HULT Private Capital co-founder John Williams of London, United Kingdom has been stalking the owner of FoulSpeakers.com in an effort to force him to take down an article critical of his company that was written by someone else. He started off by filing a bogus DMCA complaint with Google to get the search result removed and then seems to have come unhinged after learning that such removals are temporary at best if properly thwarted.
Google uses URLs as the unique identifier in their system, so if content that has been previously removed from Google search results pops up at a different URL their system thinks it is something new and indexes it even though the content is virtually identical to that found at a URL they removed pursuant to a DMCA complaint. In this case John Williams' company filed a DMCA complaint against Foul Speakers alleging the following:
"This URL has used copyright material directly from the HULT Private Capital website which includes text, content, logos, and imagery of website, without permission. In addition this site has published malicious and defamatory material causing harm to the public inciting fear based on based on falsehood and misinformation." - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/24782872
There are several problems with that complaint. First, there are no images from the HULT website on Foul Speakers; Second, all text from the HULT website was clearly used by the author in a fashion permitted by the fair use exception of the Copyright Act because it was being used to criticize the company and no more material was used than was necessary for the author to make his points; Third, the addresses in the article are all present on the HULT Private Capital website contact page, so including them in a critical article in no way endangers anyone. Despite these problems Mr. Williams continues to argue that his copyrights are being infringed upon and that "My family is in danger!!!! This is my home addresses!!!! This is a PERSONAL IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION (PII) I don't permit my home address posted in any website!!!!!" If those addresses are personal and their publication endangers his family why are they prominently displayed on his own website at https://www.hultprivatecapital.com/contact-us/? Cleary Mr. Williams is piece of work.
Also displayed on his own website is his picture which we are including with this article along with an email he sent us saying "Your identity is what we want. Hosting company will help us. Just wait and prepare your bail." We don't need his permission to use this image for the purpose of identifying the subject of our criticism, but despite that we anticipate him filing another bogus DMCA complaint with Google to get this page removed. He will claim that the picture belongs to him and that we don't have the right to use it. Then Google will blindly honor his request and tell CyberBullyingReport.com to file a counter notification. At that point all Cyber Bullying Report has to do is change the URL of this page on a regular basis to thwart the DMCA takedown by tricking Google bot into thinking that it is indexing new content. Hopefully Cyber Bullying Report is as capable as Foul Speakers in that regard.
Finally, it seems Williams' efforts to stalk our domain registrar for our identity was a failure. He sent us an email with a screenshot he claims was from them in which they say, "we feel that this type of request is a temporary resolution and not reflective of the value of the risk associated with the act of interrupting the DNS as a Registrar." They then pointed out that if they did suspend our account that we could get our content back up in a matter of minutes simply by registering a new domain name with someone else. Then they referred to the content in question as merely "allegedly illegal content" and asked that content related gripes be addressed with our hosting provider (https://postalmostanything.com/4033/hult-private-capital-false-dmca-complaints-to-google#2237).
Williams' action constitute stalking because he is repeatedly attempting to locate a person without that person's permission for the purpose of causing that person to be unwantedly contacted by others. See "stalking" defined by Merriam-Webster "to pursue quarry or prey stealthily" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stalking) which applies to those that pursue their quarry by stealthily seeking information about them from others for the purpose of locating them and inciting others to make contact.