World Press Freedom Day: WIPO censors Debian suicide cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
On Friday, 3 May 2024, World Press Freedom Day, the WIPO-affiliated lawyer W. Scott Blackmer has signed a UDRP domain seizure decision ( case D2024-0770) that principally aims to censor the web sites Debian.News (new site at uncensored.deb.ian.community) and Debian.Day (backup copy) and Techrights backup copy), the key email leaks of the Debian Day volunteer suicide.
There are many more backup copies of these sites now. The web sites and their content appear to be completely legitimate. This is all about spending $120,000 on lawyers to write insults about a volunteer on the WIPO web site. In fact, there are another 2,500 web sites with the trademark Debian in their domain name and there has been no effort to censor any of them. This is obviously a very targetted personal attack on my family and I.
Here are all those other 2,500 domains that were not censored / seized:
A previous UDRP verdict has confirmed that my family and I are the real victims of harassment. That was the verdict for WeMakeFedora.org in 2022. Ever since then, these evil people have spent these enormous sums of money seeking a revenge by the UDRP.
The protagonist in the WeMakeFedora.org harassment was IBM Red Hat. We note that the lawyer in this case, W. Scott Blackmer, recently made another domain seizure favourable to IBM in the case D2022-1717. In this case, the domain names had not been used to publish any web sites at all. They were seized and W. Scott Blackmer has mischievously made the accusation of "bad faith" because of his suspicions about the content on holding pages. It is dubious whether anybody actually looked at the holding pages before IBM opened the dispute. Therefore, I feel that W. Scott Blackmer has a bias towards these companies and his opinions can't be trusted.
We need to bypass a lot of the wordy insults from the lawyer and focus on one line about the web sites:
used for critical commentary by initially impersonating the Complainant
So there is nothing illegal on these websites. These web sites only contained critical commentary.
Using a trademark in a domain name is not impersonation. This is an extremely zealous definition of impersonation. All the web sites contained a reference to the owner of the trademark and that is also mentioned in the censorship decision:
the Respondent’s websites and links to the Complainant’s Debian trademark policy
Legitimate co-authors can't be accused of impersonation anyway.
Moreover, the section on legitimate interests makes no references to our rights as joint authors. This is a regression from previous WIPO UDRP cases where the copyright interests of authors were the basis for legitimate interests in using a trademark in a domain name. One of the most prominent examples of that precedent was the case of scientologie.org where a WIPO panel ruled that the person having a copyright interest in the Scientologie book could not be extinguished by the Church of Scientology trademark. ( the Scientologie.org precedent, which is now being ignored by WIPO. Coincidentally, Scientology also has a suicide cluster and a lot of these legal disputes are about hiding the articles about the Debian suicide cluster)
The University of Western Australia Law Journal recently published an article Copyright Nazi Plunder: How the Nazis Aryanized Jewish Works. The WIPO procedure to censor web sites for "criticism" is not a criminal procedure and it is not even a civil law procedure. It is an administrative procedure. The Copyright Nazi Plunder report tells us:
Despite the fact that written IP legislation in Nazi Germany did not include specific exclusions for Jewish applicants and authors, in practice, they were excluded by administrative measures alone rather than legal ordinances.
W. Scott Blackmer and WIPO's allegation that Debian Developers, as co-authors, have no legitimate interests inevitably leaves me feeling a similarity to the Nazis bypassing Jewish copyright.
The censorship / domain name seizure decision was transmitted by WIPO to the various parties on 6 May 2024, which happens to be Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.
Subject: (ILS) D2024-0770 <debian.chat> et al. Notification of Decision Date: Mon, 6 May 2024 [Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day] From: Domain.Disputes@wipo.int To: udrp@support.gandi.net, icann@gandi.net, alessio.canova@adv-ip.it, ... CC: udrp@icann.org
ARBITRATION AND MEDIATION CENTER
WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center
WIPO Logo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2024 [Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day]
*Re: Case No. D2024-0770
Ultimately, with over 2,500 domains using permutations of the trademark Debian, why did debian.day (backup) make people so angry that they spent $120,000 to censor it while leaving all the other 2,500 web sites intact? Am I really so special to them in some way? Probably not. It is all about hiding the Debian suicide cluster.
We can't forget the deeply personal impact of these Debian suicides and other deaths on my family. One of the volunteers has died on our wedding day and the coroner's report is not being made public. Abraham Raji died in the middle of these legal vendettas. Despite paying over $120,000 to lawyers, they had asked volunteers like Abraham Raji to pay extra money to participate in the kayak trip at DebConf. Raji decided not to pay the extra money, he was left alone, he was left without supervision, he was left without a lifejacket and he died. I found the following text on Abraham Raji's web site "Why Debian":
There is no room for underhand corporate deals, no unfair treatment behind private mails and everything can be reviewed by the public.
It looks like Abraham Raji was well and truly fooled by this gulag and it may have been a factor in his death too.
Please see my chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █