COVID Legal USA gets three copyright and trademark infringing websites removed from the web, legal processes still ongoingby Brian A. Wilkins
Editor-In-Chief: The COVID Blog
March 31, 2022
I have worked in the fields of broadcasting, journalism and content marketing for my entire adult life. One thing you learn very quickly, whether in a news room, a corporate marketing department, a Hollywood studio, etc., is that the dynamics are all the same. Writers are always the least-respected and lowest paid in the building. At least that was the case for me until I left corporate America. Everybody can write, per se, just like everyone (meaning 90% of adult society) can drive a car. But just like everyone cannot be NASCAR drivers, everyone cannot be professional writers.
There is a constant battle here at
The COVID Blog. We’re always emailing websites, domain registrars and website hosts informing them of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations, trademark violations, and other intellectual property (IP) violations. It’s safe to say that
The COVID Blog is one of the most plagiarized websites in the world.
We started watermarking all photos last May to at least semi-deter copycats. Several emails like this one from plagiarizers started coming in, trying to sound sophisticated in convincing us to make it easier for them to steal our work.
We literally submit upwards of five DMCA and other IP violation reports with web hosts everyday.
As an example,
this website copied an entire article from
The COVID Blog. We wrote and told them they have 48 hours to properly attribute the article to us or face a
DMCA takedown. They complied and we moved on. But some of these websites don’t comply; and many are operating illegally pursuant to ICANN regulations, E.U. law and U.S. law.
Three websites were recently taken offline for refusing to either delete our IP and others owners’ intellectual property, or add proper attribution. The main one was called The COVID World (hereafter “the infringer”). That website and its owner shined light on the truth about many so-called anti-vaccination people and websites.
Thecovidworld.com takedown
We first learned about this website in December. A
subscriber wrote an article about it (thanks again, E) and sent us the link. The infringer site was created on August 13, 2021, seven months after
The COVID Blog went live.
Not only does the site name sound and look confusingly similar to ours, but the website theme is exactly the same. The headlines are written the same way as ours as well.
Most importantly,
The COVID Blog mods continually monitored the infringer site since December. As of March 4, 2022, there were at least 30 articles plagiarized from
The COVID Blog on the infringer website. The take down procedures commenced with the foregoing Notice of Claim. And it exposed more than we thought it would.
Veracity Objectives, LLC., the parent company of COVID Legal USA and
The COVID Blog, served Host Gator, the domain registrar for the infringer, a Notice of Claim on March 3. Read the entire
Host Gator complaint from March 4 here.
The claims arose from ICANN acceptable use policies, the Lanham Act, and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999. After Host Gator’s legal team analyzed our claims, they determined that the infringer was in fact violating ICANN policies and federal law. Note that the DMCA only allows for takedowns of content. If you want to recover damages for copyright and trademark infringement, it must be done in federal court. Thus you need an actual defendant to serve the summons.
Host Gator contacted the infringer website on March 4, and ordered them to disclose their identity to Veracity Objectives, LLC. so we could serve them legal papers. That’s when the ugly truth revealed itself. First we received this anonymous email from someone claiming that the infringer site is hosted in Russia and a bunch of other garbage.
The infringer claimed to be located in the Netherlands. That said, instead of contacting us, the infringer
posted our complaint to a
website called 4chan Pol. It is a very strange, pornographic, disturbing forum that someone told me is where the word “
incel” was born.
The anonymous infringer and his friends said the word “nigger” about 30 times in the March 4 4chan threads to feel good about themselves.
The infringer and his friends even posted this lovely image of me.
I was also called a “magic negro” in the foregoing 4chan threads apparently because I’m a journalist and legal writer.
They also talked about “kikes” a lot, which we’ll get back to in a minute. Here’s how the infringer opened the 4chan threads (click the links above to read it all):
“Need help guys. Thecovidworld.com is getting sued by thecovidblog.com owner Brian A. Wilkins. I’m not sure what his problem is, but he claims that I’ve stolen his ”trademark”, and copied his articles. This couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Keep in mind that violations of the Anticybersquatting statutes in the U.S. must be able to prove malicious profiteering. A November 2, 2021 4chan thread
proved that element.
The 4chan Pol crowd convinced the infringer to quickly transfer his infringing domain from Host Gator to Epik.com, which is
run by a Nazi sympathizer. This infringer action essentially admitted guilt by trying to run to another domain registrar instead of addressing the legal matter. He literally posted all of his reasoning on 4chan either out of sheer arrogance or ignorance of the law and self-incrimination.
Who is “Dave Kinbar?”
Since the infringer refused to respond and incriminated himself, Host Gator disclosed his personal information to us.
This also absolved Host Gator from any liability. The infringer claimed to be someone named “Dave Kinbar” in the Netherlands. We immediately did our own investigation into this. There are only about 50 people in the world with the surname Kinbar; and 93% of them reside in the United States. Nearly all of them are related to a
Rabbi Carl Kinbar. This was funny because of all the “kike” stuff in the foregoing 4chan thread.
We checked census records, newspaper records, and criminal records in the United States and the Netherlands. The only Dave Kinbar to have ever existed that we could find in the world
would be around 82 years old today if he’s alive.
We reached out to private investigator Jethro Pijlman in Uithoorn (Netherlands). He is the managing director of
Infinite Risks B.V. We provided him the foregoing information about the infringer above, to see if he could serve legal papers there. Mr. Pijlman found that the address provided to Host Gator was fake and/or incomplete, that there are no registrations in that Netherlands town for a “Dave Kinbar,” and that his phone is prepaid.
“It all seems very off and whatever you are looking for, this person doesn’t want to be found,” Mr. Pijlman said. “This looks like a legit scammer.”
Several others join the legal process because they’ve been plagiarized too
Two more problems arose for “Dave Kinbar.” First, it appears that he’s an American and not Dutch. Why would an alleged Dutch person register and host his site in the USA, and registered the domain under false information? So either Jewish “Dave Kinbar” doesn’t exist at all, or he provided false information to register the domain, thecovidworld.com.
The domain registration is invalid because the contract is invalid with the false information; and also
violates ICANN policy. The illicit contract also violates the aforementioned Anticybersquatting laws, and may also be deemed criminal impersonation. But soon we learned that our website wasn’t the only one being infringed upon.
We audited all of the infringer website’s content published in March 2022. At least 65% of the articles were completely plagiarized from other websites, without providing proper attribution or getting permission. Mr. Thomas Lifson is the owner of AmericanThinker.com. The infringer copied at least two of his articles in March alone. Here is the
original American Thinker article. Here is
the infringer article.
“Do you have any ideas of how to stop this theft of our intellectual property?” Mr. Lifson asked in an email to
The COVID Blog. The infringer thecovidworld.com appears to have added attribution links to his infringing content sometime between March 13 and 14, after receiving our notices from his domain registrar and host. But the infringing activity is already done, and damages are due.
Then there’s Mr. Jordan Schachtel,
who has a Substack page. We wrote him via Twitter and asked if he was aware that two of this articles were copied word-for-word, without attribution on the infringer site, in March. “No, they never reached out to me,” Mr. Schachtel said.
We’ve been in contact with six more IP owners concerned about the plagiarism on the infringer site thecovidworld.com.
Cloudflare, Vultr.com, Paypal, and Epik.com
Cloudflare, once they received our Notice of Claim, disclosed that the true host of the infringer site is Vultr.com. We served Vultr, aka The Constant Company LLC. Their legal team has refused to communicate further with us after the initial service. Vultr.com wrote to us on March 25 the following:
“We have forwarded your complaint to the subscriber for response. If we do not hear from the subscriber in a timely manner, the server will be suspended. We look forward to helping you resolve this matter as soon as possible.”
Thecovidworld.com went dark temporarily on March 26. The site came back online on March 27. But it went dark again on March 28, and has been offline since that time. Note that domain registrars and web hosts can clear themselves of liability by cooperating before the case moves forward.
We don’t know exactly what is happening since both Vultr.com (host) and Epik.com (domain registrar) refuse to communicate with us. We assume the infringer will simply move the hosting to Epik.com since he endeared himself to said company with all the “nigger” and “kike” stuff. Epik.com has refused to cooperate throughout, for three weeks now.
We’ve opened a claim directly with ICANN since Epik.com refuses to comply or even respond. We’ll also seek an injunction in federal court to force Epik.com to comply. That, or we’ll use the
ICANN Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. Either way, Epik.com is essentially saying it will act as lawyer for thecovidworld.com in a federal lawsuit by not responding to us. More power to them and their new expensive friend.
The final step is Paypal. Cloudflare cannot be held liable. But since the infringer is profiting off other people’s IP, with Paypal and Donorbox facilitating the payments, those two companies can also be held liable. That process is in the works. We’ve also been in contact with at least one law enforcement agency. But as of now, we’re not supposed to disclose any further information about it.
Sad truth of working in this space
Writing is a lot of work, hard work. Unfortunately the internet makes it very easy for people to steal that hard work. Most writers just let IP, copyright and trademark violations go because they either cannot afford lawyers or don’t know the legal system well enough to pursue the infringers themselves.
Nobody will ever steal my work. And nobody will ever tarnish what is done here by confusing
The COVID Blog with a similar-looking infringer website that copies and plagiarizes real writers.
It’s fair to call this blog is “anti-vaxx.” It’s fair to call
The COVID Blog “conservative.” Sadly those two elements also house some of the most, to put it mildly, unscrupulous people in the world. The mods here have been instructed since December to flag any and all comments posted from names and IP addresses that also post on the infringer website. We were never going to allow that Nazi/porn/”incel”/4chan stuff to leak over here. I’m not trying to be anyone’s friend or flunky. This blog exists for truth and truth only.
The infringer site(s) is also why links are disallowed (for the most part) in
The COVID Blog comments. Oft-cited links and persons are typically not friends/colleagues of mine; and they won’t be promoted here. Off the top of my head, the good guys and gals, and “O.G.’s” in this space along with us are RFK Jr. and Children’s Health Defense, Angela Bininger at theempoweror.com, Courtney over at Circle of Mamas, Brian Shilhavy at Health Impact News, Mike Adams at Natural News, and the folks at the Daily Expose in the U.K. There’s more. But all the foregoing are doing their things and deserve respect for courageously spreading truth.
Further, the anonymous infringer at thecovidworld.com is not on the same planet as
The COVID Blog. It’s cowardly to hide behind anonymity, and said infringer has never created a thing in his life. Many people have mistaken my kindness for weakness over the years. And I’ll just leave it at that.
This anonymous “Dave Kinbar,” based on the totality of evidence, either does not exist, or is a child living with his parents in the United States. If “Dave Kinbar” is in the Netherlands, our guy there is going to find him.
The COVID Blog and several other IP owners are going to recover damages one way or the other from this infringer. This person has a lot of guts when they’re anonymous, hiding behind 4chan, and saying “nigger” all the time. I have no respect for punks like that or anyone who supports them. And we are going to find you.
This infringer kid will be fine. He can start a GoFundMe, and the Nazi/alt-right crowd will fund his future college education. That’s how this world works. Good for him. Of course he’ll have to use his real name for GoFundMe, which cowards don’t do. So maybe not.
Please note that this article is not published to elicit your sympathy. This is the United States and I’m a grown man. It doesn’t matter whether or not Epik.com and Vultr.com cooperate. The federal courts and ICANN are our next and current moves. Now back to my craft.
Stay vigilant and protect your friends and loved ones.
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COVID Legal USA gets three copyright and trademark infringing websites removed from the web, legal processes still ongoing appeared first on
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