A fake DMCA notice, a bribe offer and a lawsuit: how not to remove an article

On 29 September 2026 the California Court of Appeal (First Appellate District, Division Four) affirmed the dismissal of Maury Blackman’s lawsuit against journalist Jack Poulson, Substack and Poulson’s research site Tech Inquiry — and the order making him pay their attorney fees. The opinion is certified for publication, so it is now citable precedent.

It is not, despite some early summaries, a ruling on the DMCA. But the fraudulent copyright notice at the start of the story is the reason brand owners and anyone in the removal business should read it.

What happened

Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data — a company doing contract work for the US government, as the court describes it — was arrested in December 2021 for felony domestic violence. No charges followed, and in February 2022 a court sealed the arrest records under the California Penal Code. In May 2022, however, the San Francisco Police Department released the investigative report to a third party through its public records portal without restriction. A copy bearing that release’s unique watermark reached Poulson from a confidential source, and in September 2023 he reported on the arrest.

What came next is recounted in the opinion from Poulson’s own reporting: someone purporting to represent Blackman filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request against the published police report, and the same person tried to pay Poulson to take the reporting down. Poulson published the notice: it asserted copyright in a police report. In 2024 Blackman sued, pleading fifteen causes of action from negligence to defamation to violations of the sealing statutes.

What the court held

The trial court struck the complaint under California’s anti-SLAPP statute; the Court of Appeal affirmed on every point that mattered. Poulson’s reporting was speech on an issue of public interest — the court tied it to Premise Data’s government work and the security clearance implications of an arrest. At the second step, the First Amendment barred the claims against Poulson under the Florida Star line of cases: he lawfully obtained truthful information that the government itself had released without restriction. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act barred the claims against Substack and Tech Inquiry, which were neutral conduits for his content. The fee award was affirmed with it.

The sealing order did not change the analysis. As the court put it, quoting the US Supreme Court, once the government has placed information in the public domain, hopes of restitution “must rest upon the willingness of the government to compensate victims” — not on punishing the publisher.

Why the takedown is the part that matters

This was not a Section 512(f) case: no one sued over the false notice, and the court did not rule on it. But it is the cleanest illustration available of how removal goes wrong. A DMCA notice is a statement, under penalty of perjury as to authority, that you act for the owner of a copyright being infringed. A police report is not the arrested person’s copyright. Each escalation — notice, payment offer, lawsuit — turned one article into a longer story, and the last one turned it into published appellate precedent that will now be cited against the next person to try it.

What this means for you

If you want something taken down, the first question is not “which form do I fill in” but “what right do I actually hold”. Copyright covers content you created or own. Trademark covers commercial use of your marks. Privacy and data-protection law, defamation, and platform policies each have their own tests. Forcing a claim into the wrong one is how removal requests fail, backfire and — in anti-SLAPP jurisdictions like California — end with you paying the other side’s lawyers.

The reverse lesson applies too. If your own content is hit by a notice that rests on no real right, platforms’ counter-notice and reinstatement procedures exist for exactly that, and a knowing misrepresentation in a DMCA notice carries liability of its own. We handle that side under takedown defence.