Those of you who have been reading my blog for a long time (a long time) may recall that way back in 2009 I had a problem with Comcast sending service-related announcements to my wife’s email address rather than mine. Despite my best efforts, which included sending an “executive carpet bomb” email to all of the Comcast executives whose email addresses I could find.
I posted the entire saga on my blog, including posting the carpet-bomb email with all of the email addresses in it, so that the next person who wanted to get Comcast’s attention could use my list instead of having to assemble their own.
Well, in September 2024, 15 years after all that happened, a company representing Comcast attempted through puffery and vague implications of threats to intimidate me into taking down the post with all the email addresses in it. I received this email on September 13:
Subject: Content Removal Request
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 22:01:54 +0000
From: Domains General <domains@takedownreporting.com>Greetings,
We are the authorized representatives of Comcast. Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, doing business as Xfinity, is an American telecommunications company and division of Comcast Corporation. They have brought the below-mentioned domain to our attention, which we believe to be hosted by you:
URL: https://blog.kamens.us/2009/07/02/comcast-still-sending-service-announcements-to-wrong-address/
We are writing on behalf of Comcast to request the immediate removal of the above webpage on your site that is publishing unauthorized email lists of our client’s executives. These email addresses have been posted without consent, and this constitutes a violation of privacy and confidentiality.
The webpage contains email addresses of Comcast executives that were never authorized for public release.
This unauthorized posting poses a serious risk, including potential misuse of the information, and we ask that you remove this content as soon as possible to prevent further harm.
We trust that you will take swift action to rectify this matter and ensure that such content is not posted again in the future. Please confirm once the page has been removed.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this issue.
Sincerely,
Pramod G
I sent them a very brief response: “lol no”.
They sent another email address with exactly the same text on January 1, 2025, except this time it was signed “Chinmayi M” and had a screenshot of the blog post attached to it.
I replied as follows:
I’ll tell you the same thing I told you the last time you emailed me about this:
lol no
Stop sending me these stupid emails. Nothing I posted was proprietary, there’s nothing illegal about it, and I’m not going to take it down.
I thought that was the end of it until February 20, when someone from the same company who identified themselves as “Poornima K” filed a DMCA takedown request with Linode, the provider that hosts my blog.
As an aside, I need to mention that they filled out the DMCA takedown request like this:
Country United States
Street Address Pilestræde 58, 5., 1112 København K
City UK
State New YorkThat street address is clearly neither in the United States nor the UK, and “UK” is not a city, so these folks are clearly not playing with a full deck. That is, in case you couldn’t already tell from what I’ve already told you about them, they’re shady as fuck.
Anyway, this was an entirely bogus and frivolous abuse of the DMCA takedown process. It is allowed to be used only to request the removal of copyrighted material by the copyright holder, and the only copyrighted material in my blog post was the post itself, which was copyrighted by me, not by Comcast.
I unpublished the post temporarily as required by the DMCA, then filed a DMCA counter-notice with Linode which said essentially that, using this web page as a guide. That started a two-week clock for these asshats to notify Linode that they had obtained an injunction from a court prohibiting me from republishing the post, which of course they did not do because their DMCA request was completely bogus and had no basis in law. After the two weeks elapsed I republished the post, which is why it’s there in all its glory for you and the rest of the internet to read.
Abuse of the DMCA like this is unfortunately common. Companies do this because they figure most people won’t fight back, either because they don’t know their rights or because they just don’t want to take the time, so bogus DMCA takedown notices are frequently successful at suppressing legitimate content without any actual copyright violation in it. While I understand that the U.S. Congress is completely nonfunctional right now and probably will be for the rest of my life, in an ideal world they would deter this shitty behavior by amending the DMCA to enact significant penalties for misuse of the process with an individual cause of action (i.e., the target of the DMCA abuse can sue the perpetrator directly). I’m not holding my breath that this will ever happen.
Note that I have taken down content from my blog when the people or companies discussed in it contacted me and asked nicely for it to be taken down, and I probably would have done that in this case as well if they hadn’t led off with asshattery right from the start.
This kind of asshattery and the people who engage in it deserve to be publicly condemned for it.
