Penis Pump Company Threatens To Report Techdirt To Interpol Because We Wrote About Its Bogus DMCA Demands

Last summer, our writer Tim Cushing put together something of an omnibus post of stupid DMCA takedown requests, none of which probably deserved their own unique post. One of the individuals he highlighted later went on something of a wacky defamatory crusade against Tim, posting blatantly false information about him, and claiming that Techdirt is actually owned by some telecommunications company I'd never even heard of, that is also a patent troll, or something. But now another entity in that very same post has also decided it's upset about the post, and has taken a slightly different strategy. The company in question is Andromedical, makers of the creatively named "Andropenis," which is (you guessed it) a penis pump. The company appears to do two things aggressively: push a highly questionable "study" claiming its device is effective... and issue questionable takedown demands. Tim was mocking the fact that Andromedical was asking Google to take down results from the competing Bing search engine, but also the fact that it appeared to be promotional images of the product. So, why are we subject to a takedown notice? BRING ON THE KITCHEN SINK OF LEGAL THREATS! In what is announced via email as a "DMCA notice," (and sent to a personal email address of mine, rather than our publicly listed DMCA agent email address) is apparently a combination notice of all sorts of things we didn't actually do:

I write on behalf of the Legal Department of Andromedical, S.L. Company, as an Intellectual Property abuse report to your company. This email is part of a Counterfeit Notification to INTERPOL and must be considered as an official Cease and Desist, Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notification. We have detected that your website is using our trademark Andropenis® and our copyrighted images without being licensed to do so. It is illegal to use Intellectual Property (IP) without license in your website, whether or not you are selling the actual device associated to our copyrighted properties. Thus, you are infringing the law by using trademarked and copyrighted properties of Andropenis® without license and without IP rights. Please, proceed to delete immediately the following pages and the images in them from your website: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150728/12010131782/all-ways-dmca-takedown-process-can-be-responsibly-used-these-are-none-them.shtml https://i.imgur.com/2SbufcE.png

Yeah, so, first of all, it's a DMCA notice, which covers copyright and not trademark. The fact that we don't have a license is meaningless either way. First of all, we can use the ridiculous Andromedical or Andropenis name as much as we want without violating the trademark, because we're using it in a manner that is clearly descriptive of the product, and not in commerce. It's also not being used in a manner to confuse consumers or dilute the brand. So, just the fact that it suggests merely mentioning the name without a license is infringing is ludicrous and wrong. You're doing trademark law badly. On the copyright question, we did post an image of some of Andromedical's own promotional images, but in a manner that was clearly fair use. It was part of our news article, explaining Andromedical's abusive DMCA practices, and as part of showing the kinds of images it was taking down, we showed a few thumbnails of those images. This is obviously fair use, so Andromedical can take its DMCA notice and pump it. Then we get to the whole "Counterfeit Notice to INTERPOL" -- to which I can only say... huh? There's no counterfeiting. We're not selling any products in our post -- legitimate or counterfeit. We're just posting a story about the company, which is perfectly legal to do. Nevertheless, the company insists that if we don't take down our article, it will follow through with a list of increasingly aggressive/ridiculous tactics:

You have one week after the reception of this email to delete any and all images of Andromedical and/or Andropenis® products, any and all Andromedical and/or Andropenis® trademarks, and any and all Andromedical and/or Andropenis® information and references from your websites. Legal actions against your company will be stopped if these actions are undertaken. If you fail to do so, our Legal Department will:

• Remove your company’s visibility in GOOGLE, Yahoo and/or other search engines, such as Yahoo! or Bing, via DMCA notices. Please find attached to this email the DMCA notice in question. (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?rd=1&pli=1&authuser=1 )
• Block your payment gateways via intellectual property abuse reports to your payment processors, VISA, PAYPAL. (http://usa.visa.com/a