How Copyright Law Is Being Misused To Remove Material From the Internet (theguardian.com)

London-based resident Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet. She noted in her review that her ceiling fell down in an upstairs bedroom. The Guardian reports about what happened to her in the aftermath of posting that review. Building firm BuildTeam sent a letter to Mumsnet, which the site passed on to Narey. According to Narey, BuildTeam found Narey's comment defamatory and untrue, and asked for the removal of the comment from the website. The original comment saw several other users also post similar grievances, though many of these users pulled their comments in response to the legal threats from BuildTeam. Narey wanted to keep hers up. Then things got even weirder, reports the Guardian. Narey says BuiltTeam staff visited her apartment, and instead of offering any apology, asked her to remove the comment. Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request under DMCA, alleging copyright infringement. This led Google to de-list the entire thread. From the report: No copyright infringement had occurred at all. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled "Home Improvement Tips and Tricks". The post, headlined "Buildteam interior designers" was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it. BuildTeam says it has no idea why Narey's review was reposted, but that it had nothing to do with it.The Guardian deep dives into what is wrong with the copyright system, the issues Google faces in dealing with them, and the consequences many users are facing because of this.

Comments

Re:Here's a simple fix...

[bluefoxlucid]

She wrote all her own stuff; the company she reviewed bitched about the bad review; someone in Pakistan copied it to his blog and backdated it several months; and then Google got a DMCA take-down.

In other words: the copyright claim is fraudulent.

Power WILL be abused

[Anonymous Coward]

It really is that simple. Where power exists, abuse exists. The more power, the more abuse. The only way to reduce the level of abuse is to reduce the level of power. This is the libertarian viewpoint in a nutshell, but I'm not bringing it up to promote libertarianism. I'm bringing it up to promote common sense.

Re:Here's a simple fix...

[ninthbit]

"someone in Pakistan" - AKA the guy at BuildTeam using TOR to make his DMCA claim look legit enough for Google to reject any appeals from the original poster.

Re:Here's a simple fix...

[Penguinisto]

Funny thing is, the Streisand Effect will most likely kick-in hard for them, especially once it made the papers there.

Seriously - a multinational corporation can put up with bad press and survive, but most smaller businesses cannot.

Given that this is a UK company, I'm rather surprised that they didn't reach for the libel laws - even if the lady was absolutely correct and true, the legal costs would have likely ruined her faster than a DMCA takedown would have.

Re:Here's a simple fix...

[stealth_finger]

Funny thing is, the Streisand Effect will most likely kick-in hard for them, especially once it made the papers there.

Seriously - a multinational corporation can put up with bad press and survive, but most smaller businesses cannot.

Given that this is a UK company, I'm rather surprised that they didn't reach for the libel laws - even if the lady was absolutely correct and true, the legal costs would have likely ruined her faster than a DMCA takedown would have.

Or instead they could do the decent thing and say sorry to hear your ceiling collapsed, hope everyone is ok, we'll come around have a look and fix it.

That way they get to be a decent company with good service, and this woman tells people about it. Sure it's not going to spread as far or fast as bad news, it never does. But when you're a dick about something everyone wants to know about it and it ends up on slashdot or some other website where way more people than ever would see it sees it.

Re:Due process is often cost-prohibitive

[Jason Levine]

The problem here is that the attorney's fees and court costs associated with due process are often cost-prohibitive.

Not only the fees, but the time involved. Businesses (especially large ones) will often have attorneys on hand so for them the cost is little to none to handle legal proceedings against a customer who "dared" to post a negative review - even if the company's lawsuit is completely without merit. The customer, on the other hand, not only has to pay a lawyer (hoping to recoup this cost if they win the lawsuit) and various court costs, but they need to spend time dealing with the lawsuit. This might mean time off of work and possibly docked paychecks (if they ran out of vacation days). The companies know this and could just file meaningless motion after meaningless motion to drag out the court case until the customer gives in to the business' demands in order to make the lawsuit go away. (See: The RIAA/MPAA Strategy.)

Re:A sad pattern

[hattig]

Britain has a problem with the building trade, in particular the self-employed small business building trade. It's why there are TV shows like Cowboy Builders, and bad building work is commonly on other programmes like Watchdog and so on.

The biggest surprise is that this company hasn't made itself bust and reopened under a new name - a very common solution in the UK. I suspect maybe the law has been tweaked to make this less of a solution?

Build Team have not worked for this client, and having undertaken a Google search we cannot trace the individual.

So how do they know that they haven't worked for this client?!

With building companies, word of mouth reputation from people you know seems to be the best solution in the UK. And always pay attention to the bad reviews first and foremost. Sadly, with marketing, people don't do due diligence on things they are about to spend tens of thousands on. Sure, you can't always avoid bad businesses this way, but clearly a line of poor reviews that have been hidden should set of alarm bells.

build team must be new at this

[eyenot]

they're dragging their own name through the mud by this. more experienced unethical builders and housing authorities simply change their business name to escape their bad reviews online.

there's an apartment complex nearby that is expensive (located across the street from a university) but looks kind of like crap. the siding is all dirty, and you can see horrible mold infestations growing in the wood under the walk-out patios on the 2nd and 3rd stories. this is in a town where every single place i've lived there has been mold infestations, even right next to campus. the town ... the entire state of michigan, really ... is just a drained swamp and wooden, dutch-style homes simply don't stand up to it very well.

well this nearby apartment complex has changed its name every year. from "Campus Hills" (with an umlaut over the u for some reason) to "Varsity" to now "Soho 700". The sign out front of "Soho 700" promises fast internet and other things among "newly renovated".

Well, I've lived here for two years and I walk by the place every night and day. There have been no trucks, no workers, no sign of any renovation occurring at all whatsoever.

Sadly here in Michigan there's no legal recourse for the students who get sucked into moving into that place and spending oodles of money on it. The Consumer Protection Agency actually makes things worse on people who complain about unethical business practices, by sending a copy of the complaint along with the complete identity, address, and phone number of the complainer to the company they're complaining about -- and then proceeding to sit on their own hands and do nothing. I've had a pretty scary experience due to the Consumer Protection Agency doxing me to a shady store.

You can't really rely on the Better Business Bureau, either. It turns out that the BBB is just a money-mill here in Michigan. You either apply to receive an endorsement from the BBB (which costs money) or you don't. There's no recourse for consumers who turn to the BBB to get things done. The BBB isn't actually in authority.

At any rate, in many U.S. states any business owner can get away with just about anything if they're willing to pay the fees and legal costs of incorporation on top of the fees and costs of obtaining a tax code, DBA and so on (which even for an LLC is several thousand dollars). Once you're incorporated, you get to enjoy a different set of laws and many of them don't even mention anything about jail or anything scary like that, just various monetary fines all in the thousands of dollars and upwards. I wouldn't be surprised if the UK's system is even worse, considering that heinous acts are kind of part and parcel with the British Empire, and power has a way of ensuring its own legacy.