Digital Digest receives take-down notice from anti-piracy firm AiPlex, asking us to remove an article from last year that talked about the brief cyber-war between Anonymous and AiPlex, over claims that the anti-piracy firm had used illegal tactics in their war against piracy websites
Anti-piracy firm AiPlex made the news last year when, in an interview, the firm allegedly confirmed the use of less than savoury tactics when it came to fighting online piracy, including the use of denial-of-service attacks on websites offering pirated content.
"In such cases (when the web host or website owner does not take action), we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity," Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex, is alleged to have said in the overly candid interview.
But following widespread public outrage, and hacktivist group Anonymous launching attacks on AiPlex's web properties (a first in a series of attacks again anti-consumer/pro-copyright organisations, which eventually led to involvement by the FBI), Mr Kumar forthrightly denied the company was involved in any DoS attacks, which he describes as "illegal activities". But news website TorrentFreak, which first broke the AiPlex story, followed up on the denials and interviewed several Torrent website owners who claim that they had been victims of AiPlex's "threats" and "attacks".
With the AiPlex incident practically forgotten a year later, the company has kicked the hornet's nest by sending out mass emails requesting bloggers take down articles on the incident. The take-down notice, one of which was received by Digital Digest for one of our Weekly News Roundup editions from last year, states that statements made by Mr Kumar were "mis-represented".
"This has reference to the below article on your webpage, we kindly request you to deactivate the link as the article is defaming the company’s image & its prospects. It was mis-interpreted by the news agency which was blown out of proportion by some of the pirates across the globe. And subsequently we have to face damages/threats from the pirates & undergo immense losses due to their attack on our servers/websites etc," the AiPlex sent email states.
Digital Digest has offered AiPlex the opportunity to post any clarifications in regards to the originally posted story, clarifications that we will post verbatim to help clear up any "mis-representations", if any exist. AiPlex has not yet responded to our offer.
And TorrentFreak reports that, despite being the source of the original story, they've yet to receive a take-down notice from AiPlex.
But whatever their intentions were, AiPlex is back in the news once again. But once again, it's for all the wrong reasons.
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