The alleged infringing material concerns retracted papers by Dr. Anil Potti, an MBBS from CMC Vellore. He has ten retractions to his credit on RetractionWatch (until they were taken down), and seems to enjoy a dubious reputation in the Medical Community. Mr.Chatwal claimed that RetractionWatch copied the blog posts (relating to Dr. Potti) from his obscure news reporting website Newsbulet.in. This claim is absolutely ridiculous because RetractionWatch published the retractions[in January 2011, and earlier] long before NewsBulet.in was even created in October 2012. Further, RetractionWatch said:
“If you click on any of the NewsBulet.In URLs provided in the takedown notice, you will indeed find the text — and images — from ten of our posts about Anil Potti. But as will be abundantly clear to anyone who does so that our text was placed on NewsBulet.In, not the other way around…
….We have responded to Automattic[owns WordPress] with a counter-notice, and look forward to a speedy resolution of this situation, beginning with the Potti posts being reinstated.”
Moreover, Dr. Anil Potti had also hired an online reputation management agency to resurrect his career . All these moves reek of a mala fide intent to only further Dr. Anil Potti’s interests.
Background on DMCA takedown notice:
In the USA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA] mandates that Online Service Providers(OSPs) may be protected from copyright infringement liability provided they implement a policy which empowers them to check infringement by their users and terminate accounts of repeat offenders. This allows OSPs to claim immunity from copyright liability under the safe harbour provisions[ s 512(a)-(d) of DMCA]. The statute expressly describes two ways in which an OSP can be put on notice of infringing material on its system:
a) notice from the copyright owner, which asserts that he is the correct owner of the material under penalty of perjury, known as notice and take down, and
b) the existence of “red flags.”
After the issuance of a takedown notice, the alleged infringer has the option of sending a counter-notice to the OSP, which RetractionWatch has duly done. This is an informative flowchart on the process.
What is alarming however, is the blatant misuse of the process and undue harassment suffered by legitimate authors such as RetractionWatch. In fact, this is not the first time such notices have been used to stifle criticism and suppress the truth. Gauging by such cases, such notices are only going to increase with people set to abuse the DMCA procedure for personal motives.
For a more in-depth investigative read on the issue, click here.
