forged court orders – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Terrible People Are Still Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like
from the shitheels-are-forever dept
Copyright is still high on the list of censorial weapons. When you live in (or target) a country that protects free speech rights and offers intermediaries immunity via Section 230, you quickly surmise there’s a soft target lying between the First Amendment and the CDA.
That soft target is the DMCA. Thanks to plenty of lived-in experience, services serving millions or billions of users have decided it’s far easier to cater to (supposed) copyright holders than protect their other millions (or billions!) of users from abusive DMCA takedown demands.
There’s no immunity when it comes to the DMCA. There’s only the hope that US courts (should they be actually involved) will view good faith efforts to remove infringing content as acceptable preventative efforts.
But terrible people who neither respect the First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act have found exploitable loopholes to disappear content they don’t like. And it’s always the worst people doing this. An entire cottage industry of “reputation management” firms has calcified into a so-called business model that views anything as acceptable until a court starts handing down sanctions.
“Cursory review” is the name of the game. Bullshit is fed to DMCA inboxes in hopes the people overseeing millions (or billions!) of pieces of uploaded content won’t spend too much time vetting takedown requests. When the initial takedown requests fail, bullshit artists (some of them hired!) decide to exploit the public sector.
Bogus litigation involving nonexistent defendants gives bad actors the legal paperwork they need to silence their critics. Bullshit default judgments are handed to bad faith plaintiffs by judges who can’t be bothered to do anything other than scan the docket to ensure at least some filings exist.
At the bottom of this miserable rung are the people who can’t even exploit these massively exploitable holes effectively. The bottom dwellers do what’s absolutely illegal, rather than just legally questionable. They forge court orders to demand takedowns of content they don’t like.
Eugene Volokh of the titular Volokh Conspiracy has plenty of experience with every variety of abusive takedown action listed above. In fact, he’s published an entire paper about these multiple levels of bullshit in the Utah Law Review.
Ironically, it’s that very paper that’s triggered the latest round of bogus takedown demands.
Yesterday, I saw that someone tried to use a different scheme, which I briefly mentioned in the article (pp. 300-01), to try to deindex the Utah Law Review version of my article: They sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice to Google claiming that they owned the copyright in my article, and that the Utah Law Review version was an unauthorized copy of the version that I had posted on my own site:
Welcome to the party, “I Liam.”
But who do you represent? Volokh has some idea(s).
The submitter, therefore, asked Google to “deindex” that page—remove it from Google’s indexes, so that people searching for “mergeworthrx” or “stephen cichy” or “anthony minnuto” (another name mentioned on the page) wouldn’t see it.
So what prompted Google to remove this content that “I Liam” wished to disappear on behalf of his benefactors (presumably “mergeworthrx,” “stephen cichy,” and “anthony minnuto”)?
Well, it was a court order — one that was faked by whoever “I Liam” is:
Except there was no court order. Case No. 13-13548 CA was a completely different case. Celia Ampel, a reporter for the South Florida Daily Business Review, was never sued by MergeworthRX. The file submitted to Google was a forgery.
And definitely not an anomaly:
It was one of over 90 documents submitted to Google (and to other hosting platforms) that I believe to be forgeries.
You can’t blame Google. Google deals with millions of content removal requests a year. It can’t be expected to scour every local court’s docket to ensure the court order it’s presented with is actually legitimate.
So, the bad guys get unearned wins. The only backstop tends to be the people targeted by bogus takedown notices. And they’ve got the fewest tools at their disposal.
Multiple nations all want Google to target different things. Millions of Google users expect Google to provide factual information when they perform searches. In the middle of all this, there’s a multi-billion dollar company that cannot possibly satisfy everyone, no matter how much money it earns. And so we end up with things like these, where the unpaid users are expected to police the internet to push back against bogus takedowns.
But that’s not on Google. It’s on the people who willfully abuse the system for their own gain. This is on [people like Stephen Cichy](http://In 2016, Google received a copy of a Miami-Dade County default judgment in MergeworthRX, Inc. v. Ampel, No. 13-13548 CA. 1 A certain web page, the judgment said, was libelous: 2. The reports posted on or about December 30, 2014 by Defendant, CELIA AMPEL on www.bizjournals.com regarding Plaintiffs, MERGEWORTHRX, INC. and STEPHEN CICHY %28the “Report”%29, which is available at http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2014/12/30/miamiacquisition-cpmpany-mergeworthrx-to-dissolve.html contains defamatory statements regarding Plaintiffs.2) and [Anthony Minnuto](http://In 2016, Google received a copy of a Miami-Dade County default judgment in MergeworthRX, Inc. v. Ampel, No. 13-13548 CA. 1 A certain web page, the judgment said, was libelous: 2. The reports posted on or about December 30, 2014 by Defendant, CELIA AMPEL on www.bizjournals.com regarding Plaintiffs, MERGEWORTHRX, INC. and STEPHEN CICHY %28the “Report”%29, which is available at http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2014/12/30/miamiacquisition-cpmpany-mergeworthrx-to-dissolve.html contains defamatory statements regarding Plaintiffs.2) who — along with MergeworthRX — previously used a fraudulent court order to get Google to delist critical content about them.
The problem is too big to solve. Only those hit with bogus takedown demands are able to bring these matters to the attention of the public. Google has to do what it does because it’s simply impossible to moderate content perfectly, much less at the scale Google deals with. Unfortunately, this means the good people are expected to police the bad guys using inadequate tools and limited funds. The bad guys know this and that’s why they know to head to the biggest tech shop in town and wave legal-looking paperwork around until the internet believes they’ve done no wrong.
This won’t always work and the longer these people engage in the same tired tactics, the less likely they are to work the next time around. The internet is forever. Opportunists like Stephen Cichy and Anthony Minnuto and “I Liam” are only a blink of an eye. At the end of the day, they’re still terrible people who engage in fraud to get what they want. The rest of us are at least self-assured and self-aware enough to recognize our reputations are earned.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca abuse, eugene volokh, forged court orders, suppressing speech
Feds Say Jewelry Company CEO Scrubbed Google Results With Fake Court Orders And Forged Judge's Signatures
from the sign-here-to-self-destruct dept
Juicing your SEO? Don’t like what turns up during vanity Googling? There are a few right ways to solve this problem and apparently about a million wrong ones.
Doing the wrong thing could easily make things worse. Bogus DMCA notices tend to result in Streisandings, which leads to even more negative comments and contents clogging up your search results. Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers or using stupid, compliant lawyers’ letterhead tend to have the same result.
You could get more imaginative and start filing bogus defamation lawsuits to fraudulently obtain court orders for delisting. Again, once you’ve been rousted, the best case scenario is some more Streisanding and negative ROI. At worst, you’re looking at paying legal fees and/or possibly facing sanctions for defrauding the court.
If you want the worst results and the worst punishment, you could do what this jewelry company CEO did:
In 2011, sapphire jewelry company CEO Michael Arnstein was desperate to salvage the Google results for his company. According to a lawsuit for defamation he filed in 2011, a former contractor for the Natural Sapphire Company who was fired for selling them buggy software launched a personal crusade to destroy the Natural Sapphire Company’s Google search results. The defendant never showed up in court, so in 2012, a federal judge in New York granted Arnstein a default judgment along with an injunction to de-index 54 Google results.
But more fake reviews kept popping up. So Arnstein did something extremely ill-advised. According to the feds, Arnstein rounded up the bad Google results and forged new court orders to send to Google.
Some sympathy for Arnstein is warranted. Negative reviews — even the fake ones — are hard to remove from the web. This isn’t necessarily the fault of sites hosting them, but the actions of a few hundred aggrieved companies and individuals who have tried nearly everything (legal or illegal) to have negative content and comments removed, even if they’re guilty of what’s being alleged in them.
But nuking yourself from orbit is never the answer. It wasn’t enough for Arnstein to have successfully (if fraudulently) cleaned up his search results. Nope. He just had to tell others. The feds collected multiple instances of Arnstein informing others how to fix their SEO problems USING THIS ONE ILLEGAL TRICK. From the complaint [PDF]:
No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in,” Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. “Google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor200., all in ONE DAY.
Here’s another ill-advised Arnstein statement from Courthouse News, which first reported the indictment. It opens with an unforgettable disclaimer… and ends with a statement that might make it tough for Arnstein to find representation:
“I think you should take legal advice with a grain of salt,” he allegedly wrote on Sept. 4, 2014. “I spent 100k on lawyers to get a court order injunction to have things removed from Google and Youtube, only to photoshop the documents for future use when new things ‘popped up’ and google legal never double checked my docs for validity… I could have saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing… Lawyers are often worse than the criminals.”
Arnstein wanted to clean up bogus complaints and comments from a pissed off contractor. I guess that goal has been achieved. But those results will be replaced with his criminal indictment, fraudulent behavior, and his failure to get away with it.
Filed Under: forged court orders, michael arnstein, search results, seo
Companies: natural sapphire company