Bogus Lawsuit-Slinging Rep Management Firm Sued By Pissed Consumer

Furnished content.


Solvera -- a reputation management firm allegedly engaging in legal fraud to delist criticism -- is facing multiple legal problems as a result of its highly-questionable services. In late August, the Texas Attorney General filed a complaint against the company, alleging it defrauded courts by filing bogus defamation lawsuits on behalf of possibly-unaware clients, utilizing duped lawyers with bogus statements from fake defendants.This sort of behavior has been uncovered in recent months through investigations by Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and lawprof/blogger Eugene Volokh. It has also been revealed through independent research by Pissed Consumer, an obvious target of these unsavory (and illegal) reputation management tactics.Pissed Consumer is also going against Solvera. It has sued the company in Contra Costa County, California -- Solvera's backyard -- along with a number of other firms in the reputation management business and the companies they've created to act as plaintiffs in bogus defamation lawsuits.It's pretty much identical to the lawsuit Pissed Consumer filed last year against a number of defendants, including the lawyers whose name appeared on the bogus paperwork: Mark Lapham and Owen Mascott. The previous lawsuit referenced Nevada Corporate Headquarters -- the apparent origin point of some of these bogus lawsuits -- but the latest adds Solvera as a defendant.It also places much of the alleged blame on the embattled rep management firm. From the filing [PDF]:

Plaintiff is informed and believes and based thereon alleges that Defendant Solvera Group, Inc. (“Solvera”) is a California corporation incorporated under the laws of California, and orchestrated some or all of these schemes of fake litigation to remove consumer reviews.

Plaintiff is informed and believes and based thereon alleges that Defendant Solvera or Doe Corporation, operating as a reputation management company, conceived of the plan and organized the cooperation of Hair Solutions, Radonich, and Owen T. Mascott to bring the plan to fruition.Since September 2010, at least 949 individuals have posted complaints about Keranique on PissedConsumer.com. Additionally, numerous comments have been posted by third parties in response to those complaints. The majority of the comments have been negative.Plaintiff is informed and believes and based thereon alleges that at the bequest of Defendant Solvera or Doe Corporation and with the full cooperation of Defendant Radonich, Mr. Mascott filed a complaint on behalf of Hair Solutions against Radonich for defamation.In the underlying action the conspirators sought only injunctive relief. Specifically, the complaint requested an injunction that Radonich be “ordered to take all action, including but not limited to, requesting removal from the Internet search engines including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing of all defamatory, disparaging, libelous, and false statements about Plaintiff that Defendant has posted on the Internet.”Mr. Mascott filed the Complaint on January 7, 2016. On information and belief, at all relevant times Mascott knew that Radonich was not the author of the statements at issue in the Radonich Case, and thus was not a proper defendant in that case.Shortly thereafter, on January 13, 2016, Mascott filed a Stipulation for Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction with the Superior Court, containing a jurat from Radonich dated January 9, 2016. (See Exhibit 5.) On information and belief, Mascott coordinated with Radonich as Radonich’s attorney in acquiring this stipulation, such that he simultaneously represented both parties in the Radonich Case.Having obtained a stipulated injunction from the Court, the conspirators then approached various search engines including, on information and belief, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing and requested that those search engines deindex the pages of Pissed Consumer. Instead of limiting the deindexing to the pages that contained statements Radonich claimed to have posted, the request to deindex included all web pages with entries about Keranique.By engaging in this scheme, Defendant Conspirators obtained a court order under false pretenses and used the court order to persuade popular search engines to deindex every statement about Keranique, including the First Amendment protected statements of opinion and true fact posted by other individuals who were not a party to the underlying action.

0 comments, click here to add the first

With Court Ruling, Fan Subtitles Officially Copyright Infringement In Sweden

Furnished content.


Several years ago, in an unfortunate display of police bending the knee to the copyright industries, Swedish law enforcement raided the offices of Undertexter, a site chiefly dedicated to fan translations for subtitles of films. While these fan translations have been handcuffed to film piracy -- mostly through the messaging efforts of film and television content producers -- the raid registered as an extreme escalation in the battle on subtitles. Most folks have a hard time understanding why such action was taken, with most fan translations only being useful due to the content makers underserving parts of the earth that speak a variety of languages. These fan translations mostly open up those markets for makers of movies and television who have otherwise chosen not to translate their work into the relevant languages.For its part, Undertexter vowed to fight the legal action, proclaiming its work non-infringing by virtue of serving up mere dialog translations.

Undertexter.se has had a police raid this morning (July 9) and servers and computers have been seized, and therefore, the site is down. We who work on the site don't consider an interpretation of dialog to be something illegal, especially not when sharing it for free. Henrik Pontén [the copyright industry's primary henchman in Sweden], who is behind the raid, disagrees. Sorry Hollywood, this was the totally wrong card to play. We will never surrender. [...] We must do everything in our power to stop these anti-pirates. [...]

The Attunda District Court sentenced the now 32-year-old operator to probation. In addition, he has to pay 217,000 Swedish Kroner ($27,000), which will be taken from the advertising and donation revenues he collected through the site.While there were millions of subtitles available on Undertexter, only 74 movies were referenced by the prosecution. These were carefully selected to ensure a strong case it seems, as many of the titles weren’t commercially available in Sweden at the time.During the trial, the defense had argued that the fan-made subtitles are not infringing since movies are made up of video and sound, with subtitles being an extra. However, the court disagreed with this line of reasoning, the verdict shows.

0 comments, click here to add the first