If Net Neutrality Dies, Comcast Can Just Block A Protest Site Instead Of Sending A Bogus Cease-And-Desist

from the comcastic dept

It appears that a vendor working for Comcast sent a totally bullshit cease-and-desist letter regarding a pro-net neutrality site: Comcastroturf.com, created by our friends over at Fight for the Future. The Comcastroturf website was set up as a tool to see if someone filed bogus FCC comments in your name. As you probably recall, there is a bot that has been flooding the FCC comment site with bogus anti-net neutrality comments, filed in alphabetical order. Reporters contacted some of the individuals whose names appear on these comments, and they had no idea what it was about. People are still trying to track down who is actually responsible for the bogus comments, but Fight for the Future set up this neat site to let you check if your name was used by whoever is behind it.

And, of course, the name "Comcastroturf" is pretty damn clever, given the topic. Kudos to Fight for the Future for coming up with that one. It is, of course, totally legal to use the domain name of a company that you're protesting in your own domain. There are numerous cases on this issue, normally discussed as the so-called "Sucks Sites." There's clearly no legal issue with Comcastroturf, and any reasonably informed human being would know that. Unfortunately, it would appear that Comcast hired a company that employs some non-reasonably informed humans.

The cease-and-desist letter was sent by a company called "Looking Glass Cyber Solutions" (no, really), which used to be called "Cyveillance" (only marginally less bad). We've written about Cyveillance twice before -- and both times they were about totally bogus takedown requests from Cyveillance that caused serious problems. The most recent was the time that Cyveillance, working for Qualcomm, filed a bogus DMCA notice that took down Qualcomm's own Github repository. Nice move. The earlier story, however was in 2013, and involved Cyveillance -- again representing Comcast -- sending a threatening takedown demand to some more of our friends over at TorrentFreak, claiming (ridiculously) that public court filings were Comcast's copyright-covered material, and threatening serious legal consequences if it wasn't taken down. Eventually, Comcast stepped in and admitted the cease-and-desist was "sent in error." You'd think that maybe this would have caused Comcast to think twice about using Cyveillance for such things. But, nope.

The rebranded Looking Glass Cyber Solutions has told Fight for the Future that "Comcastroturf" violates Comcast's "valuable intellectual property rights" and that failure to take down the site may lead to further legal action around cybersquatting and trademark violations. (Update: Turns out it wasn't a "rebranding" but Looking Glass bought Cyveillance...).

Of course, there's no way that Comcast would actually move forward with any legal action here. In fact, I'm pretty sure it already regrets the fact that the numbskulls at this vendor they hired to police their brand online just caused (yet another) massive headache for their brand online. Maybe, this time, Comcast will finally let Cyveillance/Looking Glass Cyber go, and find partners who don't fuck up so badly. Meanwhile, the fact that Looking Glass Cyber can't even figure out that Comcastroturf is a perfectly legal protest site makes the company's website -- which is chock full of idiotic buzzwords about "threat mitigation" and "threat intelligence" -- look that much more ridiculous. The only "threat" here is Looking Glass/Cyveillance and their silly cluelessness sending out censorious threats based on what appears to be little actual research.

Of course, without true net neutrality, if Comcast really wanted to silence Comcastroturf, it would just block everyone from accessing the site...

Filed Under: cease and desist, comcastroturf, cybersquatting, net neutrality, takedown
Companies: comcast, cyveillance, fight for the future, looking glass cyber solutions

Qualcomm Uses DMCA To Shut Down Its Own GitHub Repository (Plus A Bunch Of Others)

from the because-copyright! dept

Another day, another story of ridiculously errant DMCA takedown notices. The latest involves Qualcomm hiring Cyveillance to issue a DMCA notice to Github, demanding the site take down 116 repositories for allegedly violating Qualcomm's copyright. Of course, among those repositories are... Qualcomm's own repository. Because, apparently, like many other companies out there that do DMCA takedown notices, Cyveillance doesn't much care about collateral damage, and issues overly broad takedown notices because it can, and because there's simply no penalty for doing so. The takedown also impacted CyanogenMod developers and Sony's own Xperia dev Github repository. Because if you're going to create collateral damage, why not try to hit everyone?

The impetus behind the takedown request is a WiFi config file – literally a text file – which is taken straight from a Sony firmware release. In this takedown Qualcomm also took down PRIMA mirror which is open source code for Atheros wireless chipsets that they release on the CodeAurora gitweb site.

The article at Ausdroid also points out that Qualcomm has been trying to create "better relations with the open-source community for sometime." I would imagine one way to do that would be to not pull down their GitHub repositories with bogus DMCA claims. But, of course, Qualcomm has long been known as a patent and copyright bully, so apparently old habits die hard.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, github, open source, respositories, take downs
Companies: cyveillance, github, qualcomm

When Even Totally Bogus Copyright Threats Over Court Documents Comes Close To Shutting Down A Site, Something's Broken

from the not-universally-reviled-enough,-it-would-appear dept

The "c" in "copyright" still stands for "censorship," at least when wielded by aggrieved entities with limited retaliatory options. Torrentfreak is reporting that Comcast has sent the site a cease and desist order over last week's article on Prenda's honeypot operations.

[On] Monday we learned that Comcast was not happy with our coverage. Through the brand protection company Cyveillance they sent a cease and desist letter for an alleged copyright infringement, demanding that we take the article offline, or face legal action.

The threats are clear. If we fail to comply with the takedown notice within five days Comcast will file a lawsuit seeking immediate injunctive relief, compensatory damages, statutory damages, punitive damages, attorneys’ fees and costs of the suit.

The "intellectual property" in question is the public court filing, according to Cyveillance. (The actual C&D letter doesn't specify what's been infringed.) Torrentfreak told Cyveillance that public court filings are public domain (which may not be entirely true -- court documents filed by private parties (as opposed to the courts themselves) probably are not technically public domain, though there's a pretty strong argument that most uses of them are fair use -- and especially when it comes to use in reporting and commentary).

After being informed of this fact, Cyveillance told Torrentfreak that Comcast said to "hold off" on removing the post for the time being, but that news came far too late as Torrentfreak's host was already threatening to pull the plug.

Meanwhile, the situation further deteriorated when we learned that our hosting provider LeaseWeb received the same cease and desist notice. LeaseWeb alerted us to this problem on Tuesday and stated that our IP-address would be blocked if the issue was not resolved within 24 hours.

With Torrentfreak's site on the line, Comcast and Cyveillance then decided to turn unresponsive. Several hours later, Comcast finally issued a statement.

Update 7pm CET: A Comcast spokesperson responded to an inquiry we sent to the company’s lawyers:

“[I] am replying to let you know that the cease and desist was sent in error, and you may disregard it. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

Oh, one of those common "please take down our copyrighted content or prepare to be sued" mistakes. We've all made those. I'm pretty sure the only "error" was underestimating the pushback.

So, all's well that ends well, I guess, except for that fact that Comcast's "error" nearly took a site offline and gets to walk away from the experience unscathed. And because it made it through with little more than some public embarrassement, it won't learn a damn thing.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, takedown, torrentfreak
Companies: comcast, cyveillance, prenda