After BIRN refused a demand to delete two articles about convicted Turkish fraudster Yasam Ayavefe, false copyright complaints were filed against BIRN concerning the same texts.
On a blogspot page titled Global News Express, Paul had republished an original BIRN article from February 15 this year about a cyber attack on a Greek media outlet after it reported that Ayavefe’s wife had secured fake ID papers from an organised crime gang. The date of publication on the republished text was changed to February 1 to make it look like Global News Express was the original publisher.
Then on December 14, the hosting company forwarded another copyright complaint, this time from an individual named Sharon Henkel purportedly based in France. The complaint claimed that the text was originally published on a Tumblr account called ‘mindbluray’ on July 21, 2022 but BIRN’s text was actually first published on July 26. Again, the date on the republished text had been changed.
The hosting company asked BIRN to fix any potential problems and reply within 24 hours clarifying “what the problem was, how you resolved it and what steps you have taken to prevent it from happening again. Otherwise, it should let us know why exactly you think the report is not valid. If you fail to comply within the stated deadline, the IP may be locked”.
BIRN responded within the deadline, stating that the claims are false and the two articles in question were original BIRN content.
In the case of the July 2022 article, both the original and the republished text contained direct quotes from email correspondence between BIRN and Ayavefe representatives between July 20 and 25, quotes that could only have come from original BIRN reporting. It also carried the same illustration as the original text, which was the original work of a BIRN designer.
Gurkan Ozturan, coordinator of Media Freedom Rapid Response at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, a nonprofit that promotes and defends media freedom, said the copyright complaints appeared to represent a new method of attacking independent media.
“It seems like a new method has been discovered, to copy an independent media organisation’s original news article, publish it backdated on another platform and file a take-down order through threat of legal processes based on copyright infringement allegations,” Ozturan told BIRN.
“While it has been a method used by some reputation management companies, I am personally seeing this kind of censorship attempt targeting media for the first time; it seems simple, but this has the potential to have a negative impact on independent journalism if it turns into a trend.”
Malicious
In September 2022, BIRN’s flagship website, Balkan Insight, and that of its Greek partner media outlet Solomon faced two days of hacker attacks following the publication of a joint investigation into how Ayavefe bought his way to honorary Greek citizenship despite a 2017 fraud conviction in Turkey and his arrest in 2019 in possession of a fake Greek passport.
Offline, Ayavefe sought to put legal pressure on BIRN to delete its reporting about him.
When BIRN refused, a person called Bener Ljutviovski, who presented himself as a representative of Ayavefe, suggested that BIRN could receive certain advertising revenue if it deleted the article.
In September, Turkey’s Media and Law Studies Association reported that Ayavefe had succeeded previously in getting Turkish courts to remove 201 items of online content about, including some on the website of the Turkish police force.
Ozturan said that digital platforms and service providers should be prepared for such “malicious” tactics.
“I sincerely hope that digital platforms and service providers are prepared to withstand this kind of malicious attempt to harm media organisations and independent journalists, if these incidents are repeated in the future,” he said.
Efstratios Mavraganis, a lawyer and legal adviser at the Journalists’ Union of Macedonia and Thrace in Greece, told BIRN: “The purpose of the complaints is not to protect the complainant’s copyright, but to prosecute BIRN because its published reports are not to their liking. The complainants’ main purpose is to cause damage and harm to BIRN.”
“Large companies should normally check the validity of complaints before sending them.”
The hosting company told BIRN it has “no way to check or verify” the veracity of a copyright complaint, “so we forward the report to the customer to make a statement and either confirm or deny the allegations”.
“We will always take into account the customers’ response, but you will have to respond to EVERY report, as with hundreds of thousands of customers and tens of thousands of abuse reports every day, we unfortunately cannot filter reports, but have to forward all of them.”