RIAA, Stream-Ripping Sites Engaged In Dumb Game Of Whac-A-Mole With Search Engines

from the get-ripped dept

As we've detailed previously, the RIAA has for the past year or so specifically moved on to targeting stream-ripping sites as a primary focus. It's not entirely without logic, as more and more piracy by percentage has moved away from direct file downloads and torrents, and onto ripping streams. The focus has largely been on YouTube, where some sites have declined to play games and accepted defeat. But the RIAA is also targeting these sites to have them delisted from search engines. There, the whac-a-mole game is most definitely being played.

The upside for the RIAA is that there’s no standard counter-notice option for these requests. So, even when site owners don’t agree with the request, they have no option to protest it. Besides going to court, perhaps.

That doesn’t mean that these operators are sitting idly by while their search traffic is taken away. On the contrary, behind these scenes there’s a full-blown takedown war going on. Or to phrase it less aggressive: a game of takedown whack-a-mole.

Pretty much all of the large YouTube rippers are continuously updating to new URLs, which are not yet taken down by the RIAA. In most cases, new numbers are simply added to the URL. This ensures that their websites continue to show up in Google’s search results.

If this all sounds exceedingly pointless to you, welcome to the club. By trying a route that doesn't allow actual protest and oversight, the RIAA has instead chosen a method that is gloriously ineffective. Get a search engine to delist a URL, and the stream-ripping site simply alters the URL and gets it listed once more. Then the RIAA requests the delist on that new URL, at which point we rinse and repeat. The end result?

The result is a game of whack-a-mole that can potentially continue for years. Unless one side gives up of course.

None of the YouTube rippers we contacted responded to our request for comment. From what we can see, their traffic doesn’t appear to be impacted much. Some have seen a drop in traffic recently, but others witnessed an uptick at the same time. In any case, all the major sites are still findable in Google’s search results.

Whatever you may think of the RIAA's claim that stream-ripping sites ought to be taken down, a claim that I very much disagree with, we should all certainly be able to agree that this current strategy is completely pointless. It's time to come up with a new plan, RIAA folks, because when you play whac-a-mole, the idea is that you never actually win.

Filed Under: copyright, delisting, search, stream ripping, whac-a-mole
Companies: google, riaa

Google Apparently No Longer Humoring Court Orders To Delist Defamatory Content

from the 'it's-called-the-CDA,-and-you're-going-to-want-to-scroll-down-to-Sec dept

Chris Silver Smith, writing for Search Engine Land, notes that Google seems to have stopped responding to defamation lawsuit court orders.

A number of attorneys who specialize in online defamation/libel cases have reported to me that Google has recently suspended its longstanding, informal policy of removing URLs from US search results that are specified in duly executed court orders. This poses a major paradigm shift for many victims of online reputation attacks.

Beginning around August or September of this year, a number of attorneys from across the US began receiving blanket denials after submitting requests to remove defamatory content from Google’s search results.

That timing seems to coincide with Paul Alan Levy/Public Citizen's intervention in a case where an order to delist traced back to a dentist unhappy with an online review. The eventual delisting by Google came as the result of a bogus lawsuit -- filed with or without the knowledge of the dentist Mitul Patel -- against a bogus defendant. The fake "Matthew Chan" signed a document agreeing to remove his review and the court ordered Google to take it down.

Another similarly-fake lawsuit followed soon after. Levy, working with Eugene Volokh, has managed to uncover the shady reputation management firm behind a stack of bogus libel lawsuits, all filed against nonexistent defendants.

Smith makes no mention of those efforts in his article questioning Google's actions. He does, however, point to Pissed Consumer's uncovering of the same tactics earlier in the year: bogus lawsuits designed from the ground up to obtain court orders for the delisting of URLs.

In the spring, Pissed Consumer reported that a number of suspicious lawsuits with purportedly bogus defendants were filed in California courts to obtain defamation court orders enabling URLs to get delisted by Google. In October, Pissed Consumer sued a reputation management company and attorneys that are alleged to be behind “sham lawsuits” and “stooge defendants” that were used to fool Google into removing undesirable consumer reviews.

Undoubtedly, Pissed Consumer's work pushed Google to scrutinize defamation court orders more closely, but Levy's findings likely tipped the scale. Smith feels these bogus lawsuits may have been a factor, but the legal documents he's been forwarded by other attorneys don't share the same "sloppiness" and "commonalities" of those Pissed Consumer uncovered.

This change in policy obviously poses problems for those who have obtained court orders for delisting.

For the attorneys and their clients who are now failing to procure intervention on the part of Google after they have gone through ofttimes-lengthy and costly litigation processes, the abrupt apparent change in policy and lack of explanation are upsetting and confusing.

Of course, the people to blame for this policy shift aren't employed at Google. They work for -- or run -- sketchy reputation management services that overpromise and underdeliver. A few thought they'd found a loophole in the legal system. It has worked for some, but that little fraudulent joyride is now apparently over.

But Google never had to comply with these orders in the first place -- even those obtained legitimately. Section 230 of the CDA says Google isn't legally responsible for third-party postings, which would basically be everything the search engine indexes. If it has been compliant in the past, it has been going above and beyond what's legally expected of it.

As legitimate lawyers are aware (or at least should be…), the proper target for a defamation lawsuit is the author of the libelous statements. Targeting service providers for third-party content is the wrong way to handle this.

Smith points out that the new Google status quo sucks for victims of defamation, who have often found the search engine to be a relief valve of sorts that allowed them to see unfavorable statements delisted without having to take on more antagonistic sites like Ripoff Report head-on. But while it's true addressing online defamation can be expensive and fatiguing, Google's willingness to allow plaintiffs to cut corners hasn't done it any favors.

Plaintiffs represented by Smith's colleagues aren't the only ones who are going to be hurting.

If this new paradigm becomes status quo, the attorneys expert in these matters will likely halt assisting new clients, because there will be no way to reasonably predict positive outcomes, and risk of failure will be too high.

Once again, some of the blame for the current situation rests on those who have "predicted positive outcomes" based on using search engines as a proxy defendant. If attorneys (and reputation management firms) hadn't gotten into the habit of sending orders to Google, rather than seeking out the online commenters behind the libelous statements, this decision wouldn't be so difficult to take.

Filed Under: bogus lawsuits, cda 230, defamation, delisting, reputation management, search engine optimization, section 230
Companies: google

Convicted Felon Ask Google To Delist Multiple Government Websites Because His Name Is Protected By 'Common Law Trademark'

from the 'add-it-to-my-fuckups-tab' dept

You don't often see the FBI's website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there's someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI's press release onto his own website as part of a "book" he was "writing," and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn't create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.

Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.

There are many reasons to form a trust. Jerdine's reason -- an apparent SEO gambit -- is none of them. Jerdine, like many people who don't understand search engines, the internet, intellectual property law, or the Streisand effect, seems to believe if he shouts "TRADEMARK and/or COPYRIGHT" loudly enough, magical things will happen.

Here's the text of his DMCA takedown request, which compares favorably to the word salad periodically passed around Facebook as a supposed way for users to "reclaim" their copyrights from Big Blue.

Copyright of trade-name/trademark ANTHONY LEWIS JERFIBE TRUST including any and all derivatives and variations in the spelling, i.e. NOT limited to all capitalized names: ANTHONY LEWIS JERDINE TRUST, JERDINE, ALJ, ANTHONY JERDINE, JERDINE ANTHONY, ANTHONY L. JERDINE, AJ JERDINE, ALJ JERDINE, ANTHONY LEWIS JERDINE, or any derivatives thereof are under Copyright 1989. Said common-law trade-name/trademark, ANTHONY LEWIS JERDINE TRUST

That's the "description" of the "work" Jerdine feels Google should delist, somehow misconstruing his granted trust (obtained April 2016) to be an IP shelter for his tarnished name and any variation of it that might appear on sites where his criminal misdeeds have been detailed.

You might be able to copyright/trademark a name, but you can't stop people from using it when writing about you. McDonald's is a trademarked name, but anyone can write about McDonald's without stepping on its IP protections. The same goes for Jerdine's name, attached or unattached to his trust.

Because there's no requirement that users understand the laws they're invoking when filing takedown requests, Jerdine is asking Google to go ahead and delist ENTIRE websites simply because unfavorable things about him appear somewhere in their pages. In addition to demanding Google remove the FBI's entire website from its listings, Jerdine also wants a large number of public records sites kicked (entirely) to the search results curb.

https://www.freecourtdockets.com/
https://www.hbcumoney.com/
https://www.usmarshals.gov/
https://www.justice.gov/
https://www.dln.com/
https://www.bustedmugshots.com/
https://www.plainsite.org/
https://www.yumpu.com/
https://www.static1.1.sqspcdn.com/
https://www.docketindex.com/
https://www.soldierx.com/
https://www.uscourts.gov/
https://www.sconet.state.oh.us/
https://www.gpo.gov/
https://www.intelius.com/
https://www.truthfinder.com/
https://www.beenverified.com/
https://www.courtlistener.com/
https://www.casetext.com/
https://www.cleveland.com/
https://www.ohio.gov/
https://www.mortgagefraudblog.com/
https://www.law.justia.com/
https://www.topix.com/
https://fbi.gov/
https://www.ffiec.gov/

Jerdine is so concerned about the "misuse" of his name he can't even be bothered to target the specific URLs containing information about him. Not that it matters, Google hasn't delisted anything and Jerdine's reputation, while under new mismanagement, hasn't really gained any ground.

Filed Under: anthony lewis jerdine, copyright, delisting, dmca, fbi, search, trademark
Companies: google