TFM have strong reasons to believe that there are “proxies” or fictitious characters generated or individuals hired by vested interests with the sole intention of causing harm to the daily activities of the online news portal.
TFM Desk
The Frontier Manipur (TFM) team, which has been on the receiving end of all attacks strongly believes that some vested interests are operating over time to willfully impede the progress of the news portal. These actions have been committed with mala fide abuse of factual information and distortion of events just to cause intentional harm to the works that TFM had shouldered since its launch.
TFM news portal remained inaccessible since August 5 evening while all other sites work fine. Our technical team was totally caught off guard this time. The team members were completely clueless for over 24 hours despite pulling out all the stops to fix the glitch that hindered access to our news web portal.
When they finally managed to get hold of the bug, all were taken by surprise. TFM did not have the remotest inkling of possible copyright infringement action on the TFM under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 United States copyright law. A takedown notice was served on the host of The Frontier Manipur website for Copyright Infringement.
The takedown notice is in connection with a news report under the headline — “Lamjingba group PREs seal three offices at RIMS road” published on November 9, 2020 and its breaking news “BREAKING NEWS: Executives of the Public Relations lock up Lamjingba office. The office located at RIMS road was picketed by several investors and locked up as the Lamjingba group failed to refund the money of the investors.” posted on the same day.
The complaint lodged by one Peter Lawel with the mailing address – 94 Jamal Abul Naser, Dubai – 91373 AE to the website host says that the news item “Lamjingba group PREs seal three offices at RIMS road” that appeared on The Frontier Manipur website belonged to him. He claimed that the same was published on newspressreader.com on November 7, 2020 two days before Lamjingba related episode occured on November 9 (Monday).
As per the complaint notice, Lawel claimed that the information in the notice is accurate, and he is either the copyright owner or authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.
“I have a good faith belief that the use of the described material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or by the operation of law,” said Lawel in the complaint.
“This is a notice in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) requesting that you immediately cease to provide access to copyrighted material. I wish to report an instance of Copyright Infringement, whereby the infringing material appears on a website for which you are the host,” added Lawel.
Strangely enough, the “copyrighted” material, which the Peter Lawel claimed to be his, still bears byline/credit of TFM Desk and the action was initiated without verifying the claim of the newspressreader.com and on the logic that newspressreader.com published the same material that appeared on The Frontier Manipur website two days before.
TFM has strong reasons to believe that Peter Lawel is either a “proxy” or a fictitious character generated or rather hired with the sole intention of causing harm to the daily activities of the online news portal.
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In this digital age, digital manipulation and fudging facts is not new. However, altering the date of publication of material lifted from a website to target itself appears to be the first instance reported. This sinister design is expected to be a new challenge for emerging digital media outlets.
The Frontier Manipur team, which has been on the receiving end of all attacks, strongly believes that some vested interests are operating over-time to impede the progress of the news portal. TFM trusts in journalism of courage and will continue to raise social, political, and relevant issues with in-depth news reports, investigative coverage in our media platforms. “We regret the inconvenience faced by our readers.”