A Workaround
A self-proclaimed online defamation law firm, Kelly/Warner is no stranger to suits of this kind. The firm has made a name for itself in recent years, listing fictitious defendants on a number of cases as a sort of workaround toward Internet censorship.
Not surprisingly, the web has long been a tricky place to navigate legally—at least when it comes to libel and defamation suits. Getting sites to remove URLs is one matter, but to get Google and other search engines to de-index them is near impossible without a court order.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Volokh, who originally uncovered the questionable ways of Kelly/Warner, put it best: “If you send Google a court order finding the material on some pages to be defamatory, Google will consider deindexing those pages, on the theory that the court order is fairly reliable evidence that the pages are indeed inaccurate and libelous. But the consequence is that people have been using various stratagems to deindex material even when there’s little reason for such confidence.”
