Court vacates apparent fake-defendant libel takedown order in Patel v. Chan

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From The Washington Post:

About a year ago, Matthew Chan — whom I knew from another Internet free speech case— let me know that someone had apparently gotten a bogus court order aimed at removing one of Chan’s Yelp reviews. Chan, a Georgia resident, posted a negative review of Mitul Patel, a Georgia dentist, on Yelp and a few other sites. Several months later, Yelp emailed him, saying that it was considering taking his comment down because it received a court order that was issued against him, and the court concluded that his comment was defamatory.

But wait, said Chan — he had never been sued. And sure enough, the order was against a supposed Mathew Chan of Baltimore. As best we can tell, no such Mathew Chan exists in Baltimore, but in any event no Baltimorean is the author of the post. Yet the order was supposedly based on that Mathew Chan agreeing with Patel that the review was defamatory and should be removed. (Patel told the court that he did not authorize the lawsuit or sign the pleadings, though he did hire a “reputation management company” to do something.)

In any event, this led Paul Alan Levy and me to investigate what seems to be a pattern of such fake-defendant libel takedown orders — at least about two dozen seem to fit that mold, and several of them have been linked to reputation management companies run by one Richart Ruddie (such as Profile Defenders). It also led me to investigate many other shenanigans related to such orders.

Link to the rest at The Washington Post

Notice and take down is a process that is supposed to protect online hosts in response to court orders or allegations that content is illegal.

After a website receives a notice that it has published illegal content – content that infringes copyright, is libelous, etc., and the notice includes a demand that the illegal content be removed from the website, if the website operator promptly removes such content, under US and EU law, such removal limits the liability and/or provides safe harbor from claims by the copyright owner, the person libeled, etc., against the website operator.

As indicated in the OP, sometimes parties abuse the notice and take down process to remove content which is not illegal but which those parties want to suppress.

The abuse of notice and take down described in the OP takes things a step further, intentionally misrepresenting facts to the court during litigation and intentionally failing to serve the defendant with notice of the lawsuit. In a perfect world, the court would declare the plaintiff and plaintiff’s counsel in contempt and impose substantial penalties upon them.

If any TPV visitors would like to learn more about the consequences of abusing the notice and take-down remedies, check out this discussion of Online Policy Group vs. Diebold.