Dallas Morning News sues ‘Black Hat’ operator for printing its articles without permission

The Dallas Morning News has sued a Wisconsin woman for repeated copyright infringement in federal court alleging that she is selling unauthorized access to the newspaper articles she has reprinted on her own “copycat” websites.

The News in the lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges Holly Starks was open and even boastful about the copyright infringement after publicly declaring via video that she switched web hosting companies six times to prevent the newspaper’s attempts to read the content to remove.

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.

The News claims that Starks and her company were in violation of copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by knowingly bypassing the paywall.

In addition to seeking damages, The News has filed for an injunction preventing Starks and her company from continuing to violate US law “through their black hat SEO scheme”.

Starks offers its customers search engine optimization services and, according to the lawsuit, also sells access to the unlicensed items on their website through their company SEOTech.dev LLC.

“Starks is known as a ‘black hatter’, that is, someone who takes unethical or illegal acts in violation of the terms of use of search engines in order to artificially manipulate search engine results,” says the lawsuit.

When reached by phone on Thursday, Starks said she had no comment.

Grant Moise, the newspaper’s editor and president, made the following statement regarding the lawsuit:

“The Dallas Morning News filed a lawsuit against Holly Starks and her company SEOTECH.DEV, LLC for willfully and knowingly misusing the content of the Dallas Morning News and repeating the egregious practice and pattern claimed in the lawsuit stop posting on their websites in a manner that represents the content as that of Starks’ company – all without the consent or license of The News. The News protects its enormous investment in news coverage resources and its ability to support its news-gathering efforts through the sale of subscriptions and access to its news content, as well as related marketing and advertising. “

Starks has set up “hundreds of dummy news websites” which she calls “Holly’s News Network,” the lawsuit states. The network of “copycat” websites “falsely impersonates legitimate news sites” by stealing content without permission, the lawsuit said.

She and her company make money from the websites by allowing their customers to manipulate search engine results through a process known as “backlinking,” the lawsuit says.

Starks charges its customers a subscription fee 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 has 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 states.

“Many of the news articles appear to have been slightly altered through the use of online translation software to avoid detection, but the content on the infringing websites remains essentially similar to the plaintiff’s proprietary content that it publishes on DallasNews.com” the lawsuit says.

The News says it has “repeatedly” notified Starks of its copyright infringement and requested that the content be removed. According to the lawsuit, Starks claimed to have moved their websites to other hosting services instead.

She described on a YouTube livestream on March 9th 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 said 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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