Yesterday, we had a very interesting discussion of copyright at our event on Tom W. Bell’s book, Intellectual Privilege. (Video will be available soon.) Today, I received an email that reflects how the copyright statute can be misused.

In a 2009 blog post about an $18,000,000 U.S. government web site, I pointed to the web site, Recovery.org, which was then hosting the same information as the government site, and doing it for free. Since then, the Recovery.org domain has evidently been transferred to an organization specializing in recovery from addiction (to alcohol and drugs, not government spending).

The email I received today purports to be from an attorney named “Rick Smith” of the “Law Offices of Rick Smith & Associates”—no web site or phone number, and only a Gmail account. It asks me to remove the link to http://www.recovery.org/, claiming to have “received numerous complaints” from readers of the 2009 blog post.

It goes on: “If you fail to respond by May 13 we will be forced to serve you with a formal DMCA take down notice. A copy can also be sent to the hosting provider and major search engines that can exclude this and other pages from organic search rankings.”

The notice-and-take-down provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows aggrieved copyright holders to attack the wrongful Internet posting of material over which the law gives them control. It is not there to help people seeking correction of web site inaccuracies, much less for them to threaten suppression of access to material in which they do not hold the copyright.

I know this, of course, but many people don’t. Emails like this can fool people into thinking that they have to make demanded changes.

I’m going to make the change because there’s no sense in preserving a bad link. I’m also going to contact the folks at Recovery.org to see if they’re aware that someone purporting to be their attorney is misusing copyright in their name.