If a site is unresponsive to your DMCA take down request letter, simply find its hosting company and submit it to them. Most Hosting companies are legally bound to respond and remove the infringing material.
Simply type in the sites name on any one of these online resources to find the hosting company. Visit the hosting companies website and look for privacy or legal to obtain contact information to submit your DMCA request. If you do not see any of these, simply submit a support ticket or contact any support email given. Most all Hosting companies will respond fairly quickly upon receiving your request. Be patient, as some take time, but most all will return a response and remove the material if they are hosting the site.
http://myip.ms/info/whois/
http://website.informer.com/
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/
If you took the picture you own it and can remove it anywhere on the web with a DMCA takedown letter
Here is a sample DMCA Takedown letter for you to insert your own information to take down a photo of you that has been posted on the web without your permission. By digital law, the site must take down your picture, if they do not, contact the hosting company and they will.
SAMPLE DMCA TAKE DOWN NOTICE
My name is INSERT NAME and I am the INSERT TITLE of INSERT COMPANY NAME. A website that your company hosts (according to WHOIS information) is infringing on at least one copyright owned by my company.
I am the copyright owner to a picture that was copied onto your servers without my permission.
The unauthorized and infringing copy can be found at:
PROVIDE WEBSITE URL
This letter is official notification under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”), and I seek the removal of the aforementioned infringing material from your servers. I request that you immediately notify the infringer of this notice and inform them of their duty to remove the infringing material immediately, and notify them to cease any further posting of infringing material to your server in the future.
Please also be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to remove or disable access to the infringing materials upon receiving this notice. Under US law a service provider, such as yourself, enjoys immunity from a copyright lawsuit provided that you act with deliberate speed to investigate and rectify ongoing copyright infringement. If service providers do not investigate and remove or disable the infringing material this immunity is lost. Therefore, in order for you to remain immune from a copyright infringement action you will need to investigate and ultimately remove or otherwise disable the infringing material from your servers with all due speed should the direct infringer, your client, not comply immediately.
I am providing this notice in good faith and with the reasonable belief that rights my company owns are being infringed. Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved.
Should you wish to discuss this with me please contact me directly.
Thank you.
YOUR NAME
Address
City, State Zip
Phone
E-mail
SAMPLE DMCA TAKE DOWN NOTICE
My name is INSERT NAME and I am the INSERT TITLE of INSERT COMPANY NAME. A website that your company hosts (according to WHOIS information) is infringing on at least one copyright owned by my company.
I am the copyright owner to a picture that was copied onto your servers without my permission.
The unauthorized and infringing copy can be found at:
PROVIDE WEBSITE URL
This letter is official notification under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”), and I seek the removal of the aforementioned infringing material from your servers. I request that you immediately notify the infringer of this notice and inform them of their duty to remove the infringing material immediately, and notify them to cease any further posting of infringing material to your server in the future.
Please also be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to remove or disable access to the infringing materials upon receiving this notice. Under US law a service provider, such as yourself, enjoys immunity from a copyright lawsuit provided that you act with deliberate speed to investigate and rectify ongoing copyright infringement. If service providers do not investigate and remove or disable the infringing material this immunity is lost. Therefore, in order for you to remain immune from a copyright infringement action you will need to investigate and ultimately remove or otherwise disable the infringing material from your servers with all due speed should the direct infringer, your client, not comply immediately.
I am providing this notice in good faith and with the reasonable belief that rights my company owns are being infringed. Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved.
Should you wish to discuss this with me please contact me directly.
Thank you.
YOUR NAME
Address
City, State Zip
Phone
How to find the owner of a website
First, look for contact information on the website or web page you are seeking the author of. Most people do take credit for their work.
Of course, there are exceptions. In these cases you will need to do some detective work. If the website has its own domain name, such as "example.com" (for www.example.com), you can make a start on tracking down that information by performing a "whois search" for the domain name of the site. There are many websites available that provide free whois searches; the preceding link is just one of them. A whois search will tell you who registered the site, and who the technical contact persons are. You can then attempt to contact those individuals. If they are not responsive, which is not uncommon due to the large quantity of spam emails received by addresses in the whois database, you should also look at the "domain servers" or "DNS servers" listed at the end of the whois information. These are the computers responsible for giving out the IP address of the website; they should belong to the hosting company, or to the parent company of the hosting company. This will usually give you the name of the hosting company, and you can then visit their site and make contact with them. When the owners of a website do not wish to be identified this is often the only method that works.
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/owner.html
Of course, there are exceptions. In these cases you will need to do some detective work. If the website has its own domain name, such as "example.com" (for www.example.com), you can make a start on tracking down that information by performing a "whois search" for the domain name of the site. There are many websites available that provide free whois searches; the preceding link is just one of them. A whois search will tell you who registered the site, and who the technical contact persons are. You can then attempt to contact those individuals. If they are not responsive, which is not uncommon due to the large quantity of spam emails received by addresses in the whois database, you should also look at the "domain servers" or "DNS servers" listed at the end of the whois information. These are the computers responsible for giving out the IP address of the website; they should belong to the hosting company, or to the parent company of the hosting company. This will usually give you the name of the hosting company, and you can then visit their site and make contact with them. When the owners of a website do not wish to be identified this is often the only method that works.
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/owner.html
Kevin Bollaert vs. The People...and the verdict is in..., Guilty! and All the People Say AMEN!
http://adamsteinbaugh.com/2015/02/02/kevin-bollaert-convicted-of-extortion-in-yougotpostedchangemyreputation-case/
Kevin Bollaert Convicted of Extortion in YouGotPosted/ChangeMyReputation Case
Kevin Christopher Bollaert has been convicted of 27 counts of felony extortion and identity theft in connection with his operation of revenge porn site YouGotPosted.com and its extortionate partner, ChangeMyReputation.com. Bollaert was acquitted of conspiracy and one charge of identity theft. More than thirty women testified to payments demanded by Bollaert’s operation.
This is the first conviction — anywhere — of a revenge porn site owner. Casey Meyering, another site owner with a scheme identical to that of Craig Brittain, who reached a settlement with the FTC last week, also faces trial in California on extortion charges. Hunter Moore, the progenitor of so-called “revenge porn” sites, faces trial in March for alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. None, including Bollaert, have been charged under California’s “revenge porn” statute, which was both (1) passed after Bollaert’s arrest; and (2) is inapplicable to the people running revenge porn sites by operation of CDA § 230.
I first identified the extortionate and fraudulent practice of Bollaert and his partner, Eric Chanson, almost a year before Bollaert’s indictment. 1 The state’s evidence — which I will detail in an update to this post later this evening — demonstrated that Bollaert operated both the revenge porn site and ChangeMyReputation, which purported to be an independent company that could remove the photos from YouGotPosted.com. Chanson, at some point — apparently after my initial post — asked Bollaert to disassociate Chanson’s name from the sites, but Chanson’s accounts were used to establish the means of soliciting payments through ChangeMyReputation. My research demonstrated that, among other things, emails sent from both YouGotPosted and ChangeMyReputation originated from the same San Diego IP address, and that the “ChangeMyReputation” operator could not identify a single other site from which photos could be removed. At the time, I called this practice “extortionate.”
Please forgive this moment of schadenfreude: 2
After a friend — who shall remain nameless, but to whom much gratitude is owed — assisted in terminating the site’s PayPal account, Bollaert began demanding that victims pay him in Amazon gift cards. Bollaert shut down the sites almost immediately after law enforcement contacted him.
I won’t pretend to have an educated guess as to the amount of time Bollaert faces, but it’s safe to say that it’s substantial. While I could not attend the trial, I do hope to attend the sentencing.
Bollaert did raise what appears to be a defense based, in part, on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I would be surprised if this verdict were not appealed, as it’s circumspect as to whether the extortion and, in particular, identity theft charges impermissibly treat Bollaert as a publisher, which would prevent prosecution at the hands of state authorities.
This is the first conviction — anywhere — of a revenge porn site owner. Casey Meyering, another site owner with a scheme identical to that of Craig Brittain, who reached a settlement with the FTC last week, also faces trial in California on extortion charges. Hunter Moore, the progenitor of so-called “revenge porn” sites, faces trial in March for alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. None, including Bollaert, have been charged under California’s “revenge porn” statute, which was both (1) passed after Bollaert’s arrest; and (2) is inapplicable to the people running revenge porn sites by operation of CDA § 230.
I first identified the extortionate and fraudulent practice of Bollaert and his partner, Eric Chanson, almost a year before Bollaert’s indictment. 1 The state’s evidence — which I will detail in an update to this post later this evening — demonstrated that Bollaert operated both the revenge porn site and ChangeMyReputation, which purported to be an independent company that could remove the photos from YouGotPosted.com. Chanson, at some point — apparently after my initial post — asked Bollaert to disassociate Chanson’s name from the sites, but Chanson’s accounts were used to establish the means of soliciting payments through ChangeMyReputation. My research demonstrated that, among other things, emails sent from both YouGotPosted and ChangeMyReputation originated from the same San Diego IP address, and that the “ChangeMyReputation” operator could not identify a single other site from which photos could be removed. At the time, I called this practice “extortionate.”
Please forgive this moment of schadenfreude: 2
After a friend — who shall remain nameless, but to whom much gratitude is owed — assisted in terminating the site’s PayPal account, Bollaert began demanding that victims pay him in Amazon gift cards. Bollaert shut down the sites almost immediately after law enforcement contacted him.
I won’t pretend to have an educated guess as to the amount of time Bollaert faces, but it’s safe to say that it’s substantial. While I could not attend the trial, I do hope to attend the sentencing.
Bollaert did raise what appears to be a defense based, in part, on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I would be surprised if this verdict were not appealed, as it’s circumspect as to whether the extortion and, in particular, identity theft charges impermissibly treat Bollaert as a publisher, which would prevent prosecution at the hands of state authorities.
Notes:
- I don’t know whether law enforcement relied on my research in targeting Bolleart. I can only hope. ↩
- Perhaps inappropriately so. My contribution amounted to writing a blog post. The real credit goes to the law enforcement officers and prosecutors who were willing to listen and try a difficult case, the attorneys who sued these guys pro bono, and, most importantly, the dozens of victims who were willing to speak up. ↩
http://adamsteinbaugh.com/2015/01/29/craig-brittain-settles-with-ftc-isanybodydown-david-blade-story-changes/
Craig Brittain Settles With FTC Over Revenge Porn Site “IsAnybodyDown”, “David Blade” Story Changes (Again)
It’s been almost two years since we last heard from Craig Brittain, one-time proprietor of revenge porn site “Is Anybody Down?”, but he has reappeared to apologize for the harm that his site laid upon its hundreds of victims, promising to make amends by returning the payments he extorted through his fake “lawyer,” “David Blade III.”
Just kidding. Craig entered into a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over his site and, meanwhile, joined the feral tornado known as Gamergate. He’s busy setting the record straight about the conspiracy theories that birthed “David Blade.” But it’s difficult to set the record straight when you can’t keep your story straight.
What?
The background: In late 2011, Craig Brittain and a partner started a revenge porn site known as “Is Anybody Down?” To get nude photos for the site, Brittain — who has been accused of impersonating a woman online in order to harass her — posed as a woman on Craigslist personals ads. To have the photos removed from the site — requests Craig Brittain openly mocked — victims had to pay $250 to “The Takedown Lawyer”, “David Blade III”, who claimed to be a “pro bono” public defender in New York who went to college with Brittain and could get photos removed within hours.
It was a dumb scheme poorly implemented. Brittain himself registered the domain for “David Blade” — the site’s only advertiser 1 –and First Amendment attorneys Marc Randazza and Ken White discovered that emails from Brittain and “David Blade” were being sent from the same Colorado Springs IP address, at which point the “Takedown Lawyer” was quickly replaced by the “Takedown Hammer”, offering the exact same ‘service.’ Brittain, in turn, tried to use copyright law to force Popehat.com to remove the David Blade emails.
After claiming that his critics — myself included — were being paid $350,000 to criticize his site and that the David Blade emails are utter forgeries, 2 Brittain shuttered “Is Anybody Down?” in March or April of 2013 because he didn’t like running it. By pure coincidence, CBS reported that an unnamed federal agency was preparing an investigation right about the same time.
Sure enough, the FTC announced today that it had entered into a consent decree — similar to the settlement of a lawsuit or a plea deal — with Brittain. The FTC’s complaint recounts the Craigslist scheme and the David Blade scam. Under the agreement, Brittain denies the allegations, but agrees to destroy the material he posted on his site, is prohibited from posting nude photos in the future, is prohibited from pretending to be another person online in connection with a business, and has to keep the FTC apprised of his current employment.
Two copycats of Brittain’s scheme — including one who copied, name and all, the “Takedown Hammer” website — have since been indicted in California for extortion. One, Kevin Bollaert, is currently on trial.
Actually, My Revenge Porn Site Was Good (But Revenge Porn Doesn’t Exist)
With criticism among some Gamergate devotees bubbling, Brittain penned a screed attempting to explain that “revenge porn” isn’t even real — it’s just a “fictional narrative like ‘Rape Culture'” — and, actually, his website was good: it was the target of a secret operation by the Chinese military and resulted in “no less than 200 of the women pictured” were offered modeling contracts for upwards of $100,000. In the end, Craig says, his revenge porn site caused “zero damage.” Besides, those photos were posted with “consent” because they were uploaded publicly, and “revenge porn” is “the equivalent of” sharing screenshots of “embarrassing tweets.” IsAnybodyDown was actually a “journalism website.”
Nobody believed that, and criticism soon focused on David Blade.
The Many Faces of “David Blade III”, Also Known As Craig Brittain.
Brittain’s story about the real identity of “David Blade” has one consistent component: it’s always evolving, and it’s never Craig Brittain.
Craig’s most cohesive explanation is on video:
From this, and elsewhere, we can glean some important ‘facts':
Brittain: Please Prove My New Story Wrong. (Okay.)
After years of claiming that “David Blade” was the creation of ex-employees of DMCA.com starting a new venture, the story now is that these weren’t ex-employees of DMCA.com, but the whole “Takedown Hammer” site was DMCA.com. Brittain has “paperwork” proving as much, but he can’t share it.
Brittain further explains that while he simply owned the domains TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com, the site was always hosted on a server belonging to DMCA.com — that “the domain was only used as a redirect to dmca.com’s server” — a statement he repeated several times. 3 He invites someone to prove him wrong:
Unfortunately for Brittain, records kept by DomainTools conclusively demonstrate otherwise.
When IsAnybodyDown first began to advertise the “Takedown Lawyer,” the revenge porn site claimed to be hosted on a server in Romania. Whether this is true is unclear, as IsAnybodyDown relied upon Cloudflare to mask its true IP address, but we’ll assume this was a rare moment of honesty from Brittain.
We can make that assumption because the records for TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com show that those sites were hosted on Romanian servers. 4 It would be quite the coincidence if DMCA.com were to have hosted a startup extortion business using Romanian servers when the only website they served, IsAnybodyDown, also claimed to be hosted on Romanian servers.
It gets worse. Not only were TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com hosted on a Romanian server, they were — by the sheerest coincidence — hosted on the same Romanian IP address 5 as Trolldown.com, a site created by Brittain to espouse his theories that his critics were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by “Big Porn” to criticize him. In other words, Craig’s assertion that he simply controlled the domains for “David Blade”, and that the “Takedown Hammer” websites were hosted on DMCA.com’s servers is a demonstrable fabrication.
But I didn’t make any money and it was two years ago. And thoughts on the FTC
Brittain now claims that he didn’t make any money from IsAnybodyDown, or from “David Blade.” That would seem to contradict what he told CBS: that he made upwards of $4,000 per month. One of these is a lie.
Since shuttering his sites, Brittain has apparently found some success, buying a BMW as a testament to his support for the Gamergate cyberspasm.
Perhaps before he rewards himself with a luxury car, he should pay back the people he extorted through a wire fraud scheme.
The FTC consent order is pretty toothless. Brittain doesn’t have to pay anyone back, even though he apparently could afford it and, according to the FTC, he made approximately $12,000 from his scam. Its only real effect is that Brittain can’t operate a similar site in the future, and he has to tell the FTC where he’s working in the future. It’s little deterrence to other revenge porn site operators: if you shut down your site, you’ll get a public reprimand, but nothing else. Keep the change.
UPDATE (1/31/15): Craig Brittain’s apology — and DMCA.com’s response.
Brittain has penned another screed apologizing for the “damage” his site has done, which would seem to contradict his post three weeks ago, when he claimed his site caused “no damage” and was actually good. And, just two days before the FTC settlement was announced, Craig claimed that Hunter Moore — the progenitor of the revenge porn genre — “didn’t hurt anyone.” Brittain also claims that “financial penalties were not issued was that I was able to demonstrate that I did not make any financial gain from IAD, and in fact, I am currently already struggling and largely in debt[.]” Last month he claimed to be making “six figures” and that he had just spent a pretty penny on a BMW — not to mention his prior claim to CBS that he was making thousands of dollars per month off of IsAnybodyDown.
Brittain also responds to the above, regarding Craig’s constantly-evolving claims about who operated his extortionate “Takedown Hammer” websites:
Second, 301 redirects, on the other hand, send a visitor from that website to another address altogether. So, had 301 redirects been used to redirect visitors from TakedownLawyer.com to a site operated by DMCA.com, that transition would have been apparent, as visitors could tell that the URL had changed. That’s not what happened when people visited TakedownLawyer.com. Moreover, why would an established company like DMCA.com start a new venture and have Craig Brittain of all people register the domain and direct it to their own website?
Third, after sharing Brittain’s statement with DMCA.com, I spoke with the company’s CEO, Che Pinkerton. Asked whether DMCA.com had ever worked with Brittain, “David Blade,” or either of the “takedown” sites, Pinkerton was unequivocal. “Absolutely no way, under any circumstances whatsoever. I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Pinkerton noted that he was “familiar with [IsAnybodyDown] only because many of our clients were his victims”, as DMCA.com assists people in issuing copyright takedown notices. Even had Brittain redirected visitors to a DMCA.com page without the company’s involvement, none of the company’s customers had ever indicated that they’d been referred to DMCA.com through Brittain’s websites.
Pinkerton added that DMCA.com was “ecstatic about the FTC decision on behalf of our many clients who have been victims of this guy… The sooner we don’t have to deal with this any longer, the better.”
Brittain, no doubt, will find some reason to change his story again, or claim that DMCA.com is lying (or, more likely, that I’m lying), or that DMCA.com has some reason to lie about him (even though Brittain has said that all of this was completely legal). I’m done with his rabbit holes. There is no way Brittain’s “David Blade” was anything less than a tool for Brittain to extort his victims and he made a good deal of money doing it. If he’s not to face charges, he should pay his victims back, and I intend to ask the FTC to rescind its consent agreement, no matter how unlikely that is.
Just kidding. Craig entered into a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over his site and, meanwhile, joined the feral tornado known as Gamergate. He’s busy setting the record straight about the conspiracy theories that birthed “David Blade.” But it’s difficult to set the record straight when you can’t keep your story straight.
What?
The background: In late 2011, Craig Brittain and a partner started a revenge porn site known as “Is Anybody Down?” To get nude photos for the site, Brittain — who has been accused of impersonating a woman online in order to harass her — posed as a woman on Craigslist personals ads. To have the photos removed from the site — requests Craig Brittain openly mocked — victims had to pay $250 to “The Takedown Lawyer”, “David Blade III”, who claimed to be a “pro bono” public defender in New York who went to college with Brittain and could get photos removed within hours.
Craig Brittain
After claiming that his critics — myself included — were being paid $350,000 to criticize his site and that the David Blade emails are utter forgeries, 2 Brittain shuttered “Is Anybody Down?” in March or April of 2013 because he didn’t like running it. By pure coincidence, CBS reported that an unnamed federal agency was preparing an investigation right about the same time.
Sure enough, the FTC announced today that it had entered into a consent decree — similar to the settlement of a lawsuit or a plea deal — with Brittain. The FTC’s complaint recounts the Craigslist scheme and the David Blade scam. Under the agreement, Brittain denies the allegations, but agrees to destroy the material he posted on his site, is prohibited from posting nude photos in the future, is prohibited from pretending to be another person online in connection with a business, and has to keep the FTC apprised of his current employment.
Two copycats of Brittain’s scheme — including one who copied, name and all, the “Takedown Hammer” website — have since been indicted in California for extortion. One, Kevin Bollaert, is currently on trial.
Actually, My Revenge Porn Site Was Good (But Revenge Porn Doesn’t Exist)
With criticism among some Gamergate devotees bubbling, Brittain penned a screed attempting to explain that “revenge porn” isn’t even real — it’s just a “fictional narrative like ‘Rape Culture'” — and, actually, his website was good: it was the target of a secret operation by the Chinese military and resulted in “no less than 200 of the women pictured” were offered modeling contracts for upwards of $100,000. In the end, Craig says, his revenge porn site caused “zero damage.” Besides, those photos were posted with “consent” because they were uploaded publicly, and “revenge porn” is “the equivalent of” sharing screenshots of “embarrassing tweets.” IsAnybodyDown was actually a “journalism website.”
Nobody believed that, and criticism soon focused on David Blade.
The Many Faces of “David Blade III”, Also Known As Craig Brittain.
Brittain’s story about the real identity of “David Blade” has one consistent component: it’s always evolving, and it’s never Craig Brittain.
Craig’s most cohesive explanation is on video:
From this, and elsewhere, we can glean some important ‘facts':
- Blade “is an attorney“, but Craig doesn’t know if Blade is an attorney.
- Blade was actually a rival revenge porn site owner.
- Blade was “one of my buddies, they invented this lawyer” — a quote Brittain claimed is inaccurate, but you can listen for yourself: 00:0000:0000:14
- Craig has no gotdam idea who David Blade is, but he totally exists and there are people who know how to contact him.
- Craig doesn’t know if David Blade exists, but he knows that “Dave” has “multiple children,” so people really need to “stop fucking with Dave.”
- Craig went to college with whoever created David Blade, but doesn’t know the names of the people who are running the operation.
- Craig doesn’t know who’s involved, except for his “contact” — “James” and Craig doesn’t know how to get ahold of them except through emailing “James.”
- The whole thing was a new operation created by former employees of DMCA.com, which helps people remove copyrighted content from the internet. And they’re in Canada, making it likely that they are actually hot models.
- Blade is actually some guy in India.
- Blade never actually existed, but was a “poltergeist“, a “complete fabrication” created by his critics.
- Craig is totally not David Blade III, Esq. What’s really made up here are emails sent by “David Blade” to a lawyer.
Brittain: Please Prove My New Story Wrong. (Okay.)
After years of claiming that “David Blade” was the creation of ex-employees of DMCA.com starting a new venture, the story now is that these weren’t ex-employees of DMCA.com, but the whole “Takedown Hammer” site was DMCA.com. Brittain has “paperwork” proving as much, but he can’t share it.
Brittain further explains that while he simply owned the domains TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com, the site was always hosted on a server belonging to DMCA.com — that “the domain was only used as a redirect to dmca.com’s server” — a statement he repeated several times. 3 He invites someone to prove him wrong:
Unfortunately for Brittain, records kept by DomainTools conclusively demonstrate otherwise.
When IsAnybodyDown first began to advertise the “Takedown Lawyer,” the revenge porn site claimed to be hosted on a server in Romania. Whether this is true is unclear, as IsAnybodyDown relied upon Cloudflare to mask its true IP address, but we’ll assume this was a rare moment of honesty from Brittain.
We can make that assumption because the records for TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com show that those sites were hosted on Romanian servers. 4 It would be quite the coincidence if DMCA.com were to have hosted a startup extortion business using Romanian servers when the only website they served, IsAnybodyDown, also claimed to be hosted on Romanian servers.
It gets worse. Not only were TakedownLawyer.com and TakedownHammer.com hosted on a Romanian server, they were — by the sheerest coincidence — hosted on the same Romanian IP address 5 as Trolldown.com, a site created by Brittain to espouse his theories that his critics were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by “Big Porn” to criticize him. In other words, Craig’s assertion that he simply controlled the domains for “David Blade”, and that the “Takedown Hammer” websites were hosted on DMCA.com’s servers is a demonstrable fabrication.
But I didn’t make any money and it was two years ago. And thoughts on the FTC
Brittain now claims that he didn’t make any money from IsAnybodyDown, or from “David Blade.” That would seem to contradict what he told CBS: that he made upwards of $4,000 per month. One of these is a lie.
Since shuttering his sites, Brittain has apparently found some success, buying a BMW as a testament to his support for the Gamergate cyberspasm.
Perhaps before he rewards himself with a luxury car, he should pay back the people he extorted through a wire fraud scheme.
The FTC consent order is pretty toothless. Brittain doesn’t have to pay anyone back, even though he apparently could afford it and, according to the FTC, he made approximately $12,000 from his scam. Its only real effect is that Brittain can’t operate a similar site in the future, and he has to tell the FTC where he’s working in the future. It’s little deterrence to other revenge porn site operators: if you shut down your site, you’ll get a public reprimand, but nothing else. Keep the change.
UPDATE (1/31/15): Craig Brittain’s apology — and DMCA.com’s response.
Brittain has penned another screed apologizing for the “damage” his site has done, which would seem to contradict his post three weeks ago, when he claimed his site caused “no damage” and was actually good. And, just two days before the FTC settlement was announced, Craig claimed that Hunter Moore — the progenitor of the revenge porn genre — “didn’t hurt anyone.” Brittain also claims that “financial penalties were not issued was that I was able to demonstrate that I did not make any financial gain from IAD, and in fact, I am currently already struggling and largely in debt[.]” Last month he claimed to be making “six figures” and that he had just spent a pretty penny on a BMW — not to mention his prior claim to CBS that he was making thousands of dollars per month off of IsAnybodyDown.
Brittain also responds to the above, regarding Craig’s constantly-evolving claims about who operated his extortionate “Takedown Hammer” websites:
I had nothing to do with any “takedown” services, with the exception of negotiated settlements through dmca.com. The domains which I owned associated in this manner were simply redirects to dmca.com’s settlement service. Via a 301 redirect, the domain will initially ping the host server (custom redirect on what was the IAD server) and then redirect to the target server. This will display the host server’s IP as the IP, even if the actual content is hosted on the target server. This is purposefully and willfully obfuscated by my detractors to smokescreen the average person with no technical skills. When you hear “David Blade, Takedown Lawyer, Takedown Hammer, etc.” they’re really talking about the dmca.com redirect. All of these things are the same thing – the legal responsibility of the host server owner (not me) and the third party service (I have no affiliation with either).First, this yet again contradicts what Brittain said on Monday — that the “takedown” websites weren’t hosted by him at all, but that he simply registered the domains and pointed them to DMCA.com via DNS. DNS is the tool by which requests for a domain name (like Google.com) are translated into the IP address where that website is hosted.
Second, 301 redirects, on the other hand, send a visitor from that website to another address altogether. So, had 301 redirects been used to redirect visitors from TakedownLawyer.com to a site operated by DMCA.com, that transition would have been apparent, as visitors could tell that the URL had changed. That’s not what happened when people visited TakedownLawyer.com. Moreover, why would an established company like DMCA.com start a new venture and have Craig Brittain of all people register the domain and direct it to their own website?
Third, after sharing Brittain’s statement with DMCA.com, I spoke with the company’s CEO, Che Pinkerton. Asked whether DMCA.com had ever worked with Brittain, “David Blade,” or either of the “takedown” sites, Pinkerton was unequivocal. “Absolutely no way, under any circumstances whatsoever. I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Pinkerton noted that he was “familiar with [IsAnybodyDown] only because many of our clients were his victims”, as DMCA.com assists people in issuing copyright takedown notices. Even had Brittain redirected visitors to a DMCA.com page without the company’s involvement, none of the company’s customers had ever indicated that they’d been referred to DMCA.com through Brittain’s websites.
Pinkerton added that DMCA.com was “ecstatic about the FTC decision on behalf of our many clients who have been victims of this guy… The sooner we don’t have to deal with this any longer, the better.”
Brittain, no doubt, will find some reason to change his story again, or claim that DMCA.com is lying (or, more likely, that I’m lying), or that DMCA.com has some reason to lie about him (even though Brittain has said that all of this was completely legal). I’m done with his rabbit holes. There is no way Brittain’s “David Blade” was anything less than a tool for Brittain to extort his victims and he made a good deal of money doing it. If he’s not to face charges, he should pay his victims back, and I intend to ask the FTC to rescind its consent agreement, no matter how unlikely that is.
Notes:
- The only other ‘advertisers’ on the site were Brittain’s partner, Chance Trahan, and their side projects ↩
- For what it’s worth, I was able to confirm that Brittain and the “Takedown Hammer” were sending emails from the same Colorado Springs IP address using the same obscure email program, DreamMail 4.6.9.2. These emails are independent of those sent to Randazza and White. The headers are here. ↩
- This would also contradict Brittain’s prior claim that Blade paid Craig a “flat, fixed fee for hosting and advertising[.]” ↩
- To be fair, Brittain could claim that when TakedownHammer.com later shifted to Cloudflare — thereby masking its true IP address — that’s when the site was hosted on DMCA.com. But given that this transition took place on March 9, 2013, within a month Brittain of ending his revenge porn site, this is unlikely. ↩
- Beginning August 6, 2012, TakedownLawyer.com was hosted at 93.114.44.79, an IP address assigned to Voxility in Romania. After ‘discontinuing’ the TakedownLawyer.com website, Brittain opened TakedownHammer.com. On November 1, 2012, TakedownHammer.com was hosted at the same IP address. Two days later, Trolldown.com — a site registered to and used by Craig Brittain — was hosted at the same IP address. Both sites continued to be hosted at the same IP address until March 9, 2013, when both were moved to Cloudflare. ↩
Witness who testified in Kevin Bollaert Trial Shares her Experience
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/feb/07/revenge-porn-california-law-bollaert/
SAN DIEGO — At some point during their 23-year marriage, a husband playfully suggested to his wife that she snap a nude photo of herself and send it to him, a little digital flirtation to add a new spark to their relationship.
The wife laughed off the suggestion, until one day in November 2012 when her husband was leaving for a work trip and asked, “How about that picture?”
Again, she treated it like a joke, but that night she snapped a cellphone photo of herself and emailed the intimate image to her husband. Over the next few months, she took another racy photo. And another. And another.
Twenty-one in all.
“They felt sacred and beautiful because they were done in love, for a man I was deeply in love with,” the woman, who lives outside California, wrote in an email to U-T San Diego. (Her name is not being revealed in this story to protect her privacy.)
“They were my gift to him,” she wrote.
Months later, the woman got a call from stranger who told her that her photos were on a website called You Got Posted.
"Every time I would see a women’s full name next to her city and state
posted next to the words
Ugotposted, not even entering this
site, I felt like crying deeply, each
time, feeling the horror, the terror of it all washing over me again and again.
It is like being raped and hung up naked and exposed in front of the entire
world.
You want to take down your naked
pictures so badly, so desperately you want to tear them down before anyone you
know sees them, for they are a very private part of yourself that you only
meant to share with another whom you loved, not the many sexual predators who
came to this site. Each new comment
from these strangers who came across it, felt like being violated and another
stone being thrown into your heart.
You
feel ashamed and dirty. You never forget
it and live with that deep wound for the rest of your life. The site raped the heart and soul of many
women and men too, who loved these women.
It will haunt us all, for the rest of our lives. I too, was posted on this horrific
site. "
It’s a practice commonly referred to as revenge porn, because photos are often submitted by spurned exes.
Last week, a San Diego jury found Kevin Bollaert, 28, guilty of more than two dozen felony counts related to
UGotPosted.com and its sister site, ChangeMyReputation.com, through which some of the victims were charged hundreds of dollars to get their photos taken down.
The case is being described as a landmark in California, the first conviction for an operator of a revenge porn website.
“Just because you’re sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act, you will not be shielded from the law or jail,” Attorney General Kamala Harris said in statement issued the day after the verdicts.
The office’s eCrime unit was created in 2011 to investigate identity theft and technology crimes including cyber-exploitation, the term Harris has said is more accurate to describe this type of crime than “revenge porn.”
At least one of the victims in the Bollaert case would agree.
“FOR A GOOD TIME, SHE CAN BE FOUND AT THIS ADDRESS,” a commenter wrote on You Got Posted under the photo of the aforementioned wife, a mother of two teenagers who ran a daycare out of her home. The commenter typed her house number and street name. Her hometown was posted as well.
“This was not porn,” she explained in her email. “These postings were like hate crimes.”
The Attorney General’s Office prosecuted Bollaert in San Diego, and is preparing to go to trial in Napa County on a similar case involving Casey Meyering, who is accused of running a website called
Winbystate.com. It, too, featured nude photos that were posted without the subjects’ permission and required them to pay as much as $250 if they wanted the photos taken down, prosecutors said.
“We’re talking about large scale operators,” said Daniel Suvor, Harris’ chief of policy. “Going after the big fish is sort of the way that we’re thinking about this.”
In 2013, California adopted a law against cyber-exploitation, making it a misdemeanor punishable by fines and jail time. A dozen other states, including Arizona, Illinois and Maryland, have passed similar laws. New Jersey’s 2003 invasion of privacy law, enacted before the term “revenge porn” became prominent, is considered the broadest.
California’s law was expanded this year to including protections for “selfies,” photos taken by the victims themselves. The previous version only protected photos taken by others and it required prosecutors to prove the suspect had intentionally inflicted emotional distress upon the victim, both criticisms of the original law.
The American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the initial bill, citing free speech concerns.
The first person convicted under California’s revenge porn statute was Noe Iniguez of Los Angeles, who was accused of posting a topless photo of his ex-girlfriend on her employer’s Facebook page, along with several derogatory comments. He was sentenced in December to a year in jail and placed on probation for 36 months.
Experts say revenge porn, or cyber-exploitation, is a bigger problem than many people realize. Hundreds of sites exist on the Internet, each of which can attract hundreds of thousands of visitors.
In its first case against a revenge porn operator, the Federal Trade Commission announced late last month that it had reached a settlement with Craig Brittain of Colorado Springs, whose site was called Is Anybody Down. Brittain is now banned from publicly sharing nude videos or photos of people without their permission.
Last year, Hunter Moore, described in media accounts as a “revenge porn pioneer” and “the most hated man on the Internet,” was arrested for running the site
IsAnyoneUp.com, which at one point boasted up to 350,000 unique visitors in a day. Hunter was indicted in Los Angeles federal court along with Charles Evens on 15 felony counts including conspiracy and unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.
Moore is accused of paying Evens to hack into emails to steal the sexually explicit photos featured later on Is Anyone Up. The site is now defunct.
According to a 2012 article in Rolling Stone, Moore contended his site was protected under the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields online service providers from legal action because of content posted by a third party.
“It’s the law that allows Facebook, Twitter and Yelp to operate…,” said Teri Karobonik, a staff attorney with the New Media Rights program at San Diego’s California Western School of Law. “You can see how it can get particularly dicey for a lot of sites when it comes to how they monitor content.”
The case is headed to trial in March.
Deputy Attorney General Tawnya Boulan Austin argued in the Bollaert case that the defendant wasn’t merely providing a forum for others to post content, but that he actively “curated” the images and comments.
He was convicted of 27 counts of identity theft and extortion, felony crimes that could land him behind bars for up to 24 years. He is now in jail, awaiting sentencing in April.
Some victims in the Bollaert case used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to get their photos removed from the website, claiming they — each of the individual victims — owned the copyright.
Karobonik said copyright law has helped some victims get photos removed from a website like
UGotPosted.com, but the photos often reappeared elsewhere on the Internet. “It actually becomes a whack-a-mole problem of trying to track down all of these sites,” she said.
The wife who took racy photos for her husband said her images have appeared on hundreds of websites since 2013. She contacted the webmasters and hosting companies, and most agreed to take down her photos within 24 hours.
Bollaert’s site was different, she said. It took much more effort, and hiring a lawyer, to get her photos removed.
“I went into hiding,” she explained. “I couldn’t go out. I thought, ‘I can’t meet anyone’s eyes.’ I was thinking they might recognize me.”
Her nightmare took a turn right after the verdicts, when Bollaert was taken into custody.
“I feel like I have a new life,” she said.
Staff librarian Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.FBI is top notch!
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