Faking a DMCA Takedown to Boost Search Rankings

unhappy in their current work situation at the time. They wanted to find something with a better company that better utilized their skills and knowledge and didn't make them feel like crying at the end of every day, and so they started looking online for various opportunities. They used LinkedIn and some other tools to try and find something that was stable and appealing basics for a job search right well. Along that search, they encountered some scam artists and predators.

So my friend would sometimes ask my opinion of some of the responses that they received. They would send me on a little bit of a hunt to find out is this a legitimate offer or is this company doing something shady and underhanded. They were worried that some of the responses they got were a bit too good to be true. So I looked into it, and often they

were too good to be true. And I'm sure a lot of you out there are familiar with similar scams, right, where someone gets offered one position, when they go into interview for it, they are offered something totally different. Right. It's a bait and switch, where it's a different position with different pay. They're not going to get nearly the stuff that they had been promised or suggested through the whole job search situation. That sort of stuff, unfortunately, is

terribly common and it's really crappy. So often when I would look into these offers that my friend was getting, I would find that they frequently linked to a website that, at least on a very casual surface glance, looks somewhat legitimate. But even just a cursory look at the site, especially clicking around a little bit to the different pages in the site, would reveal that the whole thing was just

a facade. I remember one supposed I think it was a real estate company that was offering my friend an incredible starting position and salary. And when I went to the website, the website did look pretty slick, The office space looked really nice, the folks, and the photos looked

really photogenic, and immediately I thought something was fishy. For one thing, like me, my friend is based in the metropolitan Atlanta area, and yet the building that I saw on the website didn't look like it was in Atlanta, even though there was an Atlanta address that was on the website. Now you could argue, well, maybe it's in a part of Atlanta I'm just not familiar with, or maybe this was a company that has offices in different cities and what I was really looking at was an

HQ building in some other city or something. But I used the address that was listed on the site to look up the location online, you know, get a street view look at this supposed place, and not only did the building look totally different, there were no businesses matching the name of the one that was contacting my friend at that particular building location. I was able to find the businesses that were in that building, and none of them matched the thing that was sent to my friend.

So then go back to the website to click around some more. I find that some of the links, like links to bios for the leadership team or whatever, led to unfinished pages. I just had stuff like lorum ipsum style gibberish in them. So the more I looked, the more it appeared to be just a hastily assembled trap designed to lure hopeful people into taking the bait. Now what the scam was, I don't know, Like, I don't know if it was going to be a bait and switch.

I don't know, if it was really some other company that was just looking to get you know, cheap labor. I don't know if it was like a phishing attempt to get my friend's personal information. That doesn't really matter. What was clear was that there was something shady happening.

The real clincher was when I did a reverse image search on some of the photos that were in the page, because some of the reverse images went to stock photography sites, but others linked to identical websites that had businesses with different names in different cities, but otherwise the website was identical, with the same language and everything, to the point where the same mistakes were showing up on some of these pages.

And clearly this was just a scam that was being run over and over and over again in different locations. So I warned my friend, and I also got very, very very angry about the scam. Now, I hate scams and cons and deceit, but I really hate the ones that prey upon people who have the most to lose. If you're going to scam the billionaire out of a million dollars, I mean, what you're doing is wrong, but

I'm not gonna be sad for the billionaire. But if you're scamming people who are trying to make a positive change in their lives because they're currently in a bad situation, that's just the worst. Now, from the con artist viewpoint, I totally get it, because you want to target people who are already highly motivated to buy into whatever it

is you're selling. But when you consider the people who are typically looking for a job or in a situation that is already pretty tough, and then on top of that you throw a scam at them, that just makes my blood boil. So why did I bother telling this story. Well, it's because there's a similar scam that I read about today, and I didn't know about it untill I saw an article by Kevin Purdy on Ours Technica. Y'all know I love Ours Technica. I don't have any connection to the website,

but I love their work. And the article is titled fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO games, which is a heck of a title. And yeah, this con game gets a bit convoluted. It starts to make me think of some of those films like that you would see, especially around the nineties and two thousands, of like these scams that would be scams on top of scams on top of scams, where following it starts to get a little challenging. It's similar in

that way. So let's give you a little scenario that's kind of an analogous to what we're talking about. Imagine that one day you go out and you check your mail because sometimes you still get stuff in the mail, and you find out there's a notice that's included in your mail that day, and the notice claims that you are under investigation for a supposed crime that you have committed against a person you have never heard of. What's even more strange is that this notice is coming from

a police department that has a weird name. It doesn't match the one that's actually in your area. It seems kind of odd, so you decide, you know what, I'm going to look into this, and you look up that police department and you find out there's no police force in your city that has that name. Then you look and you find out there's not any person by the name of the supposed victim that you can find anyway.

You would think that was really strange, right. That's kind of how the scam we're going to talk about worked, and not that it worked. It didn't work because the person they sent it to was far too smart for this. But we'll also talk about why the scam exists in the first place later on in the show, because it wasn't just to you know, phish information or get money. In fact, that wasn't the key to it at all. The article covers the story of a journalist named Ernie Smith,

so not the musician or producer or anything. It's the journalist Ernie Smith, and Smith author is a newsletter called Tedium, which is a nice little fun way of piggybacking on medium, I guess, or at least like kind of slyly acknowledging

medium with your own. I gotta admit, that's exactly the sort of name I would have picked if I were writing a newsletter I will say that, based upon what I've seen of the newsletter, which I've just subscribed to it, because again I was unfamiliar with Smith's work until I read this article, I will say that, based upon what

I've seen, it's well worth checking out. He does cover technology, but he also has articles on lots of other stuff, like Neapolitan ice cream and its role in the space industry. It seems like a cool dude. So anyway, Smith will often use images in his newsletter, which is pretty standard online, and he makes sure to source those images appropriately and then to credit those sources, as is very much not

standard online. I don't have to tell y'all that tons of folks out there on the web will just grab whatever images they can just doing an image search. They won't even spare a second thought about it. They'll PLoP it into their own stuff. So technically, this is what we would call stealing, and it's been explained to me

a society only frowns upon it. So for that reason, we've got things like stock photography databases, and you can access these typically you access them for a fee, and then you can get images that you can include with all the permissions that you need to do so, the most rule abiding creators out there will go to that kind of trouble. Everybody else steals. Now, a lot of people will steal until they get a DMCA notice, and

that scares the stealing right out of them. Now, the DMCA is the good old Digital Millennium Copyright Act of nineteen ninety eight here in the United States, and here in the US copyright law has gone through quite a

few revisions over its history. Now we can just oversimplify that whole history by saying that typically large media companies like Disney have lobbied big time, really again and again in order to extend copyright protections for longer and longer periods, and this lets them maintain an exclusive grip on certain ip You probably have heard that the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey Mouse is now in public domain. That's true. It's the only version of Mickey Mouse that's currently in

public domain. Other versions will enter into public domain as time goes on. But it doesn't mean that every version of Mickey Mouse is in public domain. And the reason it took so long to get to the point where the Steamboat Willi version would enter public domain is because companies like Disney would lobby very hard to get legislation passed to extend copyright protection beyond what it was running

up against. Well, eventually we kind of hit the limit on that and everyone said, you know what, I think we pushed this as far as we can and so now we're not seeing that happen quite as much. Now. A lot more stuff has been added into copyright law besides just making it longer, and that particularly became true upon the dawn of the World Wide Web. So remember DMC gets passed in nineteen ninety eight. That's when the

Web was maturing. It had yet to go through the Dot Com crash, but like it was definitely a big factor. So the DMCA introduced quite a few new concepts into copyright law. So, for example, there's the paradoxical nature of digital rights management or DRM. So with US copyright law, we have this concept of fair use. There are exemptions of copyright in which it is fair to use copyrighted material that does not belong to you, but they are very specific and it only comes up when you are

actually defending yourself in a court case. It's not something you can proactively put out there anyway. One of the concepts of fair use. Is that it is totally legal for someone to purchase a copy of something like an album or a piece of software or whatever it might be, is totally legal to make a copy of that thing for the purposes of a personal back That's completely within

the rights of citizens, which seems pretty straightforward. But certain companies will use DRM protections that make it difficult or impossible to make a copy of their stuff unless you first strip out the DRM. But if you were to strip out the DRM, it makes the DRM moot. So the DMCA says, hey, it's illegal to strip out DRM. If in fact there is DRM on the stuff you buy. That means that, yeah, it's legal for you to make

a backup copy. However, DRM is preventing you from making a copy at all, and it is illegal to remove the DRM. So by extension, you're legally allowed to make a copy, but technically you can't because laws are fun and fair and it makes sense, all right, I'm getting

way off track here. So the DMCA also includes processes for sending takedown notices, and this, again on the high level, is pretty straightforward, at least if you assume that the party that sending the takedown notice actually has the authority to do it. So basically, it goes like this. Let's say that you are the creator of some kind of content. Might be a photograph, that might be music, it might be writing, whatever it is. You hold the copyright for

this content, or maybe you don't. Maybe you didn't actually copyright it, you just created it. In fact, a copyright is not necessarily required to send to a DMCA takedown notice. Now, let's say that you find that someone else has made use of your content without your permission. You have the right to process a takedown notice against that someone else. It's kind of like a cease and desist letter, and it indicates that if someone else doesn't take down your material,

you could pursue a legal claim against them. So it's kind of like the first step toward initiating a more serious legal action against someone perpetrating copyright infringement. Okay, that's a lot, and there's a bit more to it, but we'll get more that after we come back from taking a break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. I just described before the break the process of sending a DMCA takedown notice to someone who's using material that does

not technically belong to them. So a DMCA notice has several factors that the content creator or the creator's agent, right whomever it is that's pursuing this DMCA takedown, they have things that they need to include in their takedown notice in order for it to actually be valid under copyright law. You can't just send someone a handwritten note on a bar napkin that says, hey, take down that picture.

You don't own it. I do. That's not enough. So if the takedown notice is missing some of these elements, then the entity that receives the notice can just refuse it or not pay attention because the notice itself didn't follow the law in the first place. It has to follow the rules in order to apply. And typically when we are talking about this, we're not actually talking about the copyright holder sending a DMCA takedown directly to the

content creator that used that material. Instead, you're talking about a notice that is sent to some sort of service provider that is responsible for giving the content creator a platform. This could be any kind of company, from an Internet service provider to a web hosting service to a platform like YouTube, and then the service acts as a kind of liaison between the injured party, the copyright holder, and

whomever made inappropriate use of that material. This is why platforms like YouTube are pretty lickety split when it comes to responding to DMCA takedown notices. YouTube has a history of acting very quickly in this regard because YouTube slash Google slash alphabet doesn't want to be held legally accountable

for allowing copyright infringement on the platform. This dates back to the very early days of YouTube, and YouTube doesn't exactly have the desire or the ability to spend the money in time it would take to investigate every single DMCA claim to make sure that it's a legitimate claim. So often you will hear stories from YouTube creators who say, yeah, I got a DMCA takedown notice, but the company that

issued it doesn't even own the material that I used. Like, there's some crazy stories out there, and in fact, a lot of people have weaponized DMCA takedown notices in an effort to silence channels they don't like. It's pretty nasty out there, and there are ways to appeal the whole situation, but it's time consuming and there's no guarantee that you're going to actually get the results you want, and that's really another tangent. It's another episode for another day. Now.

Most of the time the people who are sending a DMCA notice want one of two things, or possibly both of those things. Most of the time they want the someone else to just take down the material that isn't theirs, to remove it from whatever it is, whether it's a video or a website or whatever. Sometimes they also want to be compensated for their works use in someone else's stuff. Sometimes they want both of these things. They want to be paid and they want the material gone. But that's

not exactly what was happening with Ernie Smith's case. So Smith received a DMCA notice regarding a photo that he used of a keyfob, or as the photo description on unsplash claims, a quote close up of a cell phone on a car dashboard end quote. So this was an image that Smith was using in connection with the story he was relaying about a somewhat odd ride he had while using a ride hailing service unsplash just in case you're not familiar, because I wasn't. It's a stock photography

site and technically getty Image owns it. Getty Image purchased on splash I think back in twenty twenty one, if I'm not mistaken. So Getty is a huge name in photography in general, stock photography in particular. Getting your images from Getty typically requires a substantial subscription fee, particularly if you want to be able to use an image in perpetuity. Most folks do want to be able to use an

image in perpetuity. It means that you get to use it forever and ever for whatever purpose you want, because otherwise, if you're not having the agreement keep it in perpetuity, it means that you have agreed to a limited amount of time where you are allowed to use that image, and then once that time is up, you would need to go in and remove the image from whatever was inside.

Let me tell you, if you're running a website or a blog, or a video series or whatever, you do not want to have to keep up with a complicated database of image rights and then regularly remove pictures from your various works. That's a huge hassle. You're just asking to miss something and leave yourself liable for legal action down the line simply because it got so complicated and convoluted that you overlooked one of those images. So most

people go with the in perpetuity option. But unsplash is a stock photography site that licenses use of images for free. You are allowed to make use of those images even for commercial purposes. Like if you have a site that's selling something, you can still use images on unsplash. Like a lot of licenses say hey, you can use this as long as it's not for commercial purposes, Unsplash you're allowed to and you can use those images in just about any way you want. There is an exception I'll

talk about in a second. You don't even have to credit the photographer while you're doing so. You can just use it unattributed. And this is kind of like what people were doing on the web in general, but in this case it's actually okay because it's covered by the license. It's a licensed use. The only thing you're not allowed to do is you cannot take images from unsplash and then sell those images to other people. That would be

against the policy. You can use them again for commercial purposes, like if your newsletter is a paid newsletter, that's fine. You just can't troll through unsplashed, download a ton of photos and then sell those pictures somewhere else. That's against the rules. So Smith was following the rules. He had pulled an image from a source that allows for that kind of use. So imagine his surprise when he gets

a DMCA notice about this very image. Now, I want to be clear, something like this could potentially happen, and it could be on the up and up. It could be possible that some photographer took a picture, someone else grabbed that picture, and they submitted it to unsplash, but

they didn't do it with the photographer's permission. It's possible that photographer might find out that their image is now being used somewhere else and it wasn't licensed from them, and maybe they're using some sort of detection or search

algorithm that's pulling up instances of that image. But typically that photographer would then need to go through by sending a notice to unsplash directly in order to get the image taken down from unsplash, because going after folks who have used the image from unsplash would be kind of like treating the symptom but not the disease, because as long as that image would stay on unsplash while other

folks could be making use of it. So partly you would say, well, DMCA takedown notice should really go to the photography site, not to Ernie Smith. So Smith gets this notice and immediately he's somewhat skeptical of it, as he should be. And the notice threatened to quote unquote activate a case and a reference to section of the DMCA called DMCA Section five twelve s. And you might say, well,

what the heck is that. Well, that section of the DMCA is titled Limitations on Liability relating to Material Online, And just from that title, if you just critically break down that title, it should make your eyebrows go up, because it's not the sort of title that sounds like it would give a copyright claimant a lot of leverage. In fact, the phrase limitations on liability seem to indicate

that this is something else entirely. This is something that applies to a party that is potentially on the other side of this issue. They have limitations on how they are liable. In fact, if you really read through the section of the DMCA, and I did, I don't recommend it. It's not good reading. But if you did read through it, it would be hard for you to figure out a way where that section has any application to Smith, because

really it's more about how system providers. Again, things like ISPs or YouTube or whatever would not be held liable for monetary relief or quote injunctive or other equitable relief end quote for the actions someone takes using their service. In other words, the idea is that the platform isn't held responsible for the actions of folks who are using

that platform to transmit material that isn't theirs. This is like the concept of safe harbor, right that if you operate a service and someone uses your service to do something illegal, you didn't do the illegal thing. Your service might have facilitated it, but you didn't do it. You didn't commit the crime. Someone committed the crime using your services, and that that person should be held responsible for the

criminal act, not you. So the section is called limited liability because there are cases where you can be held to account, right Like, it's not like you get out of jail free. It's not that these platforms have no responsibilities to answer to. If the service were to take an active role in copyright infringement itself in some way, then it would be liable. There are other ways as well, But again, if we assume the provider is just doing

the job a facilitator. Then generally speaking, they're kind of off the hook from a legal sense. But in other words, this section doesn't really apply if you're trying to intimidate somebody with a DMCA notice, right, Like, why would you cite that part of the DMCA. It doesn't even carry with it any like threat of legal action or consequences. But that was not the only weird bit about the

takedown notice. The really weird thing, at least in my mind, is the notice said it wouldn't matter if Ernie Smith removed this picture or not from the newsletter. Removing the picture would not stop the hurt train that was barreling down the tracks towards Smith. In fact, the only way to avert calamity would be to credit the image by including a link that would go to a site called tech for Gods. And that's tech the numeral for gods.

That seems weird, right that the real response that the takedown was seeking was just a link to the site that's supposed le generated the image in the first place. You think they'd be asking Ernie Smith to take it down, or asking him for money or maybe a licensing fee

something like that. But no, and it was weird, and it prompted a bit of an investigation similar to what I talked about when my friend told me they thought something hinky was up with the company website that they shared with me, and some of the same issues I found back in those days, or variants of those issues, had emerged upon a casual investigation into the website of

this supposed law firm. First, the alleged law firm's name was Commonwealth Legal, but the HQ that the website listed the actual physical address for the company was supposedly in Arizona. Now that's already a huge red flag. Here's why. The United States has only four states in it that are commonwealths. Those four states are Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. You will notice that Arizona is not on that list. So there's no reason why a law firm in Arizona would

be called Commonwealth Legal. And in fact, the four states I mentioned, for those of you not familiar with US geography, they're all in the eastern half of the continental United States. Arizona is way out west. You would think, like territorial legal would make more sense to talk about territories rather than commonwealths. But no, so the name itself already was like, why would you call your law firm that in a state that is really far away from any states that

are known as commonwealths. So there are historical reasons for the whole commonwealth versus state thing. But even though that's really fascinating, I am sensitive to the fact that I've tangented about as much as any reasonable person would tolerate already, so I will not go down that fun rabbit trail. We'll get back to the hinky nature of this takedown notice. So the name of the law firm is already suspect. The website for the law firm claimed that the founders

established the company in twenty eighteen. However, looking into the website you would find that it had a registration date of March of this year. Also, it was registered in Canada, an odd thing for a law firm located out of Arizona. The images of the site of the supposed lawyers in the firm included ones that didn't look totally natural. So, in other words, there were some visual cues that perhaps some of these images were computer generated or AI generated,

and in fact, according to the ours Technica article. A company called Reality Defender looked into the matter and said every single image of a person on that website appeared to have been AI generated. Similarly, the lawyer bios were all over the place. Some of them were listed as having unlikely specialties, so like, you can be a copyright lawyer. A friend of mine is a former patent lawyer. These are real things, So seeing copyright lawyer on a site

like this that would seem to give legitimacy. However, some of those lawyers were listed as being like both a copyright lawyer as well as an expert in criminal law. Those are just two very different branches of law, and if you're specializing, it means you kind of you know, have to focus on a specific branch, not two unrelated branches of the law. So it seemed like the biographies were actually meant to send a really intimidating message like you got to do what we say, or you're going

to be in deep trouble, mister Smith. So again another red flag. We're not done with the red flags yet, but we do need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors. We'll be right back. So we're going through some of the red flags that were on this website that kind of indicated that whatever this was, it was not an act actual DMCA takedown notice, at least

not a legitimate one. The website for this supposed law firm also states that the company is on the fourth floor of a building in Arizona, and again it lists the address. So Ernie Smith did what I did when I was investigating this supposed real estate company that my friend had me look into when they thought that maybe they were getting a job offer. So Ernie Smith checked Google street View to see what actually is there at

that physical address. When he did this, he found a small, single story building with a banner outside of it that said insurance. So if this building had a fourth floor, it would have to be underground. Get another strike against this law firm for being a real thing. So we have all the earmarks of a scam. You've got a note that carries a threatening implication that this is your way of motivating a target to do whatever it is

you want them to do. You threaten them, you engage their fear, They stress out, and they hurdly do whatever it is that you're trying to get to do. You also have a website that, at least on casual glance, seems to indicate that you mean business and you've got the legal firepower to make your target pay for failing to comply that your threats have teeth to them. And the request itself is so darn painless. You just have to include that little load link back to tech for

Gods and all this goes away. This might raise a question in your minds. It did for mind, which is what the heck is tech for Gods? So I decided I'd check it out. It's a site that's run by a guy named Daniel Bartzak, who's bio on the site says is a home automation expert, computer programmer, and blogger. The site has got articles on it with like tips and tricks for tech stuff, some reviews for certain products,

some DIY projects, that kind of thing. Like there are articles if when I check today, that include stuff like how much does a smart mirror cost? Or how to clean a smart toilet for hygienic blome. So what's the goal here, right? Why are these links the big part of the whole threatening DMCA action? And did Bartzak have anything to do with it? Well, let me answer the second question. First, now you might think that perhaps there's something to this and that Bartzak might have some involvement.

If you look at Tech for Gods and you scroll all the way to the bottom, there is a notice at the very bottom of the website that says, quote all right reserved unless stated explicitly, Any graphic can be used in your own content as long as link is

included back to this website end quote. So here's precedent, right, Like, the site administrator is asking that sites that uses graphics link back to his site, And if you dig around on his site you can also see some other things that are interesting that might make you think, oh, maybe this is someone who's using some questionable means to pressure someone to link back to their site. It's not a guarantee and it's not a you know, like catching someone

red handed, but it just starts raising questions. For example, he makes use of quote unquote AI writing assistance. Now that actually makes sense to me because he puts out a lot of content and it would be very difficult to do that without the help of someone or something else. He does say that every piece goes through a rigorous

proofreading and editing process before it's published. So while the writing might be AI generated, supposedly it has gone through an editing you know, pass or two before being published. And according to Bartzak, he didn't take or own the image in question, the one that prompted the whole DMCA takedown in the first place, nor did he direct this supposed law firm to go after Smith. What he did do was he paid a service to buy backlinks to

his website tech for gods. So backlinks are just buying links so that other websites will link to your page. And you might say, well why do that. Here's why. When it comes to ranking in searches, one of the many components that determines where your site will pop up within search results is the number and quality of links that are going to your site. So if you launch a website and there are these really big, reputable sites out there that link to you, that's a huge boost

to your credibility and thus to your search rankings. Right Like, if lots of reputable sites say that you know what you're talking about, then sites like Google are going to say, well, this person knows what they're talking about. Maybe you've got some esteemed journalists who link to your work. That's going to be great news from a search engine optimization standpoint, And that's really what this all comes down to, search engine optimization, making sure you rank high enough in search

that people see your stuff. We all know that if it's below the fold, like, if it's below the point where you would have to start scrolling down the list of search results, a lot of folks aren't even going to bother going that far. They certainly won't bother going beyond the first page, and the very few who do aren't going to go beyond page two, right, Like, that's just general wisdom. There's very few people who will bother diving deep, deep, deep into search results to try and

find a link that works for them. So you need to rank high if you're going to be getting any real traffic coming from search engines. Boy howdy, it's hard to get those links, right. It's hard to get these reputable sites to link to you. Like, you really need to put out great content, and it has to be stuff that people would want to link to. You have

to be discoverable in the first place. This can lead to a catch twenty two situation, right because you can't get discovered until you get more sites linking to you, but more sites aren't going to link to you because they haven't discovered you yet. That's a really frustrating experience to be in. So what do you do well, Maybe you purchase back links. Maybe you hire a company that will make sure that these links go up on different websites that link back to your site and thus boost

your search ranking. Maybe you employ the services of a company that might use some underhanded tricks to get those back links in place, by tricking people into including links, because that works just as well as the legitimate link does. Google doesn't know if a link to a website is there because the person running the original linking site really likes the linked content, or it's because they had been intimidated into including a link to that content in order

to avoid a lawsuit. Google does know. Google just sees the link, which, in Google's eyes, is like the linking site is validating the linked site. Site A is saying, hey, this is worth seeing, even if that link is really Site A saying hey, I don't want to get sued by site B, and they said that I needed to do this link in order to avoid a d takedown. It's sneaky, it's unethical, and again I don't necessarily think

this actually links back to Bartzak directly. He was likely not aware of how the company he was using to get those backlinks was actually going to go about doing it. It does strike me as being similar to those companies that would boost follower accounts on social media platforms. You

might remember back when that was a thing. You would have, like a would be influencer who would then pay a company so the company would link like hundreds or even thousands of fake or low quality social media accounts to follow the influencer and thus boost their follower numbers, which makes the influencer appear more attractive to brands that want to partner with them. This is pretty much the same sort of thing we're seeing here, but with backlinks instead

of followers, and I get it. I understand the motivation because it is hard out there. Getting discovered is really hard. This podcast would probably have a fraction of the number of listeners I get had I launched it just the past few years. But when we started tech Stuff back in two thousand and eight, the podcast space was way less crowded. Most people didn't even know what a podcast was, and hardly anyone had found a way to monetize it,

so it really wasn't a business yet. So I had an advantage right when I launched tech stuff because it was not that big of a crowded field. And today it's far more difficult to get noticed. Particularly, it's hard to get noticed because you've got people who are already famous from some other form of media who are wading

into the podcast space. Right. You've got actors and writers and like again, influencers, people who have already made a name for themselves and they're like, well, heck, let's do a podcast too, which I get. There's no shade on them. It just means that it does get harder for those normal schlubs like me who aren't big, famous celebrities to

stand out in that field. So I do understand the motivation here, because even if you do all the work, and even if you do that work really well and you put out great stuff, there is no guarantee anyone will find out about it, and that is tragic. So the temptation to take shortcuts or to find ways to boost visibility is extremely high. Now, to be clear, there are ways to boost visibility that aren't underhanded or shady. For example, reaching out to other podcasters and guesting on

their show, or having them guests on your show. Things like that. These are generally pretty common and accepted ways to boost visibility. They don't come with deceit, but they do require a lot of work, and honestly, you only have so many hours in a day or so much energy to spare. Sometimes that work is just too much on top of already making the thing that you want

to make. So I do sympathize with folks who want to find a way to offload this effort so that they can focus on the stuff they actually wanted to do in the first place. I one hundred percent get it, and goodness knows, I'm in a fortunate position. I am a podcaster at a big media company where we have entire departments dedicated to stuff like sales and marketing. I

couldn't do all that on my own, certainly. Anyway, I thought I would talk about this because it does play into the things I do find irritating about people in general. You know, that desire to achieve a goal through trickery and deceit, And it's worse now. Right back when I was helping my friend. I was looking at things like stock photography. I was looking at stuff that could be traced to other sites. In the world of AI generated

images and AI generated content. Now you're far more likely to come across a website that has unique images because they were AI generated, And you're less likely to come across unfinished web pages because someone didn't take the effort to write something out. They could just have a content generating AI create that material. So it is harder now to suss out the scams from the legit sites. It's

really unfortunate. I do recommend if you want to learn more about this story, definitely check out that Ours Technica article by Kevin Purdy again, it's titled fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains. And also make sure you check out Ernie Smith and his newsletter Tedium. Smith comes across to me as a very smart and very funny journalist. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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