Sanctioned Revenge Porner Craig Brittain Says That Google Is Nothing But Copyright Infringement

from the good-luck-with-that-theory,-craiggers dept

We already discussed how the disgraced revenge porn guy, Craig Brittain (aka Pustule Nickelback McHitler III), is now trying to get Google to disappear most articles about his FTC settlement. As we noted, in making sure that the public is well aware of what kind of person Brittain is, the FTC wrote up not one, not two, but three separate notices about Brittain’s actions (revenge porn and then setting up a fake lawyer you could pay to “take down” the images you never wanted on his site in the first place).

Back in 2012 Brittain tried to abuse the DMCA to take down earlier criticism (from Popehat). He apparently didn’t learn his lesson when that failed, which explains his recent attempt to do the same — including arguing that the FTC’s own writeups about its settlement with Brittain were infringing.

Over on Twitter, Adam Steinbaugh, one of the people who Brittain sought to censor with the DMCA, told Brittain that he could just send a DMCA notice straight to Steinbaugh or his host, rather than going after Google, leading to a fascinating and totally clueless discussion about how Brittain is really doing this because he thinks it’s unfair that Google gets to build a search index, which he considers infringing. Uh huh, Craig, sure thing.

If you can’t see those images, Brittain says that he’s “not interested” in everyone who wrote about his settlement using “his” “material,” (still not clearly identified, by the way), but rather “Google’s use of the material.” Then he notes: “Google is piggybacking of of content creators, which really means that by default they should be paying for it.”

Even ignoring the sheer… wrongness… of this “legal analysis,” it’s doubly hilarious in that it comes from a guy whose entire claim to “fame” is posting photos of people that are submitted to his website, for which he does not pay anyone for those works — and, rather, tried to get people to pay him to take them down. Irony is a word that apparently Brittain is not acquainted with.

Oh, and I’m especially curious as to how Brittain believes that Google indexing and linking to the FTC’s website is infringing and should be paid for, given that, as a work of the federal government, the FTC’s statements on Craig Brittain are in the public domain.

At that point, I pointed out that he appeared to be ignoring multiple court rulings that have made it clear that Google’s indexing is clearly fair use, at which point it became clear that Brittain had no idea that this issue has been well litigated in the past, and he’s just wrong. First he insists that the courts were “acting improperly” and then asks if any of us “jokers” have written about this Perfect 10 v. Google case that apparently was a totally brand new concept to Brittain:

Perfect 10 certainly has quite a reputation for legal buffoonery when it comes to copyright law. Is Craig Brittain getting ready to take things a step further?

Filed Under: craig brittain, dmca, fair use, revenge porn
Companies: google, perfect 10