Pissed Consumer Gets To Go After Roca Labs For Its Bogus DMCA Takedowns

Remember Roca Labs? The somewhat shady manufacturer of some goop that the company claimed was an "alternative to gastric bypass surgery." This was the company that initially sued the site PissedConsumer.com because it was hosting negative reviews of Roca's product -- and Roca claimed that because it pressured buyers into a gag clause saying they wouldn't say anything bad about the product, that PissedConsumer was engaged in tortious interference. There was a lot more as well, including threatening to sue us at Techdirt (more than once!) for reporting on the case, suing Pissed Consumer's lawyer Marc Randazza for defamation and a variety of other shenanigans (even including some bizarre side stories on Nevada politics, despite it being a Florida company). Anyway, late last year the FTC smacked down Roca for its misleading marketing and its non-disparagement clauses. Roca is still fighting that fight, but soon after it also lost the case against PissedConsumer. However, there was (yet another) separate legal fight that didn't get much attention in all of this. In late 2014, we had reported that, in continuing with its efforts to hide any negative reviews, Roca Labs had sent a clearly bogus DMCA takedown to Google (see it here), claiming that the reviews on PissedConsumer's site violated its copyrights. What I had not realized was PissedConsumer actually had filed a separate lawsuit against Roca back in January of 2015, focused solely on these bogus DMCA takedowns, arguing that they had violated the infamous DMCA 512(f) clause on bogus takedowns. As we've noted, 512(f) cases are rarely successful, as courts don't seem to care much about them, and the law is written in such a manner that it's usually pretty easy to dance around a claim of "misrepresentation" in a DMCA takedown. And, in this case, the court dismissed the case, by basically saying that it was really nothing more than a counterclaim in the other, original, case filed by Roca. However, in a somewhat surprising move (actually, very surprising), the court has now agreed that the decision to dismiss the case was a mistake, and that this is a separate issue from the original case, and not a counterclaim. The reasoning is somewhat technical and procedural, but at the very least, it appears that the case against Roca for abusing the DMCA is back on track. Permalink | Comments | Email This Story