Oh No !! Indians Are Suing Retraction Watch to Get Articles on Anil Potti Removed

Every day takes India to another new low. What is wrong with the country, where top police office tells women to enjoy rape?

We earlier covered “Long-term Criminal Fraud at Indian Drug-maker Ranbaxy”, where their largest generic drug company made a name for selling counterfeit drugs. In publishing, we wrote about “OMICS Publishing Group An Indian Open Access Scam?”, where US-based librarian called them what they really are and apparently got into trouble. To protect their honor, those jokers threatened to sue the librarian for 1 billion dollar !!

This time, a lawyer in India sent meaningless DMCA notice out to stop Retraction Watch from covering retraction-related news regarding Anil Potti.

Wordpress Goes Legal: Sues Over Two Egregiously Bogus DMCA Notices That Were Designed To Censor

We’ve talked in the past about the unfortunate situation in which there is almost no real punishment for bogus DMCA notices. Section 512(f) of the DMCA is supposed to provide a way to get attorneys’ fees, costs and damages for bogus DMCA takedowns. In practice, however, 512(f) has been almost totally neutered by the courts (not that it was ever strong to begin with). Lately, however, there have been a series of interesting 512(f) cases, in which people, including copyright expert Larry Lessig, have been dealing with clear attempts to censor protected speech.

Today, there’s a very interesting new entrant, fighting two separate cases to go after the senders of totally bogus DMCA notices that were solely designed to censor. Automattic, the company that runs the super popular blog hosting platform WordPress.com, has filed two separate lawsuits against egregious cases of DMCA abuse. These are actually two cases that we’ve written about as examples of using the DMCA to try to censor criticism. The first involved an attempt to remove a series of articles on the excellent RetractionWatch site, run by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, that were critical of researcher Anil Potti. As we noted at the time, this appeared to be an egregious use of the DMCA to censor content that someone didn’t like. The second is the more recent example of the group Straight Pride UK giving an interview to student journalist Oliver Hotham, then deciding that they didn’t like the fact that they sounded like idiots in the interview, and tried to use the DMCA to take down the article which included the quotes they had willingly given to Hotham.

Our advice - take your loved ones out of India before the country falls apart and that can come as early as 2015 2014 2013.