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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.
Because it's easy to win if the defendant admits it is? Presumably then establishing a precedent that Google would then follow without doing their own determination because they are relying on the rule of law (i.e. the court's decision).
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.
Of course, if any of the lawyers (or self-representing plaintiffs) are aware that the defendant is fake, then they are committing perjury. Any lawyer who does this is an absolute dumbass, because courts come down hard on these sorts of shenanigans.
I mean, it's one thing if you or I lie on the stand. It's still perjury, but if we're not lawyers (I'm not), then we aren't officers of the court, and there aren't going to ethics review boards crawling up our asses over this.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It has nothing to do with whether or not the content is defamatory, or even if the content is defamatory. It looks like this movie script runs like this:
Plaintiff: "Your honor! I accuse 'Bob' here of defaming me by posting scandalous slurs on his website www.microsoft.com!"
"Defendant": "I admit I run www.microsoft.com and posted horrible things on it, but I refuse to shut down www.microsoft.com!"
Judge: "I hereby order you to shut down www.microsoft.com"
Plaintiff: "Hey google, I have here a court order demanding that www.microsoft.com be shut down. Please kindly stop people from finding this site"
Google: "Well, if it's a court order I don't have to think about it. Request complete."
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I'm also sure it depends on what laws are being broken and the reward for breaking it. I'm sure much less than 15% would be willing to kill a man if the reward were a circus-peanut. I'm sure much more than 15% would be willing to break the speed limit delivering a package if the reward were a $1000 bonus.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I doubt it.... You sue fake person, they fail to appear, you win a default judgment. As the article points out, what financial motive is there to gain from suing fake people, you can't recoup the court fees. However, by gaming the system, you now have enough paperwork to scare the third party admins into removing undesirable content.
It's really more of a problem with the 3rd party not verifying that the order applies to the originator of the content.... But what do they care? That would cost money, while just pulling the content is basically free.
Whats wrong with perjury under oath?
In the US you can do that and become president and never be charged. Not seeing what the issue with doing this is.
The FBI probably can't find any reasonable prosecutor that would take this to court anyways.
You may think this is sarcasm, but it is not. I am actually being serious. If the laws are not enforced on some, why would they be on others?
Perjury because essentially someone is lying to the court buy submitting fake defendants.
Fraud if they take this judgment which was obtained illegally and use it to get services (read take down that post)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.