For the last several months, there has emerged a campaign of bullying and censorship seeking to wipe out stories about the mercenary hacking campaigns of a less well-known company, Appin Technology, in general, and the company's cofounder, Rajat Khare, in particular.
These efforts follow a familiar pattern: obtain a court order in a friendly international jurisdiction and then misrepresent the force and substance of that order to bully publishers around the world to remove their stories.
We are helping to push back on that effort, which seeks to transform a very limited and preliminary Indian court ruling into a global takedown order.
On their behalf, we challenged the assertions that the Indian court either found the Reuters reporting to be inaccurate or that the order requires any entities other than Reuters and Google to do anything.
On December 4th, an Indian court preliminarily ordered Reuters to take down their story about Appin Technology and Khare while a case filed against them remains pending in the court.
Reuters subsequently complied with the order and took the story offline.
Khare's lawyers also succeeded in getting Swiss courts to issue an injunction against reporting from Swiss public television, forcing them to remove his name from a story about Qatar hiring hackers to spy on FIFA officials in preparation for the World Cup.
It is not clear who is behind The Association of Appin Training Centers, but according to documents surfaced by Reuters, the organization didn't exist until after the lawsuit was filed against Reuters in Indian court.
Response to AOATC. EFF is helping two news organizations stand up to the Association of Appin Training Centers' bullying-Techdirt and Muckrock Foundation.
As you must be aware, Reuters has withdrawn the story, respecting the order of a Delhi court.
It is pertinent to mention here that you extracted a portion of your article from the same defamatory article which itself is a violation of an Indian Court Order, thereby making you also liable under Contempt of Courts Act, 1971.
We pointed out that the Indian court order is only interim and not a final judgment that Reuters' reporting was false, and that it only requires Reuters and Google to do anything.
We represent and write on behalf of Techdirt and MuckRock Foundation, each of which received correspondence from you making certain assertions about the legal significance of an interim court order in the matter of Vinay Pandey v. Raphael Satter & Ors.
The court's order by its very terms is an interim order, that indicates that the defendants' evidence has not yet been considered, and that a final determination of the defamatory character of the article has not been made.
The order does not require any other person or entity to depublish their articles or other pertinent materials.
The order does not address its effect on those outside the jurisdiction of Indian courts.
The order is in no way the global takedown order your correspondence represents it to be.
Thus, even if the court's order could apply beyond the parties named within it, it will be unenforceable in U.S. courts to the extent it and Indian defamation law is inconsistent with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and 47 U.S.C. 230, pursuant to the SPEECH Act, 28 U.S.C. 4102.
Since the First Amendment would not permit an interim depublication order in a defamation case, the Pandey order is unenforceable.
Unless we hear from you otherwise, we will assume that you concede that the order binds only Reuters and Google and that you will cease asserting otherwise to our clients or to anyone else.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:13:04 +0000