Harvard's Lumen Database Hosts Fraudulent DMCA Notices Against Crypto Fraud Coverage & Its Own Research Shows It Knows

Harvard's Lumen Database Hosts Fraudulent DMCA Notices Against Crypto Fraud Coverage & Its Own Research Shows It Knows by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack SDNY COURTHOUSE, July 3 – When convicted cryptocurrency fraudsters want to scrub news coverage of their convictions from Google search results, they apparently turn to a reputation management firm — and to a Harvard University database that provides the institutional infrastructure to make it work.  Inner City Press has been covering the federal courts, including the Southern District of New York, for more than fifteen years. In 2020 and 2021, we reported from the SDNY courthouse on the sentencing of Robert Farkas, Sohrab Sharma, and Raymond Trapani — convicted of defrauding investors of more than $25 million through the Centra Tech cryptocurrency fraud scheme before Judge Lorna G. Schofield. Those articles are original reporting. They contain no Bloomberg content, no Reuters content, and no third-party copyrighted material of any kind. They quote a United States Attorney's Office press release, a government document that carries no copyright. Someone has been filing DMCA takedown notices with Google claiming that those articles infringe Bloomberg News's copyright. The filers include apparent sock puppet identities — Simon Wells (AU), Jenny Koey (GB), Triah Phil (AU), Martha Ben (GB) — filing from or through net-legal.com, a reputation management operation. Google removed at least one ICP article from search results, demonetized others through AdSense, and flagged the content — all based on copyright claims that are, on their face, impossible: the convicts in the Centra Tech case hold no rights in Bloomberg's coverage of their own criminal prosecutions. The technique is specific and deliberate. After Inner City Press successfully appealed one takedown — Google reviewed it, found it invalid, and restored the article — the campaign refiled using URL variants with random capitalized letters. The real URL is sdny30eschofieldfarkasicp0824021.html; the new complaint targets sdNY30eSchofieldFarkasicp0824021.html. Same article, two letters capitalized. No response to appeal - they are gaming the system. Google's automated system treats them as separate complaints. The appeal on the real URL does not resolve the complaint on the capitalized variant. The suppression continues. Today, anyone who searches "Inner City Press" on Google News sees this message: "In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 3 results from this page" — with links to Lumen Database notices 89264074, 89264174, and 89589211. Notices 89264074 and 89264174 are separated by exactly 100 in the database sequence, a strong indicator of near-simultaneous batch filing by the same actor.  Every DMCA takedown sent to Google is automatically logged in the Lumen Database — run out of Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which describes itself as dedicated to transparency about who files these notices, why, and to what effect. One earlier Lumen notice in this campaign (No. 15710816) cites a court order as the basis for the takedown. No such court order exists in United States v. Sharma et al., 18-cr-340 (S.D.N.Y.). Harvard's database hosts it without annotation, without flagging, and without any mechanism for a targeted journalist to review more than one notice per day — while filers apparently face no equivalent rate limit. Inner City Press wrote to the Lumen team. Lumen's response was procedurally careful: it is, it explained, just a database. It does not "allow" takedowns; it only records them. It cannot adjudicate competing claims. It cannot flag abuse. That answer would be more credible if Lumen had not already proven the opposite.  In April 2022, a Berkman Klein Center Research Fellow published findings on Lumen's own Medium account identifying almost 34,000 DMCA notices received between 2019 and 2022 that appeared to be "deliberate fraudulent attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process" specifically targeting "legitimate news articles and related critical information" for purposes of "personal reputation management." The methodology used — searching the Lumen database by domain patterns, filer names, and notice sequences — is exactly the methodology needed to identify the campaign against Inner City Press. Lumen has the tools. Lumen's own researchers have used those tools for this exact problem. Lumen told Inner City Press it can do nothing. Inner City Press has written to Lumen asking four direct questions: whether it is aware of the URL-capitalization technique as a systematic abuse pattern; whether net-legal.com or its associated filer names have appeared in other campaigns in the database; whether it will flag notices claiming the backing of nonexistent court orders; and whether it will grant researcher account access so that the full scope of the campaign — including the three notices currently suppressing Inner City Press content in Google News — can be reviewed and reported. We await their answers. The Managing Director of the Lumen project is Chris Bavitz, WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Experiential and Clinical Education at Harvard Law School, who also serves as Managing Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic. Inner City Press's initial outreach reached Professor Bavitz directly. He is, as of this writing, out of the office until July 7. WilmerHale — the law firm whose name Professor Bavitz carries in his academic title — is one of the most prominent corporate law firms in the United States, with a purported commitment to pro bono work (just not, it seems, when it comes to censorship, including by not only Big Tech but also the United Nations).  Whether a WilmerHale-branded Harvard professor overseeing a database that hosts fraudulent censorship notices against independent journalism will respond substantively when he returns is, at this point, an open question. Inner City Press will report on whatever answer, or non-answer, comes back. *** Your support means a lot. As little as $5 a month helps keep us going and grants you access to exclusive bonus material on our Patreon page. Click here to become a patron. 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