Four years ago, I initially set up the first “Internet law” department in the UK in my old law firm, Bains Cohen (now called Pinder Reaux) , people thought that an internet lawyer was one who gives legal advice over the Internet.

This is because there isn’t and there has never been an official area of law which is called “Internet law”. Today everyone understands what I do. Simply put, I get rid of bad or negative internet webpages. But the problem is that there are now too many pages on the internet which are bad, defamatory and malicious and the more you get rid of them the more they come back.

And despite some great achievements, my work has become more challenging each day with me and my team having to sharpen our pens regularly just in order to stay one step ahead of the game.

We have (virtually) travelled across the globe from Russia to the United States from Uzbekistan to Mexico from Turkey to Canada and so on in our quest for solutions to our clients’ personal and business reputation problems, and in the meantime I discovered that internet defamation is actually a big business for many people with the lawyers not necessarily being the winners. In fact, I cannot count the number of times me and my team had been threatened in dark internet alleyways with “Internet execution” by some of the worst characters in cyberspace who make a good living out of internet defamation.

We used to call them ‘The Complaints Barons’ because they were running websites dedicated to  complaints/defamation so that those people defamed have no choice but to ‘hire’ the ‘Barons’ services to ‘mediate’ and ‘moderate’ and ‘facilitate’ the successful removal of the defamatory content from their websites. You basically have to pay for protection.

Internet defamation is used by some as a mean of extorting money and particularly PayPal payments, getting free holidays and free restaurant meals. There is certainly a trend there and believe me when I say this because I have been involved in countless negotiations on and off the record on behalf of my suffering clients to remove defamatory content from the Internet.

Over time, issues of internet defamation have started to become more and more urgent for my clients, mainly because of the speed by which internet search engines are now delivering search results, which means I have found myself acting more and more as a troubleshooter rather than a conventional lawyer. You see, the law cannot solve all the problems in the world and internet defamation has gone far beyond being a legal issue for many and it is now already endangering the lives of many UK businesses that for reasons of internet defamation are unable to trade.

Internet defamation has now become such a specialist area requiring legal, technical and general people’s knowledge and understanding in order to get the most difficult internet law issues resolved.

Defamation against my company on forums

Read part 2 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.

Read part 3 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.

Read part 4 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.

Read part 5 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.

Get in touch here. Internet Law Experts Contact

The Internet Law Centre

By Yair Cohen

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