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Dozens of Suspicious Court Cases Aim At Getting Web Pages Taken Down Or Deindexed (washingtonpost.com)
- All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.)
- All the ostensible defendants ostensibly agreed to injunctions being issued against them, which often leads to a very quick court order (in some cases, less than a week).
- Of these 25-odd cases, 15 give the addresses of the defendants -- but a private investigator (Giles Miller of Lynx Insights and Investigations) couldn't find a single one of the ostensible defendants at the ostensible address.
Now, you might ask, what's the point of suing a fake defendant (to the extent that some of these defendants are indeed fake)? How can anyone get any real money from a fake defendant? How can anyone order a fake defendant to obey a real injunction? The answer is that Google and various other Internet platforms have a policy: They won't take down material (or, in Google's case, remove it from Google indexes) just because someone says it's defamatory. Understandable -- why would these companies want to adjudicate such factual disputes? But if they see a court order that declares that some material is defamatory, they tend to take down or deindex the material, relying on the court's decision. Yet the trouble is that these Internet platforms can't really know if the injunction was issued against the actual author of the supposed defamation -- or against a real person at all.
Must be on somebody's word-of-the-day calendar.
Yet the trouble is that these Internet platforms can't really know if the injunction was issued against the actual author of the supposed defamation -- or against a real person at all.
Uh, okay. What does that have to do with whether or not the content is, in fact, defamatory?
our universe is a simulation, and the just-in-time content creation algorithm is buggy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
online "reputation protection" firms that guarantee their ability to take down negative reviews and content were pretty lucrative 10 years ago, until hosting companies started pushing back against what was widely understood to be strong arm tactics designed to silence dissent. hosting companies began requiring a legal order. for content, they had the DMCA. for negative reviews, reputation protection firms quietly took ghosts to court hoping no one would notice, and with good reason. frankly its easy to get a contempt charge in court for pulling this sort of stunt.
Kudos to Giles for exposing this practice. now lets hope Yelp and others are keen to push back against what is clearly an abuse of the courts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
~15% of all humans will willingly abuse their position, violate laws, break rules, etc, for their own benefit. Judges, cops, lawyers, BLM, fast food workers, auto workers, toll booth operators, priests, tax collectors... The group is quite arbitrary. Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with this portion of the population that doesn't simply recreate the problem? For example, exterminating them will simply create a new ~15%.
Person 'A' posts a comment that is anonymous and damaging again a company or organization. The post is plausible or true enough to carry weight so that it cannot simply be ignored.
Company asks a 'reputation management' company to fix it.
'Reputation management' company sets up a fake company, which sues 'John Doe' in court.
Anonymous 'John Doe' is quickly found, but its their fake agent, in cahoots with the reputation management company. Not the person who really posted the comment.
Fake John Doe, admits it was his comment, admits it was defamation and agrees to withdraw it.
Reputation Management company goes back to court, to settle the case, and get the court to issue a takedown notice.
Google and the ISPs take down the content, because the court has ruled they must.
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This is fraud and perjury, and after several of these cases, judges became wise to it. They noticed the companies filing the lawsuits were often setup the same day and it was the same lawyers. Lawyers were sanctioned for suspected complicity.
So now the instant company is discarded and a fake individual is put forward as the person suing. So the setup of the company is no longer obvious to the Judge.
What's happening here is fraud and perjury and its organized, making it organized racketeering. This is for the FBI to investigate.
I see a web page with something on it I don't like. I then tell the court that the webpage being hosted by some made up person is pissing me off, and get my neighbor to poke his head in the court room long enough to say yeah sure, I agree to the injunctions. So now I have a legal court order to force Google, Yahoo, any ISP, etc to remove the page I don't like.
Surely illegal in some manner or other, but slick nonetheless.
So it seems that companies are suing fake defendants on the pretext that these defendants are behind critical comments on third party websites. This is in order to get the comments removed from websites.
A summary is supposed to cover a broad overview. Not give the details without context.
Don't they trust their own tools?
Wouldn't they just need to Google the name to find out?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Surely it is the responsibility of a court would make sure that the parties involved in a lawsuit actually exist?
One court in TFA did so - apparently none of the others bothered. If one cannot hold the court responsible, then surely a criminal complaint against the person who filed the suit (against a non-existent defendant) is justified?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Maryland : Unauthorized Practice of Law: Md. Bus. Occ. & Prof. Code 10-601 to 10-606
Fines and penalties of up to $5000 and 5 years in prison per instance.
Not to mention making intentional misrepresentations to a court (e.g., that a putative defendant existed who didn't, or that said defendant was the author of a post when no one actually believed he was). The contempt of court penalties for that will be a great deal swifter than the company's trial for practicing law without a license. No wonder the putative plaintiffs (clients) have lawyered up so fast and denied authorizing the suits. Judges do not like to be used.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
If our courts are so easy to game then they are the problem.
Subject says it all. Some abitious SJWs have concocted a scheme to reshape the internet in their own image by bamboozling the legal system into doing their bidding.
Do no evil Google already de monitizes you if you do something against their personal agendas.
Just Crazy Authoritarian stuff going on atm folks, you only have to look at who is pushing the corpse up to the seat of power to find out who wants it.
Most uses of the ostensible word in one article.
Sounds pretty typical of their behavior.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
The only thing worse than a scumbag is a smart scumbag.
These are disbarrable actions, the violate the lawyers oath of ethics (funny I know but they have one), go after the lawyers.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Another bit - if you're suing someone in court you need a process server to provide papers that the person you are suing was properly served before any legal proceedings can continue. Were these papers forged? If the defendants were fictional, most likely. That goes beyond perjury and veers into fraud.
Your astroturf aside, the big issue here is that Parallel Construction has so tainted the policing system, that they don't immediately tackle this.
Instead its viewed as a petty crime to be sorted by lawsuits.
And for the record, Bush didn't technically tell a lie.
Well it's become a society who wants to decide what is offensive for everyone. People get people banned from social sites for comments. While others get lambasted for comments made years. The technology age has certainly brought its share of ability to lash out at people. Sometimes without facts or justifications.
I think maybe some of this stuff could be marked as being questionable in integrity or something.
Organized crime with intent on intimidating someone.
Who at Justice Department want to make a name for themselves by prosecuting this?
Anyone have a complete list of these to assist my confirmation bias of various conspiracy theories? The listed ones are pretty bland but far fewer than the 25 cited.
WHAT?
If only there was some way to look up who owns a domain, and what their street address is.
And if that information was somehow protected for some reason, if only there were a system of... oh, let's call them "registrars", for lack of a better term... who would "host" those domains and could easily verify the ownership.
Maybe some day Google won't have to go it alone.
#DeleteChrome
Nice to see lawyers willing to commit fraud. I hope they get caught
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
This is an astro-turf campaign by companies and crooked legal shops to lay precedent setting groundwork for some dubious new law or ruling.
Ruddie CAN fail.
But he would've gotten away with it if it weren't for that meddling Eugene Volokh!