more to the point, this highlights that the system is freaking broken. For a game to be disappeared for 3 weeks as a result of one person’s ability to take advantage of the DMCA takedown process shows the flaw in the system. It’s way, way too open for this kind of abuse. The sites are too quick to comply with takedowns, clearly. The online stores likewise.
But that is how the system currently works, unfortunately. And nobody seems all that keen on fixing it. So instead you get a publisher apologizing to its customers for being the victim.
On Monday, I saw Elon Musk tweet the following, and initially thought that he might have actually made a good policy decision for once, and planned to write up something about Elon doing something right (contrary to the opinion of some, I’m happy to give him credit when it’s due):
Punching back against DMCA abusers is a good policy (and one that the old Twitter was willing to go to court over — though very early Twitter was less good about it). So, in theory, suspending accounts of those who engage in “repeated, egregious weaponization” of the DMCA seems like a good policy and Musk should be given kudos if that’s how the policy is actually put into operation.
Though, the actual details here are kind of a mess, and it’s possible that instead of putting in place a good policy, Musk might have (instead!) opened up Twitter to potentially massive liability.
This came about over a dispute between two Twitter users, but the details are now gone, as Twitter suspended one account, and it appears the other account deleted all the tweets about this dispute (though I’ve been able to dig up a few screenshots).
One account, @Rainmaker1973, is one of thousands of aggregator accounts that basically find other people’s content and post a constant stream of it to their feed. Rainmaker has 1 million followers, so is a pretty large account. Looking over Rainmaker’s feed, you can see that the account links to source material (through tracked buff.ly links). When it’s posting videos, it appears to embed the original video, rather than re-uploading it, though the way Twitter handles that is sometimes a little confusing. It just puts a little “from @OriginalAccount” in small letters underneath the video, with a link to that account’s profile page, but not to the tweet where the original video was. I’ve never quite understood why Twitter handles video embeds this way, but it does. Here’s one example, with the Twitter-appended attribution highlighted:
For photos, that’s not how it works. You basically have to reuse the photos (and if they’re hosted somewhere else, upload them to Twitter). That’s what the Rainmaker account did here, with a photo that originated on Facebook:
Is that infringing? Eh… I’d say that the Rainmaker account has pretty strong fair use claims much of the time. The account also appears to lean towards public domain images (such as from NASA) and some Creative Commons-licensed images. But fair use is always fact-specific, so it’s difficult to say if none of the accounts tweets might violate copyright law.
What appears to have happened, based on what many others have written, is that the Rainmaker account posted a video from another account, @NightLights_AM, that specialized in images and videos of the northern lights. While these tweets have since been deleted, note that the video in the image does not show the little “from” line, as it would if it were embedded directly from Twitter.
Now, unfortunately, since it’s all deleted, we can’t see exactly how the video is embedded. Rainmaker says it’s embedded, not uploaded. It doesn’t have the “from” line at the bottom in that screenshot, but… it might still be from a Twitter embed, because Twitter (confusingly!) does not show that “from” line in the video if it’s being quote tweeted, as is the case here.
So, based on all that, there’s a decent chance that the DMCA notice was somewhat iffy. I recognize that lots of people don’t like aggregators like the Rainmaker account, but if he’s just using an existing upload from the official account as an embed, then it’s clearly not actually infringing.
It is quite possible, though, that most people don’t understand how video embeds of other Twitter videos work on Twitter (it’s confusing!), and so it wouldn’t surprise me if the NightLights account didn’t even realize it was an embed of the original, and out of frustrating of this large aggregator account getting all the traffic for its video, sent a good faith (but mistaken) DMCA notice.
In the now-deleted tweet you see above, the Rainmaker account says it reached out to the NightLights account, and NightLights asked for money (likely for a license). Again, assuming Rainmaker was just embedding, there is no need for a license. It’s literally just using Twitter in the way it was intended, and in a manner that NightLights already granted a license for. Somewhat confusingly, in a later tweet, the Rainmaker account claims that NightLights didn’t actually want money and instead said that NightLights was trying to shut down his account:
For what it’s worth, the guy behind NightLights told TorrentFreak that Rainmaker is misrepresenting their conversation, and that it was Rainmaker who first proposed paying, if NightLights would rescind the DMCA notice:
Mauduit informs TorrentFreak that after sending the DMCA notice to Twitter, Massimo initiated contact and suggested that he should pay an amount to have the report retracted “since the situation for him was so dire.”
Mauduit says that since the offer came Massimo, that doesn’t constitute blackmail. A few hours later Massimo accused Mauduit of blackmail on Twitter, Mauduit says.
“I asked him to compensate me fairly for the use of the material. So at that point, that was purely business related and politically correct,” Mauduit says.
Either way, Twitter’s head of trust and safety quickly told the Rainmaker account that, despite his fears, the company would not suspend his account:
This is also a good policy (so kudos to Irwin and Musk on continuing this aspect of old Twitter’s policies). She also noted in another tweet that the Rainmaker account “is not at any risk for suspension.”
Of course, “pirating / egregious illegal behavior” is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. And so is… “blackmail.” Yet, about an hour after Ella’s tweets, Musk himself noticed Rainmaker’s tweets and announced that he would “suspend” accounts for “blackmail.”
Again, in a vacuum, this could be good policy. Suspending egregious copyfraudsters who abuse copyright to shake people down or silence them makes sense. And DMCA abuse for extortionate behavior does happen unfortunately often. As does abusing the DMCA to silence others over non-infringing speech. We’ve covered many, many such cases over the years.
So, having a policy that pushes back on that abuse of copyright law is good —and another nice thing you can say about Elon Musk is that he’s been quite good about recognizing the problems associated with patent and copyright law. Other companies have pushed back on copyright abuses as well, such as how Automattic (the company behind WordPress, and also the company that hosts Techdirt) has spent years fighting back against DMCA abusers. But it has a clear process for doing so, rather than the whims of an impulsive owner.
In this case, though, Elon appeared to take Rainmaker’s (slightly confused) word for what happened, and flat out suspended (temporarily) NightLights for what appears to have been a good faith DMCA notice, followed by a discussion initiated by Rainmaker regarding payment.
As I was finishing up this article, the NightLights account was actually reinstated, though the guy says he’s now considering leaving the platform:
So, given all this, the concept behind the policy is good, but there’s not much evidence that NightLights was actually actually “blackmailing” Rainmaker. From what was public (and mostly now deleted), it looks more like the account mistakenly thought that its content was used in an infringing manner due, in part, to Twitter’s own confusing presentation of embedded videos, and filed a good faith, but mistaken, DMCA notice. When Rainmaker contacted NightLights to try to get the DMCA strike removed (out of a fear that it would take down the account), the began a discussion on a licensing fee, which again seems reasonable if NightLights actually thought the use was infringing.
Also, this seems to have no angered others who were fans of the NightLights account:
Once again, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well because people are going to be mad at you on both sides of the equation.
In the end, this looks like a lot of miscommunication across the board, in part from people who aren’t fully aware of how Twitter or copyright law actually work. The end policy — don’t put up with shit from those who abuse the DMCA process — is actually great. But it really doesn’t look like NightLights was abusing the DMCA, just confused about how Twitter worked.
And because of the somewhat less-than-well-considered way in which Twitter under Elon is acting, if NightLights had a legitimate claim (and again, I don’t think it does in this case), quickly suspending an account for filing a real DMCA claim could open up Elon and Twitter to pretty significant liability. Contrary to popular belief, companies that receive a DMCA notice do not need to take down the content. But if they don’t, they can no longer use the DMCA’s 512(c) safe harbor, which is a risk if the case went to court. So refusing to take down something upon notice is a legal risk, and the kind of thing a large company like Twitter would normally have a copyright lawyer review.
The other potential issue is that if Twitter makes it a habit to suspend accounts that send good faith or legitimate DMCA notices, it could very much open them up to claims that they do not have a valid “repeat infringer” policy, as required by 512(i). Suspending one account for sending a good faith DMCA almost certainly won’t trigger that issue, but having Elon flat out say that Rainmaker’s account “won’t be” suspended could be read to mean that Twitter is ignoring its repeat infringer policy with regards to at least that account. And, I could see copyright lawyers trying to argue that this is an example of how Musk is willing to ditch the 512(i) policy for accounts he likes. At the very least, you can bet that these kinds of impulsive policy decisions will be used in court by copyright litigants. Perhaps from Hollywood studios who noticed that, last fall, amidst all the turmoil, Elon’s Twitter seemed to be ignoring many DMCA notices about accounts posting entire Hollywood movies.
In short, impulsive decisions around DMCA policy, made without first going over things with an actual copyright lawyer, can open up a company like Twitter to quite a bit of liability. But this is the Elon Era, in which YOLO seems to be the general ethos, and if it happens to add to yet more legal liability? Well, just toss it on the pile.
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.
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 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.
For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges.
This is more of the same. Documents leaked to Forbidden Stories and shared with the Washington Post have uncovered the unsavory tactics (and even more unsavory customers) of Eliminalia, a Spain-based reputation management company with one hell of an origin story. This is from the Washington Post’s extensive report on the leaked documents, which details how Eliminalia founder Diego “Didac” Sanchez came to believe this company must exist:
When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007.
Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. A panel of judges declined to overturn the conviction, however, citing additional evidence in the case, court records show.
Sánchez got news accounts of the abuse allegations removed from the internet, he wrote in the autobiography. He did not say how he did it, or what specifically was removed, but he wrote that he recognized a business opportunity.
Nothing in the documents suggests Sanchez decided to go into an extortion-like business by drumming up nasty allegations and making victims pay to have them removed from the internet. But that set of paragraphs sure seems to suggest it might have been a viable option.
Eliminalia does not seem to engage in any overt criminal activities. Instead, it appears to engage in a bunch of dishonest tactics. These tactics include creating fake sites to host (and backdate) copied content so the original could be targeted with bogus copyright claims. Here’s how this tactic works, as described in the Forbidden Stories article, which details interactions between a targeted publisher of critical journalism (Mexican reporter Daniel Sanchez) and the bogus persona concocted by Eliminalia (Humberto Herrera Rincon Gallardo) to get the content removed.
In January 2020, Gallardo filed a claim with Digital Ocean, Pagina 66’s US-based hosting provider, alleging that Sánchez had copied his content illegally. As proof, Gallardo linked to a third-party site that had published a replica of Sánchez’s piece, but with a falsified earlier publish date and fake author: Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo.
This time, the strategy worked. Digital Ocean ordered Sánchez to remove his article from Página 66’s site, or it would go black.
That was the tactic Eliminalia chose to go with after impersonating the EU Commission with a bogus takedown letter claiming GDPR violations: committing apparent perjury by faking up a copyright complaint.
Eliminalia also creates bogus news sites by the dozens, flooding the internet with low-value posts supposedly written by people who want worse content written about them buried.
Researchers from Qurium linked the 600 fake news websites to Eliminalia’s parent company, Maidan Holding, according to Tord Lundstrom, Qurium’s technical director. The websites’ IP addresses — each a string of numbers identifying where a site is hosted — are clustered together sequentially, Lundstrom said, and registration data from the websites’ hosting providers show that the IP addresses were assigned to Maidan.
The fake news sites contain real news copied from legitimate media organizations, and many have names that are similar to real outlets — the London New Times, CNNEWS Today and Le Monde France. But tucked amid those headlines are at least 3,800 articles that prominently feature the names of customers identified in the Eliminalia records…
So, the sort of stuff we’ve seen before, only on a much more massive and, apparently, lucrative scale. But given the company’s origins — a man trying to right a wrong he’d caused by wiping the internet of his false molestation accusation — Eliminalia seems more than willing to help far less altruistic people cover up evidence of their wrongdoing.
Its U.S. clients included a popular reality-TV personality publicly accused of sexual misconduct and a California biotech entrepreneur who had been convicted of financial fraud and is now fighting charges he hired a hit man to kill a business associate. The leader of a major religious charity in Chicago that faced criticism over its executives’ salaries also turned to Eliminalia, the records show.
Eliminalia did work for an Italian spyware company that had been fined for selling surveillance technology to Syria’s autocratic regime, and for a Swiss bank that had drawn public scrutiny over Venezuelan clients who were suspected of money laundering. It also worked on behalf of a well-known traveling circus clown who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Switzerland.
Here’s more, from Forbidden Stories’ reporting:
Forbidden Stories identified Eliminalia clients in 50 countries across five continents. The leak of around 1,500 current and former clients includes details of Eliminalia’s business dealings with a medical doctor who reportedly operated a torture center during Chile’s dictatorship and was found guilty of homicide; former bank officials at Banca Privada d’Andorra, accused of money laundering for corrupt Venezuelan officials; and a Brazilian businessman implicated in a global prostitution network, among others.
And now that this has been exposed by the documents and the great reporting at both of the above-mentioned sites, Eliminalia is attempting a disappearing act of its own. Reporters visiting its Barcelona office were informed it was now a company called “Idata Protection,” a (you guessed it) data protection service in no way affiliated with the work performed by the entity that owns it, Eliminalia. Its founder was also nowhere to be found.
Ugly tactics and even uglier customers. That’s not surprising. The entities that tend to seek out reputation management help are those that have destroyed theirs by being awful. For a little while, dodgy takedowns and black hat tactics actually get the job done. Sooner or later, though, it almost always seems to fall apart. But just as much as disintegration is inevitable, so is the rise of another company just as awful to take its place.
Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the takedowns but insisted it wasn’t them or their enforcement partner, CSC. Some of Bungie’s own official content had also been hit with claims, bolstering its defense somewhat, though it certainly isn’t unheard of for official content to accidentally get DMCA’d. Further solidifying that this wasn’t actually Bungie or CSC, however, occurred when Bungie went ahead and filed a lawsuit against 10 John Does over all of this.
Well, at least one of those Does has now been unmasked, as YouTube assisted Bungie by providing his IP address. That would be Nicholas Minor, who goes as Lord Nazo on YouTube. Bungie has amended its lawsuit naming him specifically, though it is unclear if Bungie is accusing Minor of filing all of the fraudulent takedowns. Ironically, it appears that Minor took these actions after becoming angry that Bungie and CSC took down his YouTube videos that contained Destiny 2 game music.
Lord Nazo, real name Nicholas Minor, apparently sought revenge on the development studio after CSC Global, which works in conjunction with Bungie as a brand protector, issued a number of takedown notices to him for uploading the Destiny soundtracks to his channel. The videos were uploaded in December 2021, and removed by YouTube a month later.
As reported by The Game Post, Minor allegedly created two fake Gmail accounts under the pseudonyms Jeremy Wiland and Damien Reynolds, posing as employees of CSC. He then used the accounts to issue DMCA strikes against popular Destiny YouTubers such as My Name Is Byf and Promethean, and additionally against Bungie’s own YouTube channel.
More is alleged, including that Minor used those accounts to contact Bungie directly and threaten them somewhat vaguely. For its part, Bungie is asking for a whopping $7.6 million as a result of all of this. Based on the filing for the suit, Bungie looks like it knows what it’s talking about.
Now let’s discuss briefly how this will all get talked about. If Minor did what the complaint alleges, he’s likely to be in a heap of trouble. Bungie will look like a hero here, helped by the fact that its own stance on fan-created videos is fairly lenient.
But what few will talk about is a point that Bungie actually made at the outset of all of this: YouTube’s DMCA takedown process sucks and is absolutely begging to be abused. Minor may have been found out, assuming the complaint is correct, but how many times does that not happen? How many times, in the name of promiscuous enforcement of copyrights, have such fraudulent claims at a lower level never been given this attention? We see this all the time and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
That’s the real problem here. A broken enforcement system that is ripe for abuse.
We’ve said it over and over again, if libraries did not exist today, there is no way publishers would allow them to come into existence. We know this, in part, because of their attempts to stop libraries from lending ebooks, and to price ebooks at ridiculous markups to discourage libraries, and their outright claims that libraries are unfair competition. And we won’t even touch on their lawsuit over digital libraries.
Anyway, in other book news, you may have heard recently about how a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, from being taught in an eighth-grade English class. Some people called this a ban, while others said the book is still available, so it’s not a “ban.” To me, I think school boards are not the teachers, and the teachers should be able to come up with their own curriculum, as they know best what will educate their students. Also, Maus is a fantastic book, and the claim that it was banned because of “rough, objectionable language” and nudity is utter nonsense.
But, also, we have publishers getting into the banning business themselves… by trying to capitalize on the sudden new interest in Maus.
Penguin Random House doesn’t want this new interest in Maus to lead to… people taking it out of the library rather than buying a copy. They’re now abusing copyright law to demand the book be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library, and they flat out admit that they’re doing so for their own bottom line:
A few days ago, Penguin Random House, the publisher of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, demanded that the Internet Archive remove the book from our lending library. Why? Because, in their words, “consumer interest in ‘Maus’ has soared” as the result of a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban teaching the book. By its own admission, to maximize profits, a Goliath of the publishing industry is forbidding our non-profit library from lending a banned book to our patrons: a real live digital book-burning.
This is just blatant greed laid bare. As the article notes, whatever problems US copyright law has, it has enshrined the concept of libraries, and the right to lend out books as a key element of the public interest. And the publishers — such as giants like Penguin Random House — would do anything possible to stamp that right out.
We’ve done more than our share of posts in the past about the problems within the DMCA takedown system as currently practiced. The reason for so many posts is in part due to the sheer number of problems with how this all works. For starters, when notices go out to search engines like Google to delist “problem” URLs, those notices are often times generated by automated systems that unsurprisingly result in a vast majority of notices targeting URLs that are non-infringing. As in, over 99% of those notices. And even once we get past the malpractice of using automation buckshot notices that result in an incredible amount of collateral damage, we then have to add the wide open avenues for fraud and abuse of the DMCA system. That type of fraud runs the gamut, from trolls merely trying to cause chaos for the fun of it to competitors of certain forms of content trying to hurt the competition. In the immortal words of former NFL coach John Fox: “It’s all a problem.”
And, on the fraud and abuse side, it’s such a problem that perfectly legit URLs can get delisted by Google due to a request from “The U.S. Copyright Office”, even though that office doesn’t make those sorts of requests.
Google has received several takedown notices that claim to come from the ‘U.S. Copyright Office’, requesting the search engine to remove ‘problematic’ URLs. The Government body, which is generally not involved in copyright enforcement, informs TorrentFreak that it has nothing to do with these notices. Unfortunately, Google didn’t immediately spot the imposter.
The Copyright Office is not supposed to take sides in these matters. So, we were quite surprised to see its name on several takedown notices that were sent to Google over the past few days.
The takedown requests are not typical ‘Section 512’ notices. Instead, they point out sites that circumvent technical protection measures, which is in violation of the DMCA’s ‘Section 1201.’ That’s also how Google processed them.
And process at least some of them, Google did. The notices claiming to be from the Copyright Office indicated they were sent on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America, which doesn’t appear to exist based on a Google search I performed. Even if it does, the Copyright Office is not a party to these sorts of takedown requests on behalf of any organization. The URLs targeted appear to be mostly related to stream-ripping sites, but not just sites that offer that service. Instead, some of the URLs targeted merely mention sites that offer stream-ripping services, which is how several TorrentFreak posts got targeted.
Whoever is doing this, it is most certainly not the Copyright Office.
This suspicion was confirmed by the U.S. Copyright Office. A spokesperson informs TorrentFreak that the notices in question were not submitted by them.
This doesn’t mean that the takedown requests were ignored by Google. While our links are still indexed, several of the URLs listed in the notices have indeed been removed because of the notices, which is a problem.
It’s a huge problem, actually. In fact, it demonstrates quite well how broken the current DMCA system has become. The fact that this sort of impersonation is so easy is an issue. The fact that Google is so inundated with these types of requests, which again are overwhelmingly illegitimate, that it cannot review them thoroughly enough to notice the clear impersonation of the Copyright Office at work here is another issue. And the fact that the DMCA process is obviously viewed by some bad actors as a wide open tool to attack their own competition is yet another issue.
And, notably, there isn’t even an appeal process for Section 1201 takedown requests.
Unfortunately, there is no counter-notification option for ‘Section 1201’ takedown notices. This means that sites and services that are affected by these bogus notices have no official appeal process they can use.
But perhaps the U.S. Copyright Office can help with that?
Or maybe someone can just pretend to be the Copyright Office and help. You know, on its “behalf.” It works for the bad actors, after all.
