Jose Arcaya Ph.D., Esq., Etc. is a lawyer/psychotherapist in New York. Many lawyers have to assume the role of psychotherapist; Arcaya appears to have actual qualifications.
One of those qualifications is sensitivity, apparently. A former client left a negative review on Yelp. The review primarily complained about how Arcaya treated the client:
I hired Arcaya to help with a case. I asked him at the outset if he had handled these matters before and he said yes. The ensuing performance suggests otherwise.
When I mentioned his truly pitiful performance he implied that it was my fault. When i reminded him that he was the lawyer and hired to do a professional job he made fun of my medical issues. Absolute scum.
This is America, so you know what happened next: Arcaya sued the client for defamation, representing himself pro se. He demanded the removal of the Yelp review, $80,000, and the cost of his time. The complaint is a bitter denunciation of the client and a smirking recitation of his past misfortunes. Arcaya demands satisfaction for being called “absolute scum” and for the statement that he “made fun” of his client’s medical issues.
The statement that Arcaya is “absolute scum” is a classic example of insult, rhetorical hyperbole, and opinion: it can’t be proved true or false. The statement that Arcaya made fun of his client could be a potentially actionable statement of fact, though ultimately that’s probably a matter of opinion as well. Arcaya represented his client in an attempt to get him academic accommodations based on the client’s disabilities arising from brain damage. In the course of an email dispute about fees, Arcaya said:
In your dreams. You sorted me $2000. I got just $3k for the article 78. The deal had been $5K. Memory problems.
JMA
Was it over-sensitive of the client to interpret “memory problems” as a snide reference to his disability? Maybe. The tone of Arcaya’s complaint certainly suggests he’s the sort of person who would indulge in such an insult. Whether over-sensitive or not, it’s certainly not as freakishly over-sensitive as Arcaya suing over this Yelp review.
The client reached out to me, and I reached out to my friend Scott Greenfield. Scott wanted to try to talk Mr. Arcaya back from the precipice. That effort was unsuccessful. Rather than grasping that he was engaged in a self-destructive flirtation with the Streisand Effect, Arcaya doubled down. He subpoened Scott Greenfield for a deposition. No, really. Here’s the subpoena. Challenged, he filed a bizarre rant justifying the subpoena. He spun a tale that Scott threatened him with a “gang” of thousands of internet users. It sounds like a strange person’s misunderstanding of a point Scott often makes: if you act like an ass in the effort to suppress speech, the Streisand Effect will treat you unkindly.
Category: Censorship
Music Industry Wants Cross Border Pirate Site Blocks
In recent years blockades of “pirate” websites have spread across Europe and elsewhere. In the UK, for example, more than 100 websites are currently blocked by the major ISPs.
In recent weeks alone several new countries adopted similar measures, Australia, Spain and Portugal included.
Opponents of this censorship route often argue that the measures are ineffective, and that people simply move to other sites. However, in its latest Digital Music Report music industry group IFPI disagrees, pointing at research conducted in the UK.
“Website blocking has proved effective where applied,” IFPI writes, noting that the number of UK visits to “all BitTorrent” sites dropped from 20 million in April 2012 to 11 million two years later.
The key to an effective blocking strategy is to target not just one, but all leading pirate sites.
“While blocking an individual site does not have a significant impact on overall traffic to unlicensed services, once a number of leading sites are
blocked then there is a major impact,” IFPI argues.For now, however, courts have shown to be among the biggest hurdles. It can sometimes take years before these cases reach a conclusion, and the same requests have to be made in all countries.
To streamline the process, copyright holders now want blocking injunctions to apply across borders, starting in the European Union.
“The recording industry continues to call for website blocking legislation where it does not already exist. In countries where there is already a legal basis for blocking, procedures can be slow and burdensome,” IFPI writes.
Garry Trudeau Punches Down
Last week cartoonist Garry Trudeau received the George Polk award for journalism. It’s an award named in memory of a journalist murdered while covering a war. Trudeau used the opportunity to say that while murdering journalists is sub-optimal, journalists need to rethink offending people:
What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.
Running satirical pictures of Muhammad like Charlie Hebdo or the Dutch cartoonists, said Trudeau, is punching down — “attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons.”
Trudeau’s complaint received sighs of rapture from Lydia Polgreen, a bureau chief at the New York Times, an institution generally associated — justifiably or not — with free expression:
Trudeau views the controversy over “blasphemy” as a conflict between privileged Western journalists and oppressed Muslim minorities. Hence the “punching down.” But this is an uninformed, parochial, and privileged view of how blasphemy norms actually operate in the world.
I’ve surveyed two years of “blasphemy” incidents and prosecutions1 that contradict Trudeau’s comfortable perspective. The threats and intimidation aimed at Dutch tourists, the massacre in Paris: these things are horrific, but they aren’t the day-to-day story of blasphemy norms. Most blasphemy incidents don’t involve a struggle between the West and the East, between “colonizers” and “colonized.” Most blasphemy incidents involve the majority — the strong — oppressing the minority — the weak.
Attacks on Western journalists are the exception. More typically, blasphemy norms involve things like author Zainub Priya Dala being beaten by a mob in South Africa because she spoke approvingly about Salman Rushdie at a writer’s conference. It’s about Farkhunda, a mentally ill woman beaten to death by a mob of Afghan men upon a rumor that she had burned a Koran. It’s about Aasiya Noreen, a member of Pakistan’s Christian minority sentenced to death for blasphemy on the word of her fellow field hands after a dispute. It’s about 68 lawyers charged with blasphemy for protesting police abuse, on the grounds that they had criticized a police inspector by name and that name was shared by one of Muhammad’s companions. It’s about a mother and father, members of a Christian minority, burned to death before their family by a mob made up of the Muslim majority. It’s about Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger and rights activistsentenced to flogging and still facing potential beheading. It’s about Washiqur Rahman, a secular activist and blogger hacked to death with machetes in Bangladesh.
The issue is not just that it’s ridiculous to call the world’s second-largest religion an oppressed minority. It’s not just that Trudeau and his ilk treat murdering people based on cartoons as something that is the moral responsibility of the cartoonist. The issue is that anti-blasphemy social and legal norms are a tool of oppression of people who are powerless, even by the finicky standards of Trudeau and the New York Times. The concept of blasphemy is used to persecutereligious minorities, ethnic minorities, rights activists, and anyone else disfavored by the mullahs and the mob. It is used to protect power — the existing power structure of the mostly conservative, mostly traditional, mostly male-and-religious-dominated societies where the concept holds sway.
Garry Trudeau and Lydia Polgreen are the useful idiots of the brutal and the powerful. By obligingly framing the “blasphemy debate” as an issue of West v. East and journalistic power vs. Islamic powerlessness, they support and advance the blasphemy norms used to murder and oppress the genuinely powerless. They are punching down.
By contrast, journalists who confront and defy blasphemy norms are helping to make the point that religious offense is no excuse for murder. If that’s punching down, let’s punch harder.
ISP Pulls VPN Service After Geo-Unblocking Legal Threats
While VPN services have always been associated with privacy, in recent years they have bloomed into tools providing much more than a simple way to stay cloaked online.
For a relatively small fee, users of the most popular VPN services can tunnel out of their country of origin and reappear in any one of dozens of countries around the world. This opens up a whole new world of media consumption opportunities.
Citizens of the United States, for example, can access BBC iPlayer just like any other Brit might, while those in the UK looking to sample the widest possible Netflix offering can easily tunnel right back into the U.S.
This cross-border content consumption is not popular with entertainment companies and distributors. It not only undermines their ability to set prices on a per-region basis, but also drives a truck through hard-negotiated licensing agreements.
Tired of dealing with ISPs including Slingshot who offer a dedicated ‘global mode‘ VPN service for customers, last week media companies in New Zealand ran out of patience.
“We pay considerable amounts of money for content rights, particularly exclusive content rights. These rights are being knowingly and illegally impinged, which is a significant issue that may ultimately need to be resolved in court in order to provide future clarity for all parties involved,” Lightbox, MediaWorks, SKY, and TVNZ said in a joint statement.
“This is not about taking action against consumers; this is a business-to-business issue and is about creating a fair playing field.”
Before being granted limited local access to Netflix just last month, Kiwis were required to level their own playing fields by paying for a VPN service and an account at an overseas supplier in order to legally obtain a decent range of premium content. However, the media companies now want to bring an end to that free choice via legal action. Today they claimed their first scalp.
This morning Unlimited Internet became the first ISP to respond to media company pressure by pulling its geo-unblocking service known as “TV VPN” after receiving a warning letter from a lawfirm.
The letter, which has been sent out to several local ISPs, informs Unlimited Internet that its VPN service infringes the Copyright Act of 1994.
Unlimited Internet director Ben Simpson says that while his company doesn’t necessarily agree with that assertion, it has taken down the service nonetheless.
“Geo-unblocking services are a direct result of consumer demand for access to content that is not made available to the New Zealand market,” Simpson says.
“To be on the safe side, we have taken legal advice on this matter and I have made a firm call that we will sit on the sideline until a legal precedent has been set.”
YouTuber Angry Joe Swears Off Nintendo Videos After The Company Claimed His Mario Party 10 Take
Nintendo’s never-ending desire to control how YouTubers review its games or do “let’s plays” has been laughable from the start. From the trust-destroying agreement YouTubers had to enter into in order to get access to visual content to the beauracratic nightmare individuals had to wade through just to get a video approved for monetization, the whole thing started off on messy footing. And the biggest issue in all of this: Nintendo still can’t seem to grasp that these YouTubers are giving the company free advertising. Gamers love the kinds of videos these YouTubers produce. They use them to make purchasing decisions, to become interested in new games, and to fuel word-of-mouth advertising that no trumped up ad campaign could ever possibly hope to achieve. Why make any of that more complicated by creating an approval system for the videos? And, more importantly, why take away the incentive for fans to promote your games by demanding a share of their YouTube revenue?
Well, the program that’s a mere few months old has already resulted in the first major YouTuber proclaiming that Nintendo games will no longer be covered. Angry Joe (Joe Vargas) has one hell of an online following in the gaming YouTuber community and, following a spat over his Mario Party 10video, Nintendo is dead to him.
Joe “Angry Joe” Vargas, who commands nearly two million subscribers on YouTube, has decided to stop covering Nintendo games, following a dispute over a Mario Party 10 video. Angry Joe’s Mario Party 10 video was flagged by YouTube, and while it’s possible for him to keep the video online, he can’t make money off it. It’s easy to imagine why he’s upset.
He tweeted about the decision a few days ago:I hope @NintendoAmerica enjoyed the free ad revenue & coverage I generated for em. It will be my last Nintendo video. pic.twitter.com/07797eA7W4 — Joe Vargas (@AngryJoeShow) April 4, 2015
That sort of says it all, doesn’t it? Millions of gamers who went to Angry Joe for help in where to spend their gaming dollar will no longer be directed by Joe to Nintendo games via reviews and gameplay footage. For Angry Joe followers, Nintendo might as well not exist. What’s particularly insane about this is that the YouTuber Nintendo affiliate program described above wouldn’t even have applied to this particular video, since some Nintendo games, Mario Party 10 among them, don’t even qualify for coverage under the program. Why Nintendo would seek to piss off a popular YouTuber over a video for a game that wouldn’t have been granted the okay under the affiliate program is beyond me.
Here’s a case where Nintendo has locked up 100% of the ad revenue on Angry Joe’s video, despite the fact that it’s not Nintendo’s copyright-covered content viewers are coming to watch. That’s not only unfair, it’s biting the very hand feeding Nintendo’s coffers and sending the company new customers. This is the first major YouTuber to jump off the Nintendo ship, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.
Spanish Court Orders First Pirate Music Site Block
After long maintaining a reputation for being one of the softest countries in Europe on piracy, in recent years Spain has really toughened up its approach to online infringement.
Last month the strength of new legislation became evident when a Madrid court gave local Internet service providers just 72 hours to block notorious torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB).
The legal action against TPB was launched by the Association of Intellectual Rights Management (AGEDI) last year, but that wasn’t the only domain in the anti-piracy group’s sights. AGEDI and music group Promusicae had also been targeting Goear, an unlicensed music streaming service providing access to an estimated four million tracks.
Early efforts to bring down the site didn’t go to plan when a Madrid court refused to issue an order to block the site’s IP address back in March 2014. Undeterred, AGEDI responded with an appeal and complaint to the country’s Intellectual Property Commission.
Complaining that Goear provides access to copyrighted music without any permission from artists or rightsholders, AGEDI built a case highlighting commercial aspects of the site, particularly its advertising efforts which offered to put products in front of three million registered users via “millions of quality impressions.”
Goear had previously actioned some copyright takedowns, AGEDI said, but it was never enough to keep up with the rate that infringing content reappeared on the site.
After reviewing the case the National Court has now sided with AGEDI. Handing down an order similar to that issued last month in respect of The Pirate Bay, local ISPs have been given just 72 hours to block the site at the subscriber level. Currently the Goear website is hosted in the Netherlands.
“This new resolution adds to the one recently handed down in Spain against The Pirate Bay and confirms web blockades as the only effective measure to eliminate the websites that violate intellectual property rights,” said Promusicae and AGEDI president, Antonio Guisasola.
“The block against Goear means that the site will no longer be able to profit from the works of others. I always insist on the absolute need to act decisively to stop these kinds of sites that represent true unfair competition to other [authorized sites] that offer all the guarantees for consumers and producers of music.”
Whether local users will rush to unblock the site will remain to be seen. There are many dozens of similar portals offering access to the same level of content, none of which appear to be shutting down anytime soon.
Fighting Toddler ‘Porn Addiction,’ UK Lawmakers Demand Porn Sites Include Age Checks Or Face Closure
The UK’s attempts to filter the Internet of all of its naughty bits are nothing if not amusing, whether it’s the nation’s porn filter architect getting arrested for child porn, or the complete and total obliviousness when it comes to the slippery slope of expanding those filters to include a growing roster of ambiguously objectionable material. The idea of forcing some kind of overarching structure upon porn consumption in the UK is another idea that never seems to go away, whether it’s requiring a “porn license” (requiring users to clearly opt in if they want to view porn) or the latest push — mandatory age checks.
Seemingly unaware of the way the internet (or law, or the world itself) works, some UK lawmakers are now demanding that porn websites around the world include age verification systems, or face fines or closure. How exactly the UK government plans to enforce these restrictions upon a global pornography industry isn’t explained. The only thing the UK is sure of is that these restrictions are absolutely necessary for the welfare of the country’s tots:
“Providers who did not co-operate could also be fined. Mr Javid said: “If you want to buy a hardcore pornography DVD in a store you need to prove your age to the retailers. “With the shift to online, children can access adult content on websites without restriction, intentionally or otherwise. “That is why we need effective controls online that apply to UK and overseas. This is about giving children the best start in life.”
Well intentioned, perhaps, but it’s yet another example of people not realizing how the internet genie has left the bottle, and no amount of thrashing or cajoling is going to re-imprison the agitated djinn. The UK’s latest push is being propped up by a flood of recent scary headlines across the UK proclaiming that the country has a porn addiction problem among around a tenth of the nation’s 12- and 13-year-olds. In fairly typical media fashion, the storiesproclaiming this fact don’t really bother to dissect the claims or hunt down the survey’s origins.
If they had, they might discover that the survey in question was probably about as far from science as you can get without involving clowns and sacrificial altars:
“It turns out the study was conducted by a “creative market research” group called OnePoll. “Generate content and news angles with a OnePoll PR survey, and secure exposure for your brand,” reads the company’s blurb. “Our PR survey team can help draft questions, find news angles, design infographics, write and distribute your story.” The company is super popular on MoneySavingExpert.com, where users are encouraged to sign up and make a few quid. Here’s what that website says: “Mega-popular for its speedy surveys, OnePoll runs polls for the press, meaning fun questions about celebs and your love life.” So the company behind these stats about porn addiction are known for their quick and easy surveys and promise to generate headline-grabbing stats. An unusual choice, perhaps, for such a sensitive subject.”
While the group behind the effort (Childline) appears well intentioned, there are surely better ways to protect children than by scaring politicians into a global charade of internet booby whac-a-mole. Like, with actual parenting perhaps. Paying attention to what your kids do online, and intelligently explaining sexuality to them before they run into age-inappropriate content would be worlds more effective than demanding the globe’s pornography industry capitulate to the whims of the UK’s ludditical legislators.
Top Torrent Tracker Knocked Offline Over “Infringing Hashes”
In recent years Coppersurfer.tk has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers.
Running on the beerware-licensed Opentracker software, the standalone tracker offers a non-commercial service which doesn’t host or link to torrent files themselves.
The free service coordinates the downloads of 10 million people at any given point in time, processing roughly billions of connections per month.
However, since last weekend Coppersurfer.tk has been offline. Responding to a complaint from Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, hosting provider LeaseWeb suddenly pulled the plug.
According to a LeaseWeb rep “torrents are illegal” and the company had no other option than to shut down the tracker.
This came as quite a surprise to the operator, since his service doesn’t link to or host torrent files. In fact, Coppersurfer doesn’t know what titles are tracked or where all the corresponding torrents are stored.
Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million WordPress Sites
Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.
A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”
‘Mob’ Detains, Threatens Photographers Because Single Adults Are Probably All Pedophiles
To live in the US is to live in a nation of fears — most of them, irrational. The Department of Homeland Security — the eerily nationalistic-sounding phoenix that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center — has done all it can to turn Americans into government informants, where they’re encouraged to turn in complete strangers for suspicious activities like not packing enough clothes orpurchasing cookware.
The DHS fears nothing more than a person armed with a camera. If any citizen aims a lens at public transportation, infrastructure, certain manufacturing plants or government buildings, they’re assumed to be practicing the dark art of terrorism.
Terrorism is only one of the nation’s collective fears: one so seldom realized that the amount of attention paid to it by a vast number of government bodies is almost laughable.
Another fear that is almost inversely proportional to the amount of attention paid to it is child victimization, especially kidnapping and pedophilia. From a young age, parents and educators drill into kids’ heads that all strangers are inherently dangerous. This is somehow supposed to protect children from abusers despite the fact that nearly 90% of abuse is committed by someone the child knows and trusts — family members, child care providers, neighbors, close relatives, family friends, etc.
This hysteria over child sexual abuse has reached the point that being an unaccompanied adult (especially male) in an area frequented by children is considered inherently suspicious. Toronto’s Legoland exhibit turned away a 63-year-old Lego fan simply because he wasn’t accompanied by a child. The stated reason for this bizarre policy? To “protect the children.” Likewise UK’s Puxton Park, which turned away a 53-year-old man for the same reason. The explanation given by the park’s director for its stupid policy is equally stupid:
He added: ‘There is a lot in the headlines about paedophiles and things that are going on with children.’
Perfect. The media says child molestation is happening pretty much nonstop and so it must be. Therefore, no single adults allowed. The perception is the reality. But as Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip pointed out in “Thou Shalt Always Kill:”
Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile/Some people are just nice.
Combine cameras, overwrought pedophile fears, insular communities and former homeless MTV VJ Jesse Camp, stir vigorously and you end up with the sort of mob “justice” rarely seen outside of horror movies set in remote, backwoodsy locations.
“I received a call that there was a suspicious vehicle, a light brown Volvo station wagon, Massachusetts plate, and there was a male and female in the Raysal area taking pictures of some children,” says Chief Deputy, Roger Deel.
Jennifer Adkins, the mother of three kids, and a resident of Raysal, is the one who contacted Chief Deputy Deel. She also confronted the photographers, with a group of others.
Audio recording captured the encounter. You hear a McDowell resident say, “And there are no pictures of any children on there?”
“No. And you can check it, not of your kids. I can show you. Jesus Christ. We didn’t stop and approach like, yeah; you guys are making us out to be like crazy pedophiles. You guys are making us out to be people that we are not,” says Marisha and Jesse Camp.
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You all don’t look like upstanding citizens,” says Jennifer Adkins.
The audio recording of the confrontation can be heard at WVVA’s website. According to Marisha, another person threatened to “beat them and their cameras into the ground.” Whatever violence might have resulted from this confrontation was prevented when a state trooper arrived and escorted the couple out of town. But the angry crowd already had all the justification it needed for harassing, threatening and detaining the couple — and it’s every bit as eloquent as the Puxton Park director’s defense of his “no single adults allowed” policy.
A man says, “There’s just too much going on with kids getting hurt and Y’all might be cool, I’m not saying you’re not.”
That’s what irrational fear gets us: irrational behavior. Not every adult with a camera is a security threat or a pedophile. Strangers may be unknown quantities, but they are not inherently dangerous simply because they’re unknown. No combination of these factors should be considered untrustworthy by default.
But that’s where we’re at. And these irrational fears are stoked by some of the most trusted members of the community: law enforcement officials, educators and the media. Two of those three directly profit from permanently-heightened fears. The other — educators — parrot the skewed information delivered by the other two. The perception becomes the reality. And that “reality” manifests itself as the ugliness detailed above.