Remember how a copyright maximalist was just claiming that it’s simply ridiculous that anyone would ever use copyright to censor? We pointed out a pretty long list of examples of how that’s bogus, but here’s another one, via BoingBoing. It seems that a guy named Den Lennie did a video review comparing the Rotolight Anova to a competing product, the Kino Flo Celeb. Lennie’s review showed that the Kino device was better, and apparently Rotolight took offense. So what do they do? They send a completely fraudulent DMCA complaint to Vimeo, who shamefully took the video down without doing even the slightest check to see if it was actually infringing.

Even worse, when Den posted about this, Rotolight flat out admitted to a fraudulent DMCA takedown, noting that they “did not feel the test was fair or representative” and thus they used the DMCA to take it down:

In other words, they’re admitting to out and out abuse of the DMCA takedown process for censorship purposes. As others have noted, the DMCA can only be used for copyright claims, and yet Rotolight admits there was no copyright claim in making their DMCA takedown request. Even if they were arguing a trademark claim, that is also bogus. First, the DMCA cannot be used for trademark claims. Second, doing a review is not trademark infringement. Finally, having the company outright admit that it issued the takedown not because of any legitimate claim, but merely because they didn’t like the test, shows that they intended for it to be used to censor Den’s speech.

But, no, we’re told, copyright law is never used for censorship…

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