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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.
~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.
How about we do this: Web sites whose function is to let people review products and/or services are totally immune to any type of take downs? Better yet, repeal the entire DMCA, and make it illegal to even propose any stupid laws of this type ever again!