Confused Indian Anti-Piracy Group Asks Us To Remove Article It Doesn't Like From Some Other Blog

Failures

from the try-again-guys dept

Well, this is bizarre. A few hours ago, we received an email to our copyright notice email address from Aiplex, an Indian anti-piracy/SEO/medical transcription company. You may remember the company because we wrote a short post about them over a year ago, when its CEO said in an interview that it would resort to denial of service attacks on sites that didn’t cooperate. We also noted that the somewhat confused company listed “Bram Cohen” as a type of BitTorrent client.

Anyway, I’d nearly forgotten about the company until we got this email. But the email is asking us to take down the post. Except, it’s not. Rather than asking that we remove our post, it actually asks us to remove a copy of the post on a spam blog that appears to copy every Techdirt post (there are a bunch of sites out there that do this and get no traffic — it makes no sense to us, but they’re free to use our content that way, if they want). Here’s the email:

This has reference to the below article on your webpage, we kindly request you to deactivate the link as the article is defaming the company?s image & its prospects. It was mis-interpreted by the news agency which was blown out of proportion by some of the pirates across the globe. And subsequently we have to face damages/threats from the pirates & undergo immense losses due to their attack on our servers/websites etc.

Although, we did declare that we are not involved in any of those activities as published in the article, we still have to face the consequences for reasons unknown.

Below is the link for your reference:

Bizarre Indian Anti-Piracy Group Says It Does DoS Attacks On File Sharing Operations

We kindly request you to deactivate at the earliest possible please.

Appreciate your help on this matter.

Jagadish
Support Operations
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.

Interesting stuff. First of all, they used our copyright notification email, and this issue has nothing to do with copyright. Second, they are asking us to remove our content from a site that is not ours, and which we have no control over. The content did, certainly, originate from our site, but they don’t ask us to remove the content on our site. This does not speak highly of their technical skills, let alone their basic understanding of this World Wide Web we live on. Finally, as to the claim that this is “defaming,” the article directly quotes the company’s CEO.

Anyway, seeing as we don’t control the web page they’ve asked us to take down, we obviously won’t be doing a damn thing about it, other than to publish this post and hope that, sometime in the future, Aiplex learns a little bit about how the web works.

Filed Under: anti-piracy, copyright, defamation, india
Companies: aiplex