A New York dentist had her patients sign a “mutual” agreement that, among other things, had the patient agree to not make any negative reviews of the dentist and, if she did, assigned the copyright of those reviews to the dentist. The reason for this was so, if the patient violated the agreement and made any negative reviews, the dentist could rely on her assigned copyright to send a DMCA Takedown Notice to the website host and circumvent the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally immunizes such hosts.
Well, as things always go, a patient did post a negative online review on Yelp and the dentist sent a DMCA Takedown Notice to Yelp. It all went downhill for the dentist from there. For someone trying to keep negative publicity to a minimum, this was the wrong move — what was described as “the Streisand Effect Gone Bonkers.”
You can read more at the following link but, long story short, if you have a contract like this, rather than try and enforce it, you’d probably be better off to just shred it and never tell anyone!
Dentist who used copyright to silence her patients is on the run | Ars Technica.
