I've no desire to have Daniel Brandt banned from here (to what end??) though I wish he'd stop his petty vendettas against those who he feels cross him. You've heard that part before ...

Received: from 203.59.154.236
(SquirrelMail authenticated user rwest@loopaustralia.com)
by webmail.loopaustralia.com with HTTP;
Mon, 4 Aug 2008 05:31:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: <rwest@loopaustralia.com>
To: <abuse@myDNSprovider.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 05:31:39 -0700
Message-ID: <58115.203.59.154.236.1217853099.squirrel@webmail.loopaustralia.com>

To who this may concern,

One of your users who you provide hosting for has been hosting
legally confidential and privileged information on their site without
the written permission of the copyright owners. The owner of
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/ has been hosting confidential chat
logs from wikimedia foundation chat rooms. These chat rooms are social
channels however, users occasionally discuss and circulate information
which is of a private nature. This is why, the channel holds a strict
"no public logging" rule. It is for this reason, I am requesting
you take all chat logs under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(17 U.S.C. 512, 1201-1205, 1301-1332; 28 U.S.C. 4001).
I hereby swear under penalty of perjury on behalf of the members
of wikimedia foundation channels that, I am acting on behalf of the
members in a legal way and request you take down all relevant chat
logs from http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/irc-logs

Regards

Ryan West

_____________________________________


My response to my DNS provider:

Thanks for forwarding this email to me. If you wish to pursue
this, please send me the full headers so that I can look for
the originating IP address. They got replaced with your own
headers when you forwarded it.

This complaint appears to be a hoax. I can find no evidence of
a "Ryan West" who is associated with Wikipedia, or with the
Wikimedia Foundation, which is the legal owner of Wikipedia.

Moreover, the owner of the IRC chat room in question is Freenode,
not the Wikimedia Foundation. Freenode lets Wikipedia run several
channels on their network.

Also, if there is a "Ryan West" then he may be able to claim
copyright on his own postings, but not on any other postings
in those logs. Each poster would only be able to claim copyright
on his or her own posts. My logs include an exhaustive search
engine, and I can find no postings that are identified as coming
from a "Ryan West". Neither the Wikimedia Foundation nor Freenode
has legal standing to claim copyright on the logs I have posted on
wikipedia-watch.org.

Finally, it is doubtful whether the drivel that comes from any
particular chat room participant is even something that is covered
under copyright law.

Regards,
Daniel Brandt,
PIR president

Nothing.

The various IRC posts may be copyrighted (the long ones likely are, drivel or not), but Wikipedia-Watch has a pretty clearcut journalistic fair use claim to repost them.

Precisely what journalistic purpose does a bulk archive of IRC logs with no commentary serve? I'm reminded of Free Republic.

Let's be more clear about who is harassing whom, in the context of me vs. Wikipedia. If you like you can go back nearly three years to get more perspective on this.

Just two days ago my DNS provider (which is entirely separate from the hosting providers for the dedicated servers I lease) received this email. My DNS provider sent me the extended headers that I requested, which show that it came from Perth, Australia. There's a guy in Perth who is 23 years old and studying law, and thinks he knows something about copyright. He was blocking me from IRC two years ago, and is still active on various Wikipedia-related IRC channels. He's an admin who's been on hivemind for a long time, and uses his real name (I presume) on his user page.

Although my evidence so far is circumstantial, I think he's the one who sent this. But I'm not sure because I always thought this guy was smarter than to pull a stunt that's this crude.

What would you do in response to this if your DNS provider forwarded it to you and said, "Please take appropriate action"?

Assuming that I can confirm that this guy is the one who sent it, how about a complaint letter to Mike Godwin? A letter to Freenode? A letter to some dean at the place in Perth where he's studying law?

Hi Daniel,

Someone pointed me the way of this post.

I wasn't the person who sent the message, nor did I have any involvement in it. It appears I've been somewhat impersonated. The reverse DNS of the sender indicates the blog URL of the person who sent it (whose identity you can surely discover by searching your extensive chat logs for that domain). He's a high school student from Perth and a bit of a troll, though I'm not sure why he'd send out an email like this unless he just wanted to annoy me.

I've bitched to you enough in the past about your IRC logs. I don't care enough about the IRC logging issue any more to do anything more than kickban your logging bots when they get discovered. I've finished my law degree now, and I'm not stupid enough to:
1. use a pseudonym in a legal document;
2. try to send a DMCA notice via e-mail;
3. purport to enforce copyright on behalf of other people; or
4. use such shitty grammar like "I am acting on behalf of the members in a legal way".

Seriously, give me a bit more credit in future. I'd very much like it if you stopped posting logs of the channels, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it if you don't. If you have any questions about the IRC channels I manage, or want me to contact your DNS provider to set the record straight, you can always email me.

Uh... I can't see where the person who sent the e-mail gave the appearance of being you. I see where Daniel Brandt misidentified the person as you, but that seems more down to his underestimation of the population of Perth than to any actual deception on the part of the sender.

Seriously, give me a bit more credit in future. I'd very much like it if you stopped posting logs of the channels, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it if you don't. If you have any questions about the IRC channels I manage, or want me to contact your DNS provider to set the record straight, you can always email me.

I wasn't the person who sent the message, nor did I have any involvement in it. It appears I've been somewhat impersonated. The reverse DNS of the sender indicates the blog URL of the person who sent it (whose identity you can surely discover by searching your extensive chat logs for that domain). He's a high school student from Perth and a bit of a troll, though I'm not sure why he'd send out an email like this unless he just wanted to annoy me.

Boy dupes YouTube to delete videos

by Erik Jensen
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 14, 2007

A 15-YEAR-OLD West Australian pretending to represent ABC TV succeeded in having more than 200 clips removed from the video-sharing website YouTube. The boy signed a form claiming, "under penalty of perjury", that he represented the clips' copyright owners.

The segments, taken from The Chaser's War on Everything, were removed over a month and replaced by this message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Australian Broadcasting Corporation."

The latest clip to be removed featured Charles Firth accosting Hillary Clinton. It had been viewed more than 100,000 times before it was taken down yesterday.

"The head of ABC legal is contacting those involved," the head of arts, entertainment and comedy at ABC TV, Courtney Gibson, said. "We are very much keeping our options open in terms of what kind of action we take."

The ABC contacted YouTube after the clip was removed, and was provided with a copy of the form used to claim that a copyright infringement had been committed.

It had been filled out by hand, listing "Loop Australia" as the company acting for the "Australian Broddcasting Corperation".

The ABC has no affiliation with the company, or the boy whose Hotmail account was given as a business contact.

"I don't think we should prosecute him - we should probably hire him," said the Chaser's Julian Morrow. "If they are copyright crusaders, I hope they don't look too closely at the old days' The Chaser newspaper."

Ms Gibson said the removal of the clips was in direct contrast to ABC's policy on content sharing. "[ABC wishes] to get our content out there on as many platforms as possible, run by as many different operators as possible."

The incident comes after Viacom, parent company of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, filed a lawsuit seeking more than $US1 billion ($1.28 billion) from Google and YouTube for copyright infringement.

Okay, Mark Ryan, I accept that you didn't do it. Thanks to your clues, I have determined that the culprit is most likely User:Symode09 on Wikipedia, age 16, who often logs in as brown_cat on the #wikipedia chat room. It is possible that Ryan West is his real name, although I doubt it. He registered loopaustralia.com using a proxy on 2007-09-01.

At any rate, he's a menace to civil society and if I find his real name I'm going to ask Mike Godwin to ban him for representing himself as an authorized agent of Wikimedia Foundation. In the meantime, I think you should block him from the #wikipedia IRC channel.

Firm evidence showing that Deni Symonds == Symode09, who has access to loopaustralia.com, which was mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald.

That's enough proof for me. It's time to send a fax to Mike Godwin. I want to go on record with a formal complaint about this sort of harassment. Then when the Foundation fails to do anything at all, this could prove useful to me at some point in the future.

Damn!
It's not often that I agree with Brandt on something but this guy needs to take responsibility for what he did here. Impersonating Mark Ryan? Sending takedown letters over email? Yup - file the complaint, by all means. Dunno if the Foundation will do anything about it, but they sure need to know about his misrepresentation of them.

Symode/brown cat/whatever the bloody hell name he's going by today is a pest and a troll (and not all that good of one, either). I seem to recall that he's been banned from IRC on a few occasions, but of course he always weasels his way back in. (How he does this is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Let's be more clear about who is harassing whom, in the context of me vs. Wikipedia. If you like you can go back nearly three years to get more perspective on this.

Finally, it is doubtful whether the drivel that comes from any
particular chat room participant is even something that is covered
under copyright law.

I'd ask Taxwoman to spank Deni, but I'd probably be safer asking Deni's parents instead. I don't want to be accused of cybersex with a minor.

But I think it's more likely that the government of Australia would sanction'im than WMF. I hope they do. Serial abuse of copyright law shouldn't be taken lightly. This kid's some piece of work. Harassing two people and flushing hours down the toilet in one fell swoop.

Just for fun: [/i]Where the heck does this Einstein get off attempting to deploy DMCA extra-territorially? If he's studying Aussie law, he should 'get' that U.S. law doesn't apply in Perth.

I'd assume that's why he pretended to represent the Wikimedia Foundation?

The fact is though, he probably succeeded about as well as he might have expected - the company did send a "please deal with this" notice to Daniel.

What? WMF in SFO sent a note to DB?

Uhh, no... Try reading the first post in the thread a bit more carefully?

..snip..
He should be asking me for my evidence so that he can follow up on this.

If they ban him, or if Deni leaves Wikipedia, I'll take down the hivemind entry.

It appears that Symode09 isn't a very active Wikipedian this summer, anyway.

It appears that Symode09 isn't a very active Wikipedian this summer, anyway.

Sadly, putting him on hivemind will just stroke his pathetic ego even more; this guy does what he does for the attention and giving it to him will just encourage him to find new ways to be a pain in the ass.

Why not an indefinite block on User:Symode09 right now? Why do I have to spend several hours putting all this in a multi-page fax to Godwin? Let it all hang out on WP:ANI and make my life easier. I've already spent hours on August 4 researching this, in order to respond to my DNS provider in a way that was sufficiently convincing so that he agreed that no action was required. And spent more hours today on research. Give Symode09 a chance to respond and then block him if he cannot prove his innocence.

Wikipedia commnity-banned me for off-wikipedia activity (namely Hivemind), so doesn't that mean that you can ban Symode09 for off-wikipedia activity too? Or am I living in a dream world?

P.S. If a mod thinks this can be moved to General Discussion so that it's publicly linkable, then I think this would be a good idea. Otherwise it takes a lot of energy to explain the whole thing.

I'm loath to let this just slip, by as this guy was incredibly out of order in doing what he did. I'll see this gets to certain peoples' attention and see what can be done here. Neither you, Daniel, nor WMF I daresay, needs this kinda nonsense. Any action, though, is likely to come via me than via WMF for obvious reasons. We'll see ...

13:16 <ab9rf> see, right now he's claiming to be on almost every day
13:16 <ab9rf> "idling" is not "available"
13:16 <ab9rf> he *never* responds to people
13:16 <ab9rf> i suppose he might respond to his close friends
13:17 <ab9rf> but lots of people have commented on how he is basically inaccessible.
13:18 <seanw> Both of us are e-mailiable.
13:19 <ab9rf> james does not reliably reply to emails either
13:20 <ab9rf> the general sense on the ground is that james is a "absent monarch"
13:20 <ab9rf> which is why there is such a call to remove him
13:20 <seanw> *nods* but that's sort of what we want to be.
13:20 <ab9rf> it's not what your community wants
13:21 <ab9rf> you want to be behind-the-scene kissinger-like manipulators who never have to put it on the line
13:21 <ab9rf> which is probably best for you since it maximizes your power but minimizes your risk and commitment
13:21 <ab9rf> however, it is fundamentally bankrupt because it *fails to do the job*

I'd ask Taxwoman to spank Deni, but I'd probably be safer asking Deni's parents instead. I don't want to be accused of cybersex with a minor.

I'm loath to let this slip as well. I made Mike Godwin aware of this thread.

What are you accusing me of? I've never laid a finger on a minor.

Ah, you take the fun out of it. I'd rather let all the good vandalism evidence lie here on WR, green and stinking, but with WP enable to do anything about it, BECAUSE of where it is. And just let that situation continue, as a sign of how screwed-up WP is.

I'd rather the kid annoy Godwin some more.

If he's studying Aussie law, he should 'get' that U.S. law doesn't apply in Perth.

Symode/brown cat should be banned from the IRC channels, not merely because of this stupid stunt (that email can honestly be described as nothing other than bearbaiting) but because he's a persistently disruptive and otherwise noncontributing individual. However, he will almost certainly not be banned; Mark Ryan is resistant to the idea (even though several of the junior ops want to ban him) and of course neither King James (Forrester, not Jimbo) nor Duke Sean cannot be bothered to descend from their respective celestial thrones to deal with this responsibly.

The other day there was a "discussion" (if you could call it that) regarding the IRC channel governance. It was basically James and Sean making a rare regal appearance to lecture the IRC regulars on how they (J&S) were doing such a bang-up ob of running the channels and how could they possibly think otherwise. I didn't hang around for much of the show, as it was quite revolting.

I'd also stop allowing cloaks for Wikipedians, and instead show the original hostmask when they log in.

By the way, as a follow-up from the previously-linked news story:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/youtub...5971405870.html is the story when the person apologised.

It was authored by AAP and also appeared on rival News.com.au, as opposed to the initial story which was written by a Fairfax reporter.

"Everyone does dumb stuff when they are fifteen," Ms Gibson told ABC Radio.

Ah, you take the fun out of it.

You know cloaks aren't just for Wikipedia, right? They're a pretty stock/standard feature on IRC in general and freenode volunteers freely give them away.

Well, they don't call me the "infuriatingly bland one" for nothing. Taking fun out of things is what I'm all about!

Well, they don't call me the "infuriatingly bland one" for nothing. Taking fun out of things is what I'm all about!

Well, you take the education about of it, too. If you go and take info from WR and drop it on Godwin's lap, you deny him the educational experience of having everybody refer to something which he can't SEE, until he comes here and looks for himself. WR is not a rat-infested ripening pit for trolls and vandals. It's a rat-infested source of information and useful criticism about WP that you can't get on WP itself. Because WP deletes it, blocks you, and generally pretends to having no problems that can't be solved by a random collection of teen volunteers, a clueless founder with a loss of impulse control, and a dickless lawyer. Lar, you're not helping to fix the place at all by enabling this.