8/13/2019 STC Email to HBO Accusing of Link Adding

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From: Content [STC] Sent: 03 December 2010 10:43To: Rosenthal, Steven (HBO) (Steven.Rosenthal@hbo.com)Cc: Nick Brett (nick@brettwilsonllp.co.uk)Subject: SurfTheChannel Campaign

Dear Mr Rosenthal,

We refer to your current take down campaign that your agent BayTSP is conducting on your behalf.

As you know since 30 August 2008 you have been signing, on penalty of perjury, notices that request removal of sometimes hundreds of links from the STC website at a time. These notices were originally drip fed by your agent so that rather than a master list of links being removed in one go your agent sent several notices each day, every day of the week. This practice has continued up to and including today. There has, however, been more of an effort by your agent to consolidate notices after we repeatedly requested disclosure of the master list of links that we were sure existed but that you denied any existence of.

We have been alarmed at the way in which links that were removed for certain TV episodes have been replaced so quickly with new links for the same episodes. So alarmed in fact that we knew that this was not a true reflection of the way our website was usually used by our users. We decided to set up monitoring of your notices and record various information about the patterns of your requests and the users posting the new fresh links that you would then send a request for a day or two later. We have recorded every bit of information there is to gather about the users responsible for posting these links and we are truly shocked at what we have discovered.

It is our opinion that HBO, BayTSP and/or its agents have been conducting a campaign against the STC website which involves the posting of both fake and infringing links into its database in an attempt to give the false impression

that links that are removed from the database are almost immediately replaced. We have also discovered that large amounts of the links that are being posted by these users, and subsequently being requested for removal by HBO through BayTSP, lead to pages on Megavideo where a video has never existed, this is denoted by a message that states This video is unavailable. It should be noted that if the video on Megavideo had been published and then removed as the result of a take down request the message would read This video has been removed for infringement. This begs the question why you are swearing on penalty of perjury that you have good faith that the links you are requesting for removal from STC are infringing when they are clearly, at least in some part, nothing of the sort.

The relatively small amount of users who are responsible for attacking the STC website in this way are clearly automated programs and scripts controlled by an entity who has specifically programmed the software to act in this

way. This technology and capability is something that BayTSP , Aiplex Software , Peer Media Technologies and other AntiPiracy companies who work on behalf of the MPAA and other Rights Holders are well known for. Armed with this information we have cross referenced various intelligence, investigated tactics, addresses and personnel used by these companies and are now confident in our position.

We recently responded to your take down emails by requesting that you swear, on penalty of perjury, in any further notices, that the links you have requested for removal have not been placed there by HBO or its agents such as BayTSP, Aiplex Software, Peer Media Technologies or other entities acting on its behalf. While you responded with modified notices (eventually) you omitted and continue to omit the words or other entities acting on its behalf . We also note that you continue to use the phrase I can confirm that I am unaware as opposed to I can confirm that HBO is unaware as we have requested. We are assuming from now on that whenever you use this phrase you

are actually saying that HBO is unaware of links being posted on STC by itself or its agents. Please correct us if we are mistaken.

8/13/2019 STC Email to HBO Accusing of Link Adding

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If it is your position that you do not have any knowledge of what we allege then we urge you to conduct a top down investigation of your agents and associates. We reserve the right to use the considerable information we have discovered in any civil or criminal proceedings.

As a final note we wish to emphasise that we will still act on take down notices that you or your agents send. We have copied our legal advisors into this correspondence.

Sincerely,

SurfTheChannel Link Removal Team