All in all, it seems that over a six months period, Google had only remove a worryingly low amount of content.  This is not surprising at all given my own experience in dealing with Google Inc.

Individuals victims of internet defamation and harassments should be worried about this data because it means that only those with sufficient wealth, who can afford the £20,000-£40,000 (and the rest) that it costs to obtain a disclosure order from the court, can sleep well at night. The poorest and the most vulnerable members of society need to find themselves alternative solutions or live with stress, shame and anxiety until the rest of their lives.

Yair Cohen

Internet Defamation Expert

The company was established by Yair Cohen, previously a partner with Bains Cohen who had regularly acted as a solicitor for celebrities and civil servants. The company was created  to provide effective, creative and discrete solutions to problems associated with  internet defamation and specifically fast website removal services.

We are no longer connected to Bains Cohen or tied to any other law firm and our advice is completely independent and discrete and it covers all different possible solutions to internet defamation issues, not only the solutions which involve issuing expensive formal legal proceedings.  We are not regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.

Contact Yair Cohen here.

Internet Law Experts 

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.

I have now decided to part with my old firm Bains Cohen, and focus all my attention and energy, using my skills and experience to find, create and deliver fast, practical and affordable solutions to business victims of internet defamation.

Keep an eye on this blog

Get in touch here. http://www.internetlawexperts.co.uk/p/about-internet-law-experts.html

Unfortunately I was wrong. It will be difficult to argue that the conviction of Sean Duffy has made a significant impact on the numbers of internet trolling in the UK. In fact, what we are experiencing in the past 5 months since the conviction is an intensification of the problem.

There is a general belief, which unfortunately is supported by strong evidence that the criminal justice system is not equipped to deal with such matters mainly due to lack of resources. We have evidence to indicate that some police forces, may even have a policy of sending individuals who complain about internet trolling home, without even registering their complaint in the books, let alone conducting any sort of investigation.

Increasing sentences or giving police more powers without first dramatically increasing their budget to enable them to deal with this whole new area of policing would be a waste of an opportunity.

What we need to do is to make internet trolling socially unacceptable. At the moment internet trolling is a past time for many, otherwise decent, people. It gives bored individuals something to do and it is no longer part of a sub-culture.  There is sufficient legislation in place and the bottle neck is clearly at the point where identities need to be revealed and not at the Magistrates’ Court.

The only long term solution is for the government to establish a body with some judicial powers to make it easier and cheaper for individuals to have the identity of their trolls revealed to them. This in effect, will make anonymous posters think twice before engaging in any such criminal activity and will bring back accountability to the system.
Rembember to watch (particularly if you have children)!

BBC’s Inside Out programme has investigated the latest rise in internet trolling. Watch it on Monday 06/02/2012 at 19:30 on BBC1 (London) or on BBC I player.

Speak soon

Yair Cohen

Google was told to have information, which includes the blog owner’s user name, email address and IP address disclosed to Yair Cohen of  Bains Cohen who was acting for the claimant, who is fighting for defamatory content about him to be removed from the American based Blog.

Google will also need to supply information about the Gmail account associated with the creator of the Blog as well as other data which will help identify the anonymous user.

A further order to have a Claim Form against Google Inc. served outside the jurisdiction was also granted by the Judge, opening the possibility for a future injunctive claim against Google, as a party to defamation proceedings in the UK.

It is believed that this is the first time that such an order was granted by a UK court in relation to defamation proceedings concerning a UK based victim .

Google had 21 days to comply with the order.

Yair Cohen, the lawyer representing the Claimant, said: “This ruling may signal the beginning of a shift in the behaviour of internet users who can no longer be allowed to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. I am confident that we will now achieve the removal of the defamatory blog from Google’s Blogger.”

You do need to bear in mind however, the recent data which was published by Google which shows the type of requests to remove web content that Google is likely to accept.

And although the data shows that there have only been a handful of cases where Google had agreed to remove web content from Google products, one thing is certain – Google, pretty much guarantee to adhere to court orders which means that an appropriate court order can resolve internet defamation matters fairly quickly. And because these applications for court orders to remove web pages from Google products are becoming more common and are hardly ever being contested by Google, the costs of obtaining them has become much more affordable in recent months and it is likely that the costs will drop further as the process is becoming more and more of a routine.

This is good information to have for anyone who is involved in any sort of business or has been the subject of a recent threat of internet defamation against them. Unfortunately we have now reached the point where almost everyone under this planet is a potential victim to some sort of internet defamation threat, which means we are pretty much all in this together.

I have seen the devastation that online defamation brings from all different angles. From being the subject of it myself and through the experiences of small and independent businesses, as well as of  large organisations including international franchises and PLC companies. I have seen the pain in the eyes of a couple who owned a small family business for almost 15 years just for them to see it all collapsing in front of their own eyes as a consequence of a serious online reputation attack by a disgruntled employee who they had made redundant due to a previous incident of breach of trust.

This is why, some time ago, I made a real commitment to share my unique knowledge and experience in this very niche area of the law – “internet defamation” with as many business people as I can. My blogs are read by thousands of people every month and some of my work has been featured in business publications such as Forbes and Bloomberg Business Week.

I have given in my blogs, many case studies covering a variety of businesses and situations and am updating this information all the time. This gives business owners and managers across the country an opportunity to learn from the experiences of similar businesses on the internet, so that they can now prevent and deal effectively with internet defamation. Perhaps one single piece of information that you read in one of these short case studies could one day make the difference for your own business.

I now post all the latest case studies and short tips about internet defamation on Twitter so if you were ever wondering how Twitter can help your business, follow me on @cyberlawexpert and enrich yourself with very useful information on internet defamation.

@cybrelawexpert

Best wishes,

Yair Cohen

The speed by which, you can have web pages listed on first pages of Google could bring immediate and substantial amount of money to your business, literally overnight. The same speed however that leads to this immediate success could cause complete devastation to business owners who find that their reputation has been tarnished almost overnight.

The good news however, is that ‘easy come easy go’ normally works both ways which means it is possible to make negative reviews and defamatory web pages disappear to obscurity, where hardly anyone will ever view them. Speed and strength are keys to success and tasks of removal of negative reviews or defamatory web pages should not be undertaken half-heartedly.

The fact that almost everything on the internet is changeable and movable should be somewhat comforting to victims of online defamation, online reputation attacks and online harassment. Having the knowledge that nothing on the internet is set in stone gives people a real hope that their reputational issues could one day be resolved.

And if you are a victim of online defamation, online reputation attack or online harassment, you can also take comfort with the fact that search engine results are nothing but a function of volume, relevance and popularity – all of which can be created artificially by techniques such as Defensive Manipulation™ which tend to focus on demotion of internet web pages using all available means.

Furthermore, because of the very high volume of information which is posted daily on the internet, what appears to be a big problem today, could be made to disappear tomorrow and today’s hot topics are likely to have very little impact on future internet searchers. In fact, if you carry out an internet search on almost any subject matter, you will struggle to find internet pages which were posted before 2008.

And finally, a last bit of good news to victims of online defamation. Online reputation attacks and internet harassment. It appears that people are getting lazier by the day, when it comes to internet searches. Search results on the first page of Google receive 89% of the clicks, results on the second page receive 4.37 of clicks, results on the third page receive 2.42%, results on the forth page receive 1.07% and results on the remaining pages receive a total of less than 1% of the clicks.

This means that on 93.3% of occasions, people find results which appear on the third page of the search engine irrelevant to their search, so in future they hardly bother to go that far.

This in fact is good news for anyone who suffers an online reputation attacks because it means that most online reputation attacks could be defeated or at least be pushed down to obscurity.

The new Stalking Bill might bring some good news to the tens of thousands of good, innocent people who find themselves victims of internet stalking, harassment and bullying every year.

The new Stalking Bill must take account of the fact that internet stalking, harassment and bullying have become such an epidemic in recent months, with some people being driven to committing suicide because they cannot take the pressure and the shame any longer.

The police is almost powerless to help victims of internet stalking, harassment and bullying because of the high costs of such investigations, as well as the costs of the extended legal process which the police is required to undergo prior to even being able to commence a serious investigation.

Ask any police officer who has got some experience in such matters and they will tell you that identification of the suspects of internet stalking, harassment and bullying constitutes a major stumbling block in even commencing an investigation. It is very difficult to investigate anything on the internet without knowing who you are investigating and without having a right to even basic access to the evidence, or, in many cases with very restricted access to the ‘crime scene’.

The new Stalking Bill should make access to identifying details of internet users who are engaged in online stalking, harassment and bullying much easier than it is at the moment.

At present, the state of the internet is one of complete anarchy. Social networking sites, blogs, forums and discussion groups are attracting ‘online rioters’ of the worst kind who (quite rightly) believe that there are no consequences to their actions.
They hide behind a veil of anonymity knowing that it will be almost impossible (especially to a vulnerable victim) to ever smoke them out. Anarchy spreads fast, so it is not surprising that we are now seeing an increase in the number of victims of internet stalking , harassment and bullying.

The new Stalking Bill is a golden opportunity for the Government to start controlling and to possibly, dramatically reduce the number of incidents of internet stalking, harassment and bullying that are devastating the lives of innocent people and their families every single day. The new Stalking Bill is an opportunity for the government to introduce ‘Online Social Responsibility’, by making access to details of those who commit these terrible acts of internet stalking, harassment and bullying, easier.

Just as with the case of the London Rioters, once the internet anarchists realise that there are in fact consequences to their antisocial behaviour and that they can be smoked out and brought in shame to justice, the number of victims of internet stalking, harassment and bullying will be reduced dramatically.

In fact, many victims of internet stalking, harassment and bullying will be hoping that the government will go even further with the future Stalking Bill to make access to personal details of online stalkers easier, quicker and cheaper, not just for the police but also for regular members of the public who are victims of internet stalking, harassment and bullying. The Stalking Bill should help to create a system for obtaining Identification Orders which will help victims resolve their matters through the civil courts without the need to pay expensive legal fees and without taking valuable resources away from the police.

Yair Cohen

The owners of the Ballymascanlon House Hotel in Co Louth have taken a legal action for damages against internet giant Google alleging defamation of the hotel’s business and reputation via Google’s web search service.
It is alleged Google had permitted, since about March 14th 2011, the term “receivership” to automatically appear after the hotel’s trading name when a search is carried out in the autocomplete suggestions in the search bar. This suggested the hotel was in receivership or financial difficulty when it was not, the plaintiffs claim.

The Supreme Court in Australia ordered Google Australia to reveal details of the owner of a website which named an entrepreneur and self-help guru Jamie McIntyre a “thieving scumbag”, the Courier-Mail reported.

Professor Michael Fraser

Reported in the CourierMail.com, leading communications law academic Professor Michael Fraser of the University of Technology, Sydney, said “The internet is a mainstream channel of communication now so it can’t just be like the wild west outside of the rule of law.” He added, “people can’t … be allowed to hide behind a cloak of anonymity…”

Tell us what you think!

If you post online what is considered by the subject of your comments to be defamatory comment – would you be happy for your identity to be revealed?

Should Facebook, Google and other operators of social networking be completed to provide personal details of their users- so that the court can decide whether or not your comments were defamatory?

Is it right or wrong to post anonymous online reviews about organisations and businesses?

Write Your Comment Now!