*IT IS NOT TOO LATE.* If the DMCA notice that you received and/or ignored or threw in the trash has expired, the copyright holders have THREE YEARS from the alleged date of infringement to file a lawsuit against you in a federal court. So there is time to solve the problem, if it has not already escalated into a lawsuit.
[This article is a continuation of the “WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT” article. It made sense to separate out the topics and keep them short and to the point.]
If the DMCA notice had a deadline which has expired, since RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is a knock-off of the CEG-TEK system, my best guess is that following the expiration of whatever date you were given in your notice (likely 30 days), a second letter will be forwarded over to you stating that “because you did not settle, now we want $3,500 for that one title,” or whatever they are asking for. This too can be negotiated by an attorney.
NOTE: Why $3,500? Marvin Cable used to ask for $1,850, if I remember correctly, and that was back in 2012. Also, CEG-TEK’s business model was not to sue anyone, so their settlement letters lacked ‘teeth’. However, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT settlement letters are made with an explicit threat that they will follow-up with a lawsuit against the internet subscriber of your account if you do not settle. For this reason — because their threats have ‘teeth’ — you can expect to see higher follow-up settlement amounts, akin to a settlement if a lawsuit were filed.
— CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
NOTE: No attorney client relationship is established by sending this form, and while the attorney-client privilege (which keeps everything that you share confidential and private) attaches immediately when you contact me, I do not become your attorney until we sign a contract together. That being said, please do not state anything “incriminating” about your case when using this form, or more practically, in any e-mail.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT represents EVERY movie copyright troll.
This is what I know so far about RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT (rightsenforcement.com) and the clients they are representing.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is a reverse-engineered ‘evil twin’ of CEG-TEK. I assume they are even a more advanced version of CEG-TEK (2.0), where they have likely taken CEG-TEK’s system and improved it to gain insight into the accused downloaders by using unethical malware, website scripts, and even illegal methods — “anything to gain an advantage.” (I do have reasons for saying this.)
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is the pre-lawsuit settlement arm of his copyright enforcement machine. This pre-lawsuit mechanism uses automated DMCA abuse / copyright infringement notices to send settlement requests directly to subscribers through their ISPs.
WHAT ISPs ARE KNOWN TO BE WORKING WITH RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT?
ISPs known to be working with RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT are:
AT&T,
CenturyLink,
Charter,
Comcast,
COX,
Frontier,
Hawaiian Telecom,
Optimum Online,
Time Warner Cable,
Verizon, and
Windstream.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT settlement demand letters require that accused recipients visit his rightsenforcement.com website and pay $300 per instance of infringement, per title (this can be negotiated down by an attorney).
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUR ISP AND RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT?
UPDATES: This list of movies (copyright holders who are signing on with Carl Crowell’s copyright trolling copyright enforcement model) continues to grow. As of July, 2017, I have written about this twice already:
I have listed the list of titles in the linked article (click here) based on the the list of movies listed on the RIGHTSENFORCEMENT.com website. I even took screenshots from that website (pasted below) so that you can view the images of the movies — that way, you’ll have a ‘heads up’ to learn which lawsuits will be filed for which movies in the coming months (they are methodically going through that list).
Hint: The copyright holders are given a 3-year statute of limitations to sue individuals for copyright infringement. However, pretty quickly after your 30-day deadline expires (or however long RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will allow you to settle before taking down the ability to settle), you will probably receive a second letter — this time addressed from one of their lawyers — indicating that “because you did not settle, now we want more money.” That second-tier settlement amount will probably be significantly higher.
Short answer: Because there are MANY ‘COPYRIGHT TROLL’ ATTORNEYS filing lawsuits across the US and working for Carl Crowell (the owner of the RIGHTS ENFORCRMENT website and likely puppet master for all of the movie-based copyright infringement lawsuits across the US), it is likely a VERY BAD IDEA to ignore this.
Short Answer: Absolutely not. Logging into Carl Crowell’s RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT website will not only create a record that you were given the chance to settle for $XYZ amount, but there are also likely trackers and barbs built into the website which can dig into your computer and determine private things, such as what IP address you are coming from, where you are physically located (based on the geolocation of your IP address), what the MAC address is of your computer, what your operating system is, etc.
***And, if you do not have your javascript off and Adobe Flash capability turned off, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT can dig deeper into your computer to determine what files you have installed on your computer, what software programs you have installed on your machine (e.g., do you have bittorrent installed?), and their website can run scripts (akin to apps or mini-programs) in your browser to reveal many other private things about you.
WHY DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS?
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is a reverse-engineered clone of the CEG-TEK website and DMCA abuse / copyright violation system. I spent close to FIVE YEARS digging deep into the mechanics of their website, learning what tricks or systems were put in place, and I am generally knowledgeable about privacy and anonymity to the point that would make even someone wearing a tin hat cower in a corner.
What makes me good at this is because I understand not only what CEG-TEK did with their website, but I also understand how their system can be misused, and I have every expectation that the RIGHTSENFORCEMENT.COM website will be an improved version of the CEG-TEK website, complete with advanced tracking, and malicious scripts and content to provide the attorneys evidence against you which they will use to gain an advantage over you.
Plus, this is all fun for me (I am not a hacker), but I enjoy uncovering what pitfalls the bad guys have set up on their sites, and how to get around those pitfalls in a way that keeps my clients anonymous, that protects their wallet, their credit cards, and their peace of mind, and that keeps them legally out of trouble.
— CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
NOTE: No attorney client relationship is established by sending this form, and while the attorney-client privilege (which keeps everything that you share confidential and private) attaches immediately when you contact me, I do not become your attorney until we sign a contract together. That being said, please do not state anything “incriminating” about your case when using this form, or more practically, in any e-mail.
I have been watching the analytics of this website, and as you know, I noticed a spike in individuals looking for help with the DMCA notices they received from an entity called RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT (a.k.a. “RIGHTSENFORCEMENT”).
Until now, because the only copyright enforcement company using DMCA settlement notices has been CEG-TEK (RightsCorp too, but they are a different animal), mistakenly, those who have come to this site have viewed the CEG-TEK articles. I have done some extensive research to figure out exactly who RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is, how they got a hold of CEG-TEK’s proprietary software, and what to expect from them.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT IS A REVERSE-ENGINEERED CLONE OF CEG-TEK
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is a reverse-engineered clone of CEG-TEK. They have taken and have copied all of the methodologies of CEG-TEK, and they have created a mirror entity which does exactly what CEG-TEK did. They have (I understand by brute force) convinced the ISPs to forward their DMCA settlement demand letters to subscribers, and when a subscriber receives a DMCA notice, they are directed to pay a settlement or be sued.
ISPs forwarding the copyright infringement notices for this scheme fall into three categories.
Those ISPs that I believe are being forced or bullied by Carl Crowell to participate in the scheme who were formerly hostile to this method of copyright enforcement;
Those ISPs that were part of the Six Strikes System, but willingly participated in the bittorrent-based lawsuits; and
Those ISPs who willingly worked with CEG-TEK to forward the DMCA copyright infringement notices for them, and now are forwarding the notices for Crowell.
CATEGORY 2) Optimum Online, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, and
CATEGORY 3) CenturyLink, Charter, and sometimes Comcast (at times) and COX (yes, I listed them twice on purpose).
CARL CROWELL IS THE NEW “KEITH LIPSCOMB” MASTERMIND BEHIND ALL GUARDALEY-BASED LAWSUITS.
Carl Crowell is the mastermind behind RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT, just as he is the mastermind behind all of the Guardaley lawsuits (pornography based AND movie-based). To understand who he is, he is equivalent to the ‘kingpin’ role that Keith Lipscomb had in directing all of the Malibu Media, LLC lawsuits (and formerly all of their other pornography-based lawsuits, e.g., Patrick Collins, K-Beech, NuCorp, etc.).
The interesting piece of information that people likely haven’t pieced together yet is when the relationship between Lipscomb and Malibu Media broke apart, so did the relationship with Lipscomb and Guardaley. If you time this, you’ll probably find that around the same time the relationship between Lipscomb and Malibu soured is the same time Carl Crowell ‘came to power’, so to speak and started filing all of the bittorrent-based lawsuits [backed by Guardaley].
***KEEP READING*** (SCROLL DOWN UNDER THE CONTACT FORM TO CONTINUE READING). — CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT IS CEG-TEK’S ‘EVIL TWIN.’
So CEG-TEK (which at this moment is in a dormant state, but is still watching what is going on) is not RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT. RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is an ‘evil twin’, so to speak of what CEG-TEK tried to be.
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT USES FAR MORE AGGRESSIVE TRACKING METHODOLOGIES (WITH FAR MORE FALSE-POSITIVES).
The big difference between CEG-TEK’s bittorrent tracking methodologies and RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT‘s tracking methodologies will be the way someone is caught (and I am basing this on what I know about CEG-TEK’s vs. Guardaley’s tracking methods, because they were always competitors for the same copyright holder ‘copyright troll’ production companies).
CEG-TEK always waited until they could prove that the download actually happened.
Guardaley (and thus, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT) ‘catches’ a downloader as soon as he clicks on a bittorrent file and joins a bittorrent swarm (before even a byte of data is transferred).
Thus, someone could technically get sued or accused of copyright infringement with Guardaley for a download they did not commit. They may have visited the bittorrent website. They may have clicked on the file, but that file never needed to download in order for Guardaley to sue that individual for copyright infringement.
WHY RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT WILL BE A MONSTER.
So in essence, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will be a monster. It’ll be an evil version of what CEG-TEK strove to become (CEG-TEK’s goal was always to discourage piracy, and they succeeded in their goal which is what made it not profitable for them).
RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will likely accuse ISP subscribers of downloading multiple copyrighted files (asking for $300 per title), when the accused downloader merely clicked on a bittorrent file. This will be true even if he later changed his mind and decided not to download the file, whether he waited in the queue and never got the opportunity to download the bittorent file, or whether he clicked on a bittorrent file, but only decided to download one or more files in a bittorrent file that contained many files for download. Worse, if he clicks on a siterip (something Malibu Media, LLC / Guardaley) almost always ‘dings’ a defendant for, no doubt RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will ask for settlements for each and every file in that siterip.
WHY CARL CROWELL WILL TURN RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT ‘EVIL’.
To make matters worse, Carl Crowell has a reputation that precedes him. Where CEG-TEK would give deference to an individual who made a mistake, or who didn’t realize the gravity of what he/she did, or if that individual was a war veteran or an elderly lady or gentleman, these considerations reportedly mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to Carl Crowell. Rather, people have referred to him as a bully, and in order to deal with a bully, you need to stand up and fight if needed.
In sum, this is why I am predicting that RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will be a monster.
HOW WE WILL HELP TAKE DOWN ‘RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT’
As I mentioned before, expect Carl Crowell (and anyone working under him) to be a bully. As such, the only way to fight a bully is to punch him in the face. Now since it does a client of our firm no good if I ‘punch him,’ so to speak, the only way to handle a bully entity (as I am sure RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT will become) is to be willing to step away from a negotiation, file a lawsuit, and perhaps even proactively file a declaratory judgement action for non-infringement. For copyright matters, this can be done in any federal court in any state (although Crowell has already had some issues with judges in his own state, so perhaps that is a good place to start).
I will take clients for both settlements (these will be anonymous just as a CEG-TEK matter would be since Crowell will not know who you are when he sends the DMCA copyright infringement notice to you), and for the explicit purpose of filing lawsuits (and defending lawsuits filed) by him and his local attorneys in the various states’ federal courts.
There will essentially be three kinds of clients:
GROUP 1) Clients with matters small enough that we can resolve them anonymously with no, some, or aggressive negotiation.
GROUP 2) Clients with matters to large to settle (e.g., they are faced with an unreasonable settlement demand, or RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is unwilling to negotiate a matter). For these clients we will defend the lawsuit when the client is sued (again, it does not matter in which court this happens), or we will proactively file a declaratory judgement action to obtain a ruling that these clients were not guilty of copyright infringement.
GROUP 3) Clients who want to skip all settlement negotiations and fight this matter in court. As I mentioned, many individuals will get accused of downloading titles they simply did not download (or, that perhaps they clicked on, but did not download). For these people who are willing to fight, we’ll skip settlement negotiations and go straight to the lawsuit.
In sum, I am willing to dedicate a significant amount of our firm’s resources to shutting this guy down. From what I understand, this Carl Crowell guy is another John Steele bully, and if he runs his RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT the way he’s been handling his lawsuits, I will be sure to help clients either proactively attack the claims against them, or in the alternative, I will help them get out of his way with an anonymous settlement.
— CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
NOTE: No attorney client relationship is established by sending this form, and while the attorney-client privilege (which keeps everything that you share confidential and private) attaches immediately when you contact me, I do not become your attorney until we sign a contract together. That being said, please do not state anything “incriminating” about your case when using this form, or more practically, in any e-mail.
If CEG-TEK were a stone, I deeply analyzed every facet of it. I knew every client of theirs. I knew what business connections they had, how they acquired them, and which ISPs they were working with. I knew which of their principles answered the phones, and at what times. I knew what problems they were working on internally, and what business ventures they were working on externally. But then in August of 2016, they took a step back and stopped sending DMCA letters to ISP subscribers accusing them of copyright infringement.
I thought this was a win, namely, that there was one fewer copyright enforcement agency out there actively sending settlement demand letters and threats to sue for copyright infringement in federal court.
Before CEG-TEK stopped going after downloaders, there were rumblings of what was to come. …What they would and would not do, and as far as I understood, their success was causing their business model to fail. Around the same time, there was a huge opportunity missed for Keith Lipscomb to partner with CEG-TEK (consider this lucky timing based on him getting sued by his Malibu Media, LLC client), because if the relationship between Lipscomb and Malibu Media, LLC had not soured around the same time as CEG-TEK began to shift their client base and restructure the operations of the company, Lipscomb might have proposed a partnership and CEG-TEK might have agreed to it.
For those of you are newcomers because you received a notice or a letter forwarded to you from your ISP based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) statutes, Lipscomb used to be the mastermind behind each and every Malibu Media, LLC (adult film-based pornography lawsuit) and through his local attorneys across the US, he filed thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against John Doe Defendants, initially asking for $20,000+ in settlement amounts from each defendant. Do the math.
If Lipscomb corrupted CEG-TEK’s Copyright Enforcement system, instead of asking for a mere $300 per title for the bittorrent download of one copyrighted title, Lipscomb would have employed Malibu Media, LLC’s strategy of “catch one torrent click, sue for 60+ titles which were all downloadable by clicking that one bittorrent file.” In other words, we would have seen settlement amounts of $18,000 ($300/title x 60 titles) per accused downloader.
But that didn’t happen, or so I thought…
HAS “RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT” BECOME THE NEW CEG-TEK?
Come now, a new entity dressed in new clothes, but one that still ‘walks and quacks’ like CEG-TEK did. This new entity named “RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT” (or, “RIGHTSENFORCEMENT”) appears to have gotten access (legally, illegally) to CEG-TEK’s proprietary systems and mechanisms and they started sending DMCA settlement demand letters directly to ISP subscribers, just as CEG-TEK did. They appear to be tracking and sending these notices the same way CEG-TEK did. They are asking for $300 per title as a settlement, just as CEG-TEK did. But the RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT name doesn’t carry the same history as does the CEG-TEK name, which caused me to write almost FIVE YEARS of blog entries on them.
A few weeks ago, I started to notice that people were finding my older website articles using the names of CEG-TEK’s old clients, as I outlined in CEG-TEK’s Client List (posted in 2014). I saw Google Searches such as looking for DMCA notices surrounding adult film companies such as Brazzers, Girlfriends Films, Reality Kings, Wicked Pictures (all CEG-TEK clients), just to name a few. I did not think anything about this until in the past few days, people started visiting my CEG-TEK articles. Again, I didn’t think much about it until the visits to the CEG-TEK articles started to spike in the last day or so, and this morning, I wrote a blog entry in alarm, asking why everyone was suddenly visiting articles on CEG-TEK, a sleeping entity?
I have to thank Sophisticated Jane Doe (“SJD”) of FightCopyrightTrolls.com for the tip-off. I am posting her comment in its entirety, and I do encourage her to write more about it. While I could answer a number of her questions about the mechanisms of how CEG-TEK did their tracking, and how their systems worked, SJD has pieced together who the entities are behind the scenes.
Crowell was cozying with Siegel since last summer. “London Has Fallen,” used for shakedown by both the Guardaley network and Siegel, was a test drive for something new IMO. This “new” is a new CEG-TEK-like outfit created and run by Crowell in December. Check it out. The letters are already being sent out. I wanted to write a post (and maybe I will) about these developments, but has been busy recently.
I don’t know who harvests IP addresses and have no idea to what extent Siegel and Crowell work together, if at all, but my gut feeling: they do.
The gravity of this news is that Crowell & Co have something that neither Rightscorp nor CEG-TEK had: credibility of threats to sue. As a result of non-paying to this new shakedown factory, at least one lawsuit was already filed (can’t locate it for the moment, but the complaint explicitly mentioned that the defendant was given opportunity to pay small ransom, but skipped).
So what do we have now? We appear to have a new copyright enforcement entity called “Rights Enforcement” which acts as if it is CEG-TEK, just in new clothes. Aside from the fact that this name (RIGHTSENFORCEMENT) is impossible to search for in a Google Search (ingenious). Aside from the fact that it is next to impossible to bring scrutiny to Rights Enforcement’s practices because the name is so generic. And, aside from the fact that “rightsenforcement.com” is just as confusing to look at as “iwenttothestoreyesterdaytobuysomedaisies.com”… I believe what is going on.
CEG-TEK WOULDN’T SUE. RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT UNDER OWNERSHIP / MANAGEMENT OF ATTORNEY CARL CROWELL WILL SUE.
A big complaint the principles at CEG-TEK used to have is that they would ask for $300/title and threaten to sue if this amount was not paid, but when that notice was ignored, nobody at CEG-TEK filed any lawsuits. I would even say that Ira Siegel was averse to filing lawsuits, as we know that he used to file copyright infringement lawsuits, and then after having Siegel had a number of bad experiences with the California federal courts inquiring about his settlement rates, he dropped all of his lawsuits and went on to help form Copyright Enforcement Group (CEG-TEK).
However, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is run not by Ira Siegel, but by Carl Crowell. Putting aside everything that has been written about him on the other bittorrent-based blogs, one thing that you as a recipient of the DMCA letter must know is that Carl Crowell files lawsuits in federal courts, justified or not. This means that if a settlement is not reached, he will file copyright infringement lawsuits against individual John Doe Defendants, and instead of asking for $300 for one title (or whatever he is asking for in the DMCA notices), he will file a copyright infringement lawsuit for $150,000 for the infringement (unlawful download, upload, etc) for ONE copyrighted movie.
So in sum, as far as I understand it, RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is a reverse-engineered copy of CEG-TEK, but with teeth and a salivating desire to sue accused downloaders who do not settle.
FOLLOW-UP NOTE (FOR ACCURACY PURPOSES): RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT, especially with litigious attorney Carl Crowell is certainly a threat to anyone who received a DMCA letter from their ISP. Why? Because whoever represents a client in a settlement MUST be prepared to also be able to fight Carl Crowell in the federal courts. It appears as if they have somehow acquired, or even reverse engineered CEG-TEK’s DMCA copyright infringement notice system (I have already contacted a number of individuals at CEG-TEK trying to ascertain who RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT is).
Either way, based on the way they appear to be structured, I believe that we’ll be able to settle these cases using the same methodologies as we did the CEG-TEK cases (keeping the accused downloader ANONYMOUS), but with a caveat that we did not need to give our CEG-TEK clients — these guys are a different breed of attorneys than CEG-TEK, and they come to the negotiations with a “we’ll take your house” mentality, so aggressive negotiations backed by a willingness to fight or be bullied is the strategy that will need to be used with this new RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT / CEG-TEK clone entity.
— CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
NOTE: No attorney client relationship is established by sending this form, and while the attorney-client privilege (which keeps everything that you share confidential and private) attaches immediately when you contact me, I do not become your attorney until we sign a contract together. That being said, please do not state anything “incriminating” about your case when using this form, or more practically, in any e-mail.
As an attorney, unfortunately there is often information that I need to be tight-lipped about when discussing a case or a particular copyright holder. Malibu Media, LLC and their implosion with Keith Lipscomb (who ran each of their thousands of lawsuits filed across the US) was one such example, but not for the reasons you might consider.
This summer, I sat back and watched what was once one of the biggest copyright trolls and their scheme implode as the relationship between the attorney hired to represent their cases across the US (Keith Lipscomb) and Malibu Media, LLC crumbled. Regardless of the screams of autonomy each local counsel hired by Lipscomb claimed in the courts, it was still plain and obvious to me that Lipscomb was running each of the thousands of lawsuits filed against single “John Doe” defendants (not only because the filings were identical, and the court documents allegedly filed by different attorneys had the same spelling errors in each filing, but because every settlement payment — regardless of which local counsel was allegedly in charge of the lawsuit — went to Lipscomb’s Florida office).
Recognizing that there is ‘no honor among thieves‘, I laughed when I learned that Malibu Media sued Lipscomb for not paying them the settlement monies him and his attorneys extorted from hundreds if not thousands of John Doe Defendants across the US, and… he appears to have kept the settlement monies for himself.
However, the reason I stayed quiet was because I knew of something going on internally at Copyright Enforcement Group (CEG-TEK), and I saw a possible reality where Keith Lipscomb got into negotiations with CEG-TEK, and he got them to agree to send DMCA letters to thousands of accused downloaders through their ISPs, but instead of asking for a $300 settlement for one copyrighted title allegedly downloaded, he would list each-and-every title from his X-Art.com siterips.
Instead of CEG-TEK sending a notice for each title allegedly downloaded, Keith would have them send one notice for the siterip [when accessed by clicking a link on a bittorrent website, and that bittorrent file wold contain possibly 100+ titles to be downloaded]. However, when that unsuspecting user logged into CEG-TEK’s copyrightsettlements.com website using the username and password provided in the DMCA notice, each-and-every title in the X-Art Malibu Media siterip would have appeared. Thus, a $300 per accused downloader settlement could have easily turned into a $30,000+ per accused downloader settlement ($300/title x 100+ titles in the siterip). This could have even been exacerbated if Lipscomb asked for higher per-title settlement amounts, as his attorneys are accustomed to negotiate with other attorneys in the $750-$500/title range.
In my opinion, a Lipscomb-Siegel/CEG-TEK marriage would have been a nightmare, and because at the time CEG-TEK was changing their business model and shifting how they send out letters and to whom (remember the Girls Gone Wild fiasco?), the timing was right for Lipscomb to reach out to them, and I was concerned that they would have accepted his plan.
[In passing, I want to note that CEG-TEK had a shake-up as well over the summer. They were changing their business model from sending DMCA notices and soliciting small $300 settlements for copyright infringement claims for just a few titles to sending notices only to “more egregious downloaders” which in turn would increase the per-person settlement amount paid to CEG-TEK on behalf of their clients. They also appear to have been changing their client base by transitioning away from little porn companies to more well-known copyright trolls (e.g., Millennium Films, LHF Productions, etc.) — copyright holders who threatened to sue downloaders (and in at least one circumstance did sue at least one client of mine in federal court.) The point is that they were changing their image from being a company who’s clients didn’t sue to a company who’s clients do sue. Lipscomb fit their former profile of bringing pornography copyright holders to the table, and he matched their new profile because he brings a strong proclivity to sue defendants who ignored the notices. Thus in a possible reality, I saw Lipscomb meeting with CEG-TEK, and I did everything I could behind the scenes to avert this reality.]
Now we are roughly six-months later, and I am happy to share that the marriage between Lipscomb and CEG-TEK never took place, and CEG-TEK is no longer in a place where they would accept Keith Lipscomb or the $10K/client+ settlement amounts he would have brought to the table.
For this reason, I am sharing the story of this nightmare which — even though the ‘stars aligned’ — never happened (and thankfully, will never happen).
…there is new news for Lipscomb’s former Malibu Media, LLC client. I will post about that next.
[2017 UPDATE: This is bad news. In my article, I wrote about how former Guardaley kingpin Lipscomb might have corrupted CEG-TEK. Since the April 2016 breakup of the Lipscomb/Guardaley relationship, new Guardaley kingpin Carl Crowell has created a new entity called RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT which has reverse-engineered CEG-TEK’s proprietary DMCA copyright infringement notice system. Many of you have visited this link thinking that RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT was somehow related to CEG-TEK (at first, I thought so too), but really it is an ‘evil twin’ competitor. In sum, apparently my concerns about CEG-TEK’s DMCA notice system getting corrupted may actually have happened, but I got the entity wrong. It wasn’t CEG-TEK’s system that was corrupted, it was Crowell’s reverse-engineered ‘evil twin’ copy of CEG-TEK which we now see in RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT.]
— CONTACT FORM: If you have a question or comment about what I have written, and you want to keep it *for my eyes only*, please feel free to use the form below. The information you post will be e-mailed to me, and I will be happy to respond.
NOTE: No attorney client relationship is established by sending this form, and while the attorney-client privilege (which keeps everything that you share confidential and private) attaches immediately when you contact me, I do not become your attorney until we sign a contract together. That being said, please do not state anything “incriminating” about your case when using this form, or more practically, in any e-mail.
