This topic has more history than I expected. Noice.
Soo.. did anyone speak to her directly? Or is there some sort of non disclosure thing going? And, may I assume that the links were mainly to fakes or was it some kinda celeb jihad or mr skin type stuff?
Hah, no NDA. It was her legal team that contacted us (as is the case with these things). No contact with Ms. Swift herself.
And as Adam said, no fakes. Most of the content was just the regular celebrity stuff. Links to interviews, news, youtube vids and other social media.
To be honest, I think the greatest story isn't Taylor Swift. It's a very, very, very, very, very minor F list celebrity that I can't name because if it gets crawled and indexed on google I'll start getting mails from her and from our domain, hosting, etc legal. This very minor celebrity was a playboy plus model and had very minor roles in 2 Troma films (more on this later).
She was upset we listed her on a porn site and demanded we take her down. At that time I think we only had a social media link and IMDb links to the 3 total films she was listed in. Since she was being quite a bitch about it all, I just deleted the links and her babe section to get rid of her. It's not like she had starred in hundreds of films and was relevant in the porn industry.
This wasn't good enough. She was upset that when she searched for herself on FreeOnes, her name showed up. I was very confused since she was now unlisted and it turned out she was seeing her name under "your search" as well as her name in the search URL. I explained to her you'd see the exact same thing if you were to search for "President Obama", "Pope John Paul" or "Bugs Bunny". This is how search results worked... the keywords show up in the search URL, but it doesn't mean there was any positive results. This wasn't good enough to her and she had her lawyer send a cease and desist to our host's legal department trying to get the entire site taken down.
Whatever company we host with actually knows us on a personal basis. It's not like some small blog on shared hosting. We have a custom solution, travel to the data center, etc. Whenever someone sent a DMCA or C&D to their legal, I usually got a mail so we had the opportunity to handle it first. I emailed the woman who I was now referring to as "the idiot" because I had emailed countless times trying to explain in different ways that she's not listed and to stop googling her name in combination with FreeOnes. Google will think it's a relevant search and won't de-index her old page (which would 404 if anyone clicked on it..). At this point I wrote her and told her that this was the last mail and bit of time I'm spending on the issue....
"Your page has been removed from FreeOnes. It has been for the past year. At this point it's like a mirror. If you don't want to see yourself, don't look in the mirror. If you don't want to see your name on the search or in the link, don't put your name in there and it won't show up!"
Immediate reply with loads of bitching how this wasn't good enough. I called our hosting's legal, told them I am sending them a copy of the mail, I don't know what more I can possibly do since none of it exists any longer. Legal told me they'd handle it. Didn't hear from her again.
Every few years now this person mails us, still bitching about seeing her name when she searches for herself. This has been going on a better part of 10 years now.
Now, one thing that it DID do is allow me to contact Troma and tell them that a very minor cast member was trying to DMCA their links as her own. This allowed me contact with someone in the company and I got to fan girl all over them because I LOVE Troma films. I got a tshirt out of it. In the spirit of Troma, here's a music video from one of my favorite darkwave bands that was directed by the man, Lloyd Kaufman himself.
