Stone & Vaughan Retained by Remove Your Media, LLC in Long-term Engagement

If you search Google for "remove your media llc" the first hit isn't the company's own website, it's a Google "Transparency Report" profile of the company regarding its removal requests. These removal requests are requests made to Google by Remove Your Media, LLC, on behalf of more than a hundred different copyright holders, asking Google to remove from its search results specific links to infringing content. This report is essentially Google's way of letting the world know who the biggest tattletales are in terms of reporting online infringement. 

The folks running pirate websites HATE the companies in this section of the transparency report because these companies devastate online traffic to pirate websites. When Google crawls new links to pirate sites, these companies make the links disappear. For the companies in the rights enforcement business, this transparency report is a measure of how well each company is doing its job. Having a high ranking here, is a badge of honor. This month, Remove Your Media is ranked #6 in the world. 

And they've earned it. Looking at the removals for their top five clients, you can see that they've reported nearly five million links to infringing content within the last year. Two of these clients are among the biggest, if not the biggest, anime distributors in the United States. And for any K-Drama fans out there, Remove Your Media also represents the biggest film/tv studios in South Korea. (Yeah, RYM is responsible for shutting down the big one, dramacrazy.net -- go ahead and click that link. There's nothing left but a sad note to all the former fans of that pirate site.)

As illustrated above, Remove Your Media doesn't just report infringement to Google, it reports infringement to web hosts, internet service providers, advertisers, payment processors, proxy services, etc. And somewhat to the chagrin of copyright attorneys like me, they do it cheaply.

The reason their services are so inexpensive is because about 80% of this battle comes down to having the superior technology and the right people to use it. RYM has that. Only 20% rises to the level of real legal work. Why pay a lawyer $200/hr. to search Google and send a template infringement notice when RYM could automate that task for you at a fraction of the price? Save the legal fees for when they're really necessary, they say.

This is where we come in. Remove Your Media now does rights enforcement work for so many studios, distributors and content producers that the total number of issues requiring legal counsel has risen to the point that a long-term, ongoing engagement with an intellectual property law firm was necessary. Stone & Vaughan was more than happy to accept this appointment. Now, the really stubborn pirates will have to deal with 512(h) subpoenas, UDRP petitions and full-blown federal lawsuits.

Let the party begin. :)