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