Friday, October 11, 2024

Cyber-stalking should be made a criminal offence, says a group of MPs calling for an overhaul of the law.

BBC News – Cyber-stalking should be a criminal offence, MPs say

The MPs also say police and prosecutors must give all stalking complaints greater priority.

Data released by probation union Napo shows 2.2% of the 53,000 stalking incidents recorded in England and Wales in 2009 led to a jail term.

The charity Network for Surviving Stalking says the internet is “another weapon in the stalker’s armoury”.
via BBC News – Cyber-stalking should be a criminal offence, MPs say.

 
 

An Online Reputation Attacks On A Successful Small Family Business Which Resulted In The Family Losing Almost All Of Its Income And The Collapse Of Everything They Have Ever Worked For.

Jeff Clark, a husband and a father to three young children age 3, 6 & 10 has always loved cars. He has been fixing them since he was 12 and has worked in local garages around the Manchester area for many years now……

Read full story on Defamation Solicitors website

Online Defamation Almost Destroyed The Family Business One day, Jeff received a telephone call from a chap by the name of Herald Keller, who worked for one of Jeff’s regular suppliers in Germany – the largest wholesaler of second-hand Saab car parts in Europe. Herald Keller told Jeff that his employer was not going to supply Unique Vehicle Suppliers with parts anymore, because there was too much ‘bad stuff’ about Unique Vehicle Suppliers on the internet and that the name of Hines’ employer started to get tarnished as well through some of the very negative internet posts. Basically, there was so much negative publicity on the internet about Unique Vehicle Suppliers that Hines’ employer started to get concerned about his own company’s reputation

Read full story on Defamation Solicitors website

Internet Law Expert Yair Cohen says that victims of online reputation attacks and online intimidation should take their cases to the high court instead of reporting them to the police.

As a hospital administrator has become the first man in the UK to be jailed for stalking a woman by blogs, internet law expert, Yair Cohen says that it seems that the authorities have now sent a strong message to all those who wrongly believe that the internet is a lawless land where stalking, bullying, harassment, defamation and blackmail are a fair game and have demonstrated that online harassment shall not be tolerated in our society.

In a case which was heard by Magistrates in Manchester, a 38 year old man, Stephen Andreassen continuously attacked his female victim by using no less than 35 website blogs in which he repeatedly insulted her, causing her upset and reputational damage. Andreassen also used emails to harass his victims as well as social networking sites such as Facebook.

“It is not surprising at all”, says one of the UK’s leading internet legal experts Yair Cohen, “that it took the authorities 18 months before Andreassen was finally jailed. By this time, his victim must have been completely destroyed

I strongly advise to take cases to the High Court and to obtain a comprehensive injunction within 48 hours.

mentally and emotionally. Her confidence must have been shattered and her trust in people would have been replaced with cynicism and weariness. Had this hate campaign been conducted offline, I have no doubt that the authorities would have acted much quicker to bring it to a halt.

By the time Andreassen was jailed he had already appeared in court on a number of occasions. On one occasion, after he admitted harassment, an order was made against him to refrain from mentioning his victim’s name on any websites. Again, it appears it took some time before this very limited court order was made and even longer, before breaches were dealt with.

“It is very likely,”
 says Yair Cohen “that had this been a case of domestic harassment, where more traditional methods of harassments were being used, the victim would have been relieved from her pain much, much earlier. It seems to me that the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Magistrates’ Courts are not yet ready to effectively deal with these sorts of online harassment cases. The civil courts however are much quicker to act in response to online harassment cases with injunctions being granted within days rather than months and years. I strongly advise victims of online harassment,” says Yair Cohen “to take their cases to the High Court where solicitors can obtain a much more comprehensive injunction on their behalf within 48 hours. There is no need for victims of online harassment to suffer for such a long time before the harassment is stopped.”

Despite him being jailed, a large number of the defamatory blogs that Andreassen created against his victim still remain active and are visible to the entire world to view. Yair Cohen says that a properly prepared High Court injunction would have ensured that the blogs and websites were removed by the internet service providers and that once such an injunction was granted, it could last for life, preventing anyone from taking part in the publication of material which is prohibited by the court order.

During his online campaign of harassment, Andreassen boasted of being so skilled in IT that he could set up and manipulate blogs about Miss Pattinson quicker than they could be deleted.

“It is not unusual for IT skilled individuals to blackmail their victims by making threats to destroy their victim’s reputation unless certain demands being met,”says Yair Cohen. “The police have seemed to so far, failed to recognise the fact that this form of blackmail is a criminal offence, mainly out of ignorance and lack of resources. In my law firm we take these sorts of threats very seriously and we make sure that we articulate clearly to the perpetrators of such online threats, the civil as well as the criminal implications of their actions.”

How To Get Rid Of Internet Defamation

Because the internet is a world of extremes, success and failures could literally happen overnight. The speed by which, for example you can have web pages listed on first pages of Google could bring immediate and substantial amount of money to your business, literally overnight. The same speed however that leads to this immediate success could cause a complete devastation to people and business owners who find that their reputation has been tarnished almost overnight. The good news however, is that with the principle of ‘easy come easy go’, listings of web pages on the first pages of the search engines are constantly changing which means that it is possible for negative information to disappear from the first pages of the search engines and be replaced by positive information fairly quickly. Speed is the key and the quicker you act the easier the task is. This should be somewhat comforting to those who sustain online reputation attacks because the knowledge that nothing on the internet is set in stone, gives you the opportunity to replace negative comments with positive ones. The same rules of extremes apply to videos and personal information which appear online.

Because of the extremely high volume of information, which is being posted daily on the internet, what is prominent today becomes little known tomorrow and high audience could turn into low volumes over a period of time and sometimes instantly.

In fact, if you search the internet for almost anything, you will struggle to find internet pages which were posted before 2008. Another, very encouraging set of statistics which reflect the extremes by which the internet operates is to do with the clicking habits of web users. It shows that results on the first page of Google receive 89% of the clicks, results on the second page receive 4.37 of clicks, results on the third page receive 2.42%, results on the forth page receive 1.07% and results on the remaining pages receive a total of less than 1% of the clicks. This means that 93.3 out of 100 people find results on page 3 and below irrelevant. As a result the vast majority of the people would not bother searching beyond the third page. This, in fact, is good news for anyone who suffers an online reputation attack.

It means that most online reputation attacks could be defeated or at least be pushed down to obscurity. If you are interested in the full click through statistics, you can find them below. The numbers of course, fluctuate all the time but could be regarded as a true reflection of the searching habits of the internet population.

  1. The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
  2. The second position receives 11.94%
  3. The third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
  4. The fourth placed position on page one receives 6.05%
  5. The others on the first page are under 5% of click through traffic
  6. The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic
  7. The next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%
  8. The third page receives a total of 2.42%
  9. The fifth page receives a total of only 1.07%
  10. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

Yair Cohen

Internet Law Expert

via Internet Law Experts | Online Reputation and Videos 

Having your reputation tarnished all over the internet is bad. But having your reputation destroyed with an online video is absolutely devastating.

Since taking over You Tube, Google appears to be on a mission to turn the internet into a multimedia medium and so are the other major search engines. It is believed that Google uses positive discrimination in order to encourage the use of video on the internet and as a result, it gives priority to video results which contain the searched keywords as well as to web pages which contain videos.

This means that online videos could be used as an explosive weapon by those who wish to harm your online reputation.  Online videos can be optimized to obtain good placements without the search engines in exactly the same way that optimisation is done for a web page. In fact, some argue it is much easier to obtain high places in the search engines with videos than with web pages. At the moment, online videos remain a major reputational weakness for many businesses. But this weakness can be turned into strength very quickly.

You can create a relatively inexpensive yet highly effective reputational defence shield by…Read NOW the full article on Internet Lawyer website

 
 
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Posted by London Internet Lawyers

How Can I Remove Defamatory Websites

In the past few weeks we removed over 40 defamatory websites, which up until then, devastated our clients’ reputation.

We removed a vast number of defamatory videos from You Tube and we managed to remove a popular, yet defamatory article against a successful businessman from a national news website.

We sought and won injunctions against YouTube, Google Inc, Firefox and other internet giants around the world and successfully enforced them all in the UK, the USA, Canada and other countries.

We gave one decent, hard-working online retailer his business back following savage online reputation attacks against him and his company by competitors.

We advised a client who owns an international franchise company on how to deal with online attacks by a former employee. These constant attacks were estimated to have cost the company in excess of £300,000!

 
We have also helped the owners of a national services company to form their first ever online reputation strategy following a devastating online reputation attack against them by both a competitor and a former employee, which cost them their biggest contact.

Last month, we brought solutions to an ever growing number of vulnerable people following online reputation attacks against them. We devised creative and cost effective solutions. Some of these individuals thought that it would cost them a fortune to stop these online attacks on their reputation, but pleasantly enough for them, many of them were completely surprised.
The full solution to their online reputation problem was handed to them during an initial consultation, which meant that they needed not spend any money with us, save for their investment of £93 in the initial consultation.

Other individuals saw their problem quickly disappearing following a well drafted and extremely effective letter (sometimes 2), which we sent on their behalf.
Other individuals, who were on the verge of giving up and who came to us with serious online reputation problems, sometimes following years of attacks on their reputation online, finally found that no reputation issue, as big as it might be, is beyond our competence.

But we also brought to them solutions for any future problems. To prevent the problem from repeating itself, we created a unique tool that gives them early alerts of any posts about them on the internet.

It brings any internet posts that carry yours or your company’s name, directly to the desk of our highly experienced legal team, and in real-time.
The material then undergoes an initial assessment and then if necessary, is acted upon.
We do this all for you with no hassle or inconvenience to you. Should the material posted be suspected to be harmful to your reputation we take swift action to contain the problem and often to make it completely  disappear.

Follow this link to learn more about the exclusive our reputation management tools. 

http://www.internetlawcentre.co.uk

We have solutions to almost all online reputation problems. Some of these solutions are fast, others take more time to implement. But what we are sure about is that you will get results (and more quickly), if you use people who are hugely experienced in this very delicate areas of law and business.

We are ready to take on your online reputation problem.

Internet Lawyers

 
 
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