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All International Rights Reserved

STILAS Founder Matthew B. Greene Unleashes

Innovative New Legal Strategy for Anti-Defamation,
Unmatched by Top Law Firms
February 2, 2010

The United States has become infamous throughout the world for malicious conduct
of online defamation, and even worse for certain federal laws giving immunity to
service providers for false defamatory postings.

All of us support legitimate free speech, but certain time-tested laws still make false
defamatory speech illegal. We all agree that internet service providers should be
protected, and are not responsible for unlawful postings by their millions of users.

The problem, however, is that internet defamers are allowed to be ANONYMOUS.

Because of that alone, there is nobody identifiable to sue, only the provider is in a
position to take any action, and only the provider can detect the IP address of
uploads and postings to disclose the identity of violators.

The only real solution will be when the United States finally passes a law
requiring providers to verify the true identity of users when they first setup
their online account (i.e. require passport or ID copy), so that anonymity can
be easily taken away when content violates federal laws.

As a result of the uniquely American laws (designed more to protect criminals than
any “free speech”), most service providers flaunt their immunity. Some go so far as
to outright taunt people who want to complain, with an attitude of “Ha ha, so you
think you want to sue us – here’s some laws we’re gonna hide behind”.

Clicking on a “Report Abuse” link from almost any US provider usually takes you
through a serious of pages designed to discourage complaints, intimidate against
lawsuits, and often hide any useful contact information behind blind online forms.
The bigger they are, the bolder they filter out complaints. Google (which owns
Blogger and Blogspot) even goes so far as to outright threaten people that if their
complaint isn’t solid enough (by their high standards) they will be forced to pay large
legal costs.

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For most of the past year, STILAS has been monitoring legal articles, discussions
and cases from top law firms specializing in online anti-defamation. Unfortunately,
most of the top firms continue losing many key cases. The losing cases are those
that cling to the old concepts of proving the defamation “false”. While that is enough
to win a judgement against a defamer (if you can catch one who is anonymous), it is
not enough to penetrate the immunity of a service provider.

Some law firms have caught on that if you have a “copyright infringement” argument
then the provider will be forced to respond. All discouraging warnings behind the
“Report Abuse” button talk about only “copyright” as the only thing they will act on.
The challenge is that most false defamation does not involve copyrights.

Other law firms realized that an argument establishing a criminal violation will
penetrate provider immunity to force removal of offending content. However, most
lawyers look only for “extortion”, which requires a written demand for money (or
something of value) enforced by the threat (or action) of unlawful false defamation,
which is a direct violation of US criminal law. The challenge is that most defamers
do not do that. Even service providers to charge money for removal are not found
guilty of extortion, because they did not originate the false defamation, so it is not
enforcement of (or sufficiently connected to) the motivation for the money requested.

As Matthew Greene explains: “They are still making only the weaker arguments,
limited by preconceived notions of traditional approaches. Nobody seems to be
completely researching and leveraging the full extent of available laws. The fact is,
while free speech is protected, unlawful false defamation is not protected ‘free
speech’, and it is long time to use existing laws for their original intended purpose.
Somebody has to begin fighting harder to uphold the rule of law.”

While the intimidating “filtering” pages of providers extensively cite the US laws
protecting them, all of them tend to actually misleadingly and selectively misquote
them. For example, one law was actually intended to protect providers when they
want to voluntarily remove offensive content, stating that no content connected to
any criminal activity should be permitted, but the law is wrongly misused to claim
immunity.

What nobody wants to tell you, is that the relevant federal laws directly prohibit not
only (1) copyright infringement, but ALSO (2) trademark violations, and (3) ANY
content that is in furtherance of criminal activity. The sections of these laws that
nobody wants to write about do force providers to take action, and do impose liability
for failure to remove illegal content.

The key winning legal strategy – in a nutshell – is wider application of lesser

known and little used subsections of copyright and trademark law, combined
with more creative (but correct and direct) application of US federal criminal
laws.

To make this effective, however, any legal demand letter must clearly, fully and
overwhelmingly convince a provider’s legal department that it does in fact
have liability for the particular conduct, motivating them to take immediate
action.

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The recent and growing trend in the United States is that many providers force
victims of abuse to actually hire a law firm, file a court case, and obtain a Court order
(subpoena) compelling the online service provider to remove content or disclose the
identity of an anonymous defamer.

The real goal of highly effective lawyering for practical results is to have a Legal
Notice and Demand letter powerful (and understandable) enough to persuade the
provider to act upon its own initiative. This is precisely what was accomplished by
STILAS supervising attorneys, led by founder Matthew B. Greene.

In the first ever field test of this new innovative legal strategy, a highly aggressive
defamation site was devastated within only 36 hours, by 2 major US service
providers responding directly (and highly positively) to the STILAS demand letter,
without any need for litigation.

An up-and-coming high-tech boutique IT marketing firm in the United Kingdom

predicts: “The American legal landscape protecting false online defamation,
offending and angering the rest of the world, was just waiting for Matthew Greene to
come along, to provide the European Union and international community with this
particular solution. We think this new approach, which is serious intellectual property,
will make this man somewhat of a ‘folk hero’ to many innocent businesses who are
routinely victimized by unlawful and aggressive Americans.”

The UK-based IT firm is already considering packaging the strategy as a product or

service for syndication, as the latest defensive weapon to protect European Union
businesses (and the rest of the world) from the aggression unleashed by American
abusers hiding behind ill-conceived laws.