An attempt at being silenced

This happened some time ago actually, but I had to wait until Aff himself posted about it first.

The post is at the main site.

Long story short, it’s a network domain registration scam, where a ‘different company’ tries to register an existing domain and then the ‘registering company’ contacts the owner of the existing domain and says they should register the site with them to ensure they own the domain – in this case, the affsdiary.com domain.

It’s rather unusual that this came after my post got Instalanched.

Well, no, not really. This is not the first time something like this has happened.

See, I wrote a little self-published book called Sparrowind, and soon after it was put out, Aff got a takedown notice, based on ‘potentially copyright infringing material.’ Aff responded that as all the contents and the artwork were original, there was no way that the book was in violation of copyright. But, if the original complainant were to contact us directly, we were surely going to be able to discuss this further.

We never got any further contact on that end, and the case was closed.

Periodically we also get emails with rather vague demands to ‘take stuff down’ – I said it was vague. Still, this latest attempt has been somewhat creative, but is clearly unaware of the legal labyrinth that would pretty much result in a loss from the complainant – simply because the domain is registered in copyright according to Australian law, and has been for several years.

This is not the first time there have been attempts to silence me, and honestly, I doubt it’ll be the last.

The silly thing is, I’m a very minor entity on the Internet, and I don’t think I have that many readers. To drag myself mentally out of the grief and depression takes a lot of effort, and afterward I feel as if I’d spent hours doing martial arts training, without the benefit of endorphins to make me feel better. Yet that effort seems small in comparison to the amount of effort there seems to be aimed at driving me off the Internet, to alienate me from the writing communities I’ve joined, in seeming response to any positive attention my works get.

That’s…a rather sad way to spend time, isn’t it?

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