Dishing the Dirt II

Burlington Police Department responds to Techdirt.com article based on my blog post re: failed attempt to censor news stories about arrests, insists someone is pretending to abuse copyright law to protect reputation

Last week, I blogged about a DMCA/copyright complaint filed by so-called ‘legal agent’ Mike Ferrell who claimed to represent the Burlington, Massachusetts Police Department, demanding that Google remove news stories because it violated the copyright the police department held on certain mugshots.

When I passed the story on to Techdirt.com, I was awaiting a response from the Burlington PD to my request for comment. Over the weekend, the department contacted Techdirt.com putting the record straight.

Via “Burlington Police Insist Someone Is Pretending To Abuse Copyright Law To Censor News Stories About Arrests” by Mike Masnick, November 21, 2016.

Mike Kent, the Chief of Police in Burlington reached out to us over the weekend to let us know that whoever sent the notices, it was not his department. He says they have no one working for them by the name of Mike Ferrell, and that the Burlington PD “has no issues whatsoever with these mugshots being used.”

So… that leaves open the question of just who is impersonating the Burlington Police Department, and filing completely bogus DMCA notices in an attempt to censor news stories. It would seem that the most obvious options are those who were featured in those stories about arrests in Burlington. The very first notice that Ferrell sent, focused on stories about a particular prostitution sting, and named the nine men who were arrested, along with mugshots. It would seem that perhaps one (or more!) of those nine men would have pretty strong incentives to seek to have those stories deleted from Google.

Either way, we’ve been pointing out for years that copyright is an easy tool for censorship — and here’s yet another example. If you want something censored, just try to work out a copyright connection of some sort. In this case, it appears to have failed, but mostly because whoever filed it wasn’t very good at pretending to work for the police.

Andrew Quemere, a public records enthusiast and journalist for digboston.com, has posted a separate response from Kent, stating that he believes the complaint “was filed under a false name by a man who was arrested in a prostitution sting several years ago and who has hounded me because his photo is still on the Internet.”

If this is the case, the perpetrator has succeeded only in attracting attention to his arrest.

The term for this, coined by Masnick himself, is the Streisand Effect, referring to a 2003 story about Barbra Streisand’s failed lawsuit to have a fairly inconspicuous photo of her Malibu coastal home removed from the Internet.

Prior to Streisand filing the lawsuit, the photo had been viewed six times (twice by her own lawyers). Following the news of the lawsuit, it had accumulated around 420,000 views. The photo is currently featured prominently on Wikipedia’s dedicated Streisand Effect page.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Ferrell files any further complaints with Google.