Zoom in / A person of many parts, similar to the attorney who handles both severe criminal law and copyright takedowns for an Arizona law firm.
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If you have a personal or hobby website, getting a copyright notice from a law firm about an image on your site can quickly cause panic. As someone who has paid to resolve a news service licensing issue before, I can empathize with anyone who wants to make this kind of thing go away.
That’s why a new type of angle-on-angle scheme might seem obvious to spot and probably effective. Ernie Smith, the prolific and ever-curious writer behind the newsletter boredreceived a “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” in late March from “Commonwealth Legal”, which represents the “Intellectual Property Division” of Tech4Gods.
The problem was with a photo of a keychain from the legitimate photo service Unsplash used in the service of a post about a strange Uber ride Smith once took. Like Smith detailed in a Mastodon thread, the alleged company needed it to “extend a credit to our customer immediately” and said it should be “addressed within the next five business days.” Removing the image “does not conclude the matter,” and if Smith hadn’t taken action, the putative firm would have to “activate” its case, based on DMCA 512(c) (Which one, in many readings, actually grants relief if a website owner, unaware of the infringing material, “acts expeditiously to remove” that material). The email pointlessly points to the home page of the Internet Archive so that Smith can review “past usage records.”
A portion of the Commonwealth Legal Services website, with every word in that sentence, including “by,” questioned.
Commonwealth Legal Services
There are quite a few problems with Commonwealth Legal’s application, as detailed by Smith and 404 Media. The main one is this Commonwealth Legala company based theoretically in Arizona (which it is not a commonwealth), almost certainly does not exist. Despite the 2018 copyright displayed on the site, it appears that the company’s website domain was registered on March 1, 2024, with a Canadian IP location. The business site address leads to a location that at least does not match the “fourth floor” listed on the website.
announcement
While the law firm website is full of stock images, so are many professional services websites. The real explanation is that of the place list of lawyers, most of which, as 404 Media puts it, have “thousand-meter blank stares” common to AI-generated faces. AI detection company Defender of reality told 404 Media that its service detected the AI generation in the image of all the lawyers, “probably by a generative adversarial network (GAN) model.”
Then there are the lawyer biographies, which offer surface-level competencies backed up by oddball setups. Five of the 12 reportedly come from acclaimed law schools at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago. The other seven appear to have graduated from the top five results you could get from “Arizona Law School.” Sarah Walker has a practice based on “Copyright Infringement and Criminal Litigation”, a rather unusual pairing. It sometimes “defends the rights of artists” but can also “handle high-stakes criminal cases.” Looks like Walker couldn’t pick just one track at Yale Law School.
Why would anyone go to the trouble of making a law firm out of NameCheap, artwork and AI images (and apparently copying) to send quasi-legal demands to site owners? Inbound links, that’s why. Backlinks are links from a site that Google (or others, but almost always Google) holds in high esteem to a site that is trying to rank. Whether spammed, exchanged, generated, or solicited through a fake company, backlinks fuel the gray to very gray search engine optimization (SEO) market. dark Despite all their algorithmic (and now AI) prowess, search engines have always had a hard time evaluating the quality and context of backlinks, so some site owners still buy backlinks.
The owner of Tech4Gods told 404 Media’s Jason Koebler that he bought backlinks for his gadget review site (with “AI writing assistants”). He disclaimed ownership of the disputed image, or any image at all, and made vague suggestions that a disgruntled former contractor might be trying to poison his ranking with spammy links.
Ars has reached out to Ernie Smith to ask if he had heard back from “Commonwealth Legal,” now that five business days have passed, and will update this post if he hears back.
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