Dallas Morning News settles suit against ‘Black Hat’ operator who reprinted its articles
The Dallas Morning News has settled its federal copyright lawsuit against a Wisconsin woman who repeatedly sold, without permission, access to the newspaper’s articles published on her own “copycat” websites.
The News filed the lawsuit on June 29, alleging Holly Starks openly bragged about the copyright infringement after publicly stating on video that she switched web hosting company six times to prevent the newspaper’s attempts to do so Remove content.
The News, like other media companies, limits online access to most of its content to subscribers who pay a fee to access it. The News is Texas’s leading newspaper and the winner of nine Pulitzer Awards. Its products reach an average daily audience of more than 1.1 million people, both in print and online at DallasNews.com.
By knowingly bypassing The News’ paywall, Starks and her company violated the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act “through their ‘black hat’ SEO scheme,” the lawsuit said. Starks offers its customers search engine optimization services and, according to the lawsuit, also sells access to the unlicensed items on its website through its company SEOTech.dev LLC.
She could not be reached on Thursday to comment.
The settlement agreement signed this week provides, among other things, for Starks to make an unspecified payment to The News.
Grant Moise, the newspaper’s editor and president, made the following statement Thursday:
“The Dallas Morning News filed a lawsuit against Holly Starks and her company SEOTECH.DEV LLC for willfully and knowingly misusing and re-viewing the egregious practice and pattern of the defendants as alleged in the lawsuit publish, stop, defendants ‘websites in a way that presents the content as that of Starks’ company – all without the consent or license of The News.
“Defendants have now agreed to remove all copies of Dallas Morning News content from their websites and not to reproduce or distribute any Dallas Morning News content without a license in the future. In addition, defendants have agreed not to encourage third parties to reproduce or distribute anyone else’s copyrighted content without a license or permission from the owner. Failure to comply with this Agreement could result in Defendants being fined $ 100,000 for each such breach.
“This lawsuit represents The Dallas Morning News’ determination to support their tremendous investment in their news coverage resources and ability to support their news-gathering efforts through the sale of subscriptions and access to their news content, as well as related marketing and advertising, to protect.”
Starks had set up “hundreds of bogus news websites,” which she called “Holly’s News Network,” the lawsuit said. The network of “copycat” websites falsely posed as legitimate news sites by stealing content without permission, the lawsuit said.
Starks demands a subscription fee from its customers for writing “guest posts” on their websites, which “artificially” inflate the traffic of the websites by manipulating the algorithms of the search engine results, according to the lawsuit.
Starks had posted hundreds of copyrighted news articles and photos from DallasNews.com on at least two of their websites without a license or permission, the lawsuit said. Many of the articles appeared to have been slightly altered using online translation software to avoid detection, but remained “essentially similar,” the lawsuit said.
The News said it had “repeatedly” notified Starks of its copyright infringement and asked them to remove the content. However, according to the lawsuit, Starks alleged that they had moved their websites to other hosting services instead.
She described on a YouTube livestream in March how she repeatedly switched web hosting services to circumvent The News’ copyright claims, the lawsuit said. And she recommended in the video that others in similar situations do the same by using “offshore” hosting services.
Starks also alleged that certain articles from The News that she posted on her websites ranked higher in search engine results than DallasNews.com, according to the lawsuit.
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