Slashdot Mirror
Site Copies Content and Uses the DMCA to Take Down the Original Articles
First time accepted submitter ios and web coder writes "From the article: 'A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher's career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.' This is extremely worrying. Even though the original story is careful not to make accusations, I will. This sure smells like a 'Reputation Defense' dirty trick."
Could this also be a case of anti-DMCA activism, where someone is fabricating this scenario just to demonstrate how abusable the system is?
No, it's an Indian medical researcher who hired a reputation management company to downplay the fact that he was thrown out of Duke for lying on his resume and falsifying cancer research results.
Of course if it's not, I'm sure this will give some people that kind of idea.
There is no need for activism in that area. Using a DMCA request for trying to take down content that affects your reputation is a very common tactic. Most of the time, it doesn't do anything because the content is posted by back up after a little while.
In this case however, the reputation management company was smart enough to post duplicated content first. This means that the primary content may be dinged automatically by the google bot as a plagiarizer if it thinks the content was posted in India first, and so the google ranking of that content may be permanently affected as a result. Hopefully, the google bot is smart enough to figure out what truly happened.
Either way, because of the Streisand effect, I wouldn't want to be that Anil Potti right now.
The real problem we should be focusing on is the "takedown first, ask questions later" approach.
But that is handled already. The site takes down the material and asks questions later, because that is exactly what they need to do to be involved in any copyright lawsuit. On the other hand, the lawmakers realised that this opens the door to mischief, and therefore sending a DMCA takedown notice when you are not the copyright owner or their agent is a criminal offence that can put you into jail. If India has similar laws to the USA, then there is a good chance that a request for extradition would be successful. If not, then these guys from India better never travel to the USA.