Slashdot Mirror
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).
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.
--------
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.
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 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.
No. We have an adversarial court system, not an inquisitorial system. The job of the civil court is to settle disputes, not find truth. The dispute is settled, the court did its job. It's not the court's job to determine if the dispute was real or not.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
They take up court time too, take the lawyers involved for damages and add on a nice order of magnitude multiplier.
Google has never said "do no evil". Their motto was "don't be evil". Subtle difference.
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!
Hey, the entertainment industry paid good money to get the DMCA in place, and reputable lawmakers STAY bought. The same legislatures that put it in place will not take it away.
Money gets people's attention more quickly than deindexed webpages, but sure, debt buyers end up with forgiven, expired, and illegitimate debt and still try to collect. You wouldn't net a billion if you found a buyer but I'm sure people try scams like you laid out and net smaller rewards.
That's perjury, yes. But a court not noticing perjury isn't "criminally negligent" on the part of the court.
If someone tried to do what you suggested, Microsoft would complain and there would be criminal and civil penalties for the plaintiff/"defendant" in your script. But nothing bad would happen to the judge...he didn't do anything wrong. What do you think would or should happen to the judge?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I said,
IT'S NOT THE COURT'S JOB TO DETERMINE IF THE DISPUTE WAS REAL OR NOT.
stupid lameness filter I know it's like yelling that's the joke.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No, actually, when you run large scale web services with ridiculously few employees, everything tends to be automated. Read automated here as automatic. No due diligence just click the take-down button and move to the next item.