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J. D. Obenberger is the attorney who helped racist censor Olivier Janssens attack the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, for accurately reporting the racist comments that he made in a public forum on Facebook. (See the bogus complaint e-mail that J. D. Obenberger sent to C4SS’s web hosting company here: \u003Chttp://pastebin.com/CxD9UsPj>. In case you’re wondering, J.D. Obenberger is very familiar with the aggressive use of bogus DMCA takedowns to suppress speech. He’s a professional porn attorney, whose practice does most of its work defending adult entertainment websites and helping them to attack “pirates” accused of copying their copyrighted images and videos. In this article he actually brags about the ability to use DMCA takedowns to get his way through extralegal intimidation, even when he knows he doesn’t have a case. http://www.xxxlaw.com/articles/4secrets.html Here are some choice bits, quoted under terms of fair use for the purpose of commentary and criticism: “Most US pirating boards are ashamed of what they do and live in fear of liability; US hosting companies are also pretty worried because they have a lot invested – and many of them don’t require any formality to effect a takedown. If you write the request for a takedown on a leaf of stale cabbage in magic marker, without stating any reason or offering any proof or affidavit pursuant to the DMCA, and transmit it by a casual, friendly courier, who works a garbage truck route running past their office and offers to drop it off for you, most of them will take it down fairly immediately, within hours, because they are more afraid of you and your attorneys than they are of the posters.” – J. D. Obenberger, Attorney at Law. “. . . The second dirty little secret is that a very tiny number of the videos released via the Internet are ever registered with the Library of Congress. You have no legal right to maintain any lawsuit for infringement on the basis of an unregistered copyright. Period. (Look at Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act.) While your copyright theoretically exists in US law and under the Berne Convention from the time that it is first reduced to a tangible medium (there are exceptions allowing preregistration of things that are first fixed at the time of transmission, like the 6pm Network News and Trailer Park Sally’s webcam show), it is a hollow and illusory right upon which no lawsuit can be maintained until you’ve registered it. On the motion of the defendant, it will be dismissed without prejudice.” – J. D. Obenberger, Attorney at Law. The racist Janssen’s copyright-thug attorney Obenberger openly discusses the utility of abusing legal processes and directing over-aggressive DCMA notices for the purpose of intimidating hosting companies into yanking content without due process. In this case he submitted a DMCA takedown notice in a case where he knows that his client has “no legal right to maintain any lawsuit,” nothing at all but “a hollow and illusory right upon which no lawsuit can be maintained.” Because, as he knows, skittish web hosts will jump at the noise and censor websites even though they have done nothing actionable and nothing wrong. Obenberger ought to be ashamed of himself for facilitating this kind of censorship, and Olivier Janssens ought to be ashamed of himself for stooping to enlist it in the effort to cover up his racist tirades.