*** STATEMENT REGARDING MASON MALMUTH ***
(permission given to repost this elsewhere)
Background
On March 31, 2017, Mason Malmuth, owner of twoplustwo.com, had his attorney send a demand letter via e-mail to PokerFraudAlert. Rather than utilize PokerFraudAlert's standard and visible "Contact Us" link, he dug up an e-mail address listed on the domain registration -- one inundated with spam and rarely checked. This e-mail address is not publicized as a way to contact PokerFraudAlert, nor is it utilized for anything besides a throwaway domain registration e-mail. As a result, I did not find the message until May 26, 2017, when I checked the account for the first time in months.
The e-mail (which incorrectly refers to me as "Mr. Whittles") is shown below:
Mr. Whittles,
We represent Two Plus Two Interactive in its business and litigation matters. Your website, www.pokerfraudalert.com, contains multiple discussion threads and posts lifted from Two Plus Two’s discussion forums at www.twoplustwo.com. As a registered user of the Two Plus Two forums, you are aware that the content on the Two Plus Two forums is protected by copyright and other applicable law. You are also aware that Two Plus Two expressly prohibits third party sites from replicating Two Plus Two content without our client’s permission.
Here, rather than pasting links to Two Plus Two’s content (or even brief snippets of Two Plus Two’s content for commentary purposes), several threads on your site contain lengthy word for word conversations and posts directly from Two Plus Two’s forums. Two Plus Two has never authorized you to publish any of its content on your site. Further, most if not all of the posts on your site containing Two Plus Two’s content appear to have been posted by you personally (Dan Druff) as opposed to other users on your message boards.
Two Plus Two requires that you remove all posts from any user on www.pokerfraudalert.com containing posts and content from Two Plus Two. Two Plus Two also requires that you refrain from posting Two Plus Two’s posts and content in the future. Please confirm by way of response to this email that you and www.pokerfraudalert.com will comply with these requests. Otherwise Two Plus Two reserves its right to take all necessary measures to protect its content.
Aside from the misspelled name, that e-mail contains various inaccuracies, which will be discussed later in this statement.
The Initial Response
I felt it was within PokerFraudAlert's legal rights to occasionally reproduce individual, publicly-posted messages by third parties on 2+2 for commentary and discussion purposes. However, I also was aware of Mr. Malmuth's infamy for his litigious nature. Therefore, in order to avoid the unnecessary hassle and legal expense, I offered to do the following:
1) Cease from copy/pasting messages from twoplustwo, except in occasional "brief snippets" as referred to in Malmuth's attorney's letter, as being allowed.
2) Make a rule on PokerFraudAlert prohibiting others from copy/pasting messages from twoplustwo, again aside from the aforementioned "brief snippets".
3) Agree to remove copy/pastes of TwoPlusTwo posts, when brought to my attention by Mr. Malmuth or his agents.
On May 26, 2017, I wrote an e-mail and made a phone call to Mason Malmuth's lawyer.
I stated the above, but also stated that I was not going to put in the massive amount of time and effort required to go through this site's more than 700,000 posts and search for such copy/pastes from twoplustwo. Instead, I offered to remove or edit such posts when brought to my attention of Mr. Malmuth or his agents.
Mr. Malmuth's attorney stated, "That sounds fine to me", and said that he would be giving the message to his client. At no time did Mr. Malmuth's attorney object to my offered resolution. Also, the offer was not accepted or rejected at any point. I was simply told that it sounded okay, and that he would contact Mason for his reaction.
I have not heard anything from either Mr. Malmuth or his attorney since then.
The Larry Laffer Post
On May 27, one day after I informed the public about Mason's demand letter, a PokerFraudAlert poster and radio listener who goes by "Larry Laffer" made a post on twoplustwo regarding Mason Malmuth's tennis charity: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...w-you-1668658/
Larry Laffer did this on his own, without any request or influence by me. In fact, I was not even aware at the time that he made this post. It was quickly deleted by twoplustwo moderators, and remained that way for 4 days. Additionally, Larry's account on twoplustwo was banned.
However, on May 31, the post was resurrected by Mr. Malmuth, and he responded to it. You can read the thread in the link above, but basically Larry was questioning why the (publicly available) tax forms filed for the "Mason and Charmaine Foundation" showed $0 in charity disbursements. In the subsequent discussion, Mason admitted that his charity had filed incorrect tax returns for the past 10 years:
Larry's concern was clearly reasonable, as Mason's charity's own tax forms showed hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue with zero charitable disbursements. While indeed this may have been simply an accounting error, obviously Mason cannot blame people for questioning the data from his own tax forms.So for the year 2014 the Foundation should be showing on this form $14,000 in revenue, $0 in expenses (not $10,000), and $14,000 in Charitable disbursements. And it looks like we have, thanks to this accounting error, ten years of tax returns to correct.
I posted a link on PokerFraudAlert to Larry's thread on June 3, 2017.
Keeping to my own (not yet accepted nor agreed upon) offer to Mr. Malmuth, I did not reproduce that post on PokerFraudAlert. Instead, I only copied a brief snippet (Mason's 2-sentence statement regarding ten years of erroneous tax returns), and then posted a hyperlink to TwoPlusTwo's forums for people to read the rest.
I did link to two pictures posted by Mason in that thread, which depicted himself, his wife, and two tennis players purported to have received charity disbursements.
However, these pictures were simply linked from the same third-party URL Mason used to post these pictures. They exist in a public directory on photobucket.com. They are not stored on the PokerFraudAlert servers, nor are they stored on the TwoPlusTwo servers!
Furthermore, the TwoPlusTwo forum contains hundreds of thousands of pictures posted from other sites.
This thread, however, seemed to enrage Mason, as he felt his charity's integrity was being questioned.
The "Witteles Infringement" Thread
On June 2, 2017, Mason Malmuth created a thread on twoplus entitled, "Witteles Infringement Issue", which can be found here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...issue-1669455/
This thread was clearly given such a title in order to cause negative SEO for my (very uncommon) last name, associating me with "infringement".
In this thread, Mason provided two links to posts on PokerFraudAlert where I had copied and pasted posts by third parties which appeared on twoplustwo. Despite claiming that these were violations, Mason or his agents/attorneys have never contacted me about modifying or removing those two threads, despite my May 26 offer to do so.
He also oddly stated: "We don't buy the excuse that he’s unable to read or check every post on his forum to see if there is a violation."
This is a peculiar claim, given that PokerFraudAlert has over 700,000 posts, does not operate for profit, and does not have any employees or forum moderators.
It is even more peculiar that Mr. Malmuth found the time to write such a defamatory post about me, yet could not find a moment to respond to the overly generous offer I made to his attorney more than a week ago, in order to resolve this matter.
On June 3, 2017, Mason made it even more clear that his post was made for vindictive reasons, in order to associate my name with these damaging false accusations. He "bumped" the same thread, with the following message:
Note that he threatened to "make it a sticky" (which sticks the "Witteles Infringement Issue" on top of the site's most busy forum), and states, "I want as many people as possible to see it."Hi Everyone:
I'm bumping this because I want as many people as possible to see it. Eventually, if the posts by Witteles are not fixed, we'll make it a sticky.
Again, Witteles has posted much 2+2 content on his site but in his discussions of this issue, as far as I know, he never states that he's has a history of doing this.
Best wishes,
Mason
Again, through all of this bluster and public accusation, Mr. Malmuth and his attorney have made no effort to contact me since my offer on May 26th, 2017.
Mason Malmuth seems intent upon using his high-traffic forum to ruin my good name, despite my immediate good faith efforts to resolve the situation.
Legal Discussion
As stated earlier, I made my May 26th offer to remove copy/pasted posts by third parties on twoplustwo, simply to avoid the wrath of a wealthy and known litigious man. I never felt he was legally in the right, but offered something I didn't have to do, in order to avoid the massive hassle and expense of defending a lawsuit.
This offer was never accepted. Therefore, in light of recent defamation against me by Mr. Malmuth, I am rescinding it, and taking it off the table.
Additionally, TwoPlusTwo's own Terms of Service acknowledge that the content posted there by third parties is not owned by Two Plus Two Publishing, but rather the ownership remains in the hands of the third party posters themselves:
The above can be found under #7 on this webpage: http://www.twoplustwo.com/terms.phpTwo Plus Two does not claim ownership of Your Content; however, you hereby grant Two Plus Two a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sub-licensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content and to incorporate Your Content in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.
Therefore, there is no infringement against TwoPlusTwo Publishing.
PokerFraudAlert has NOT reproduced proprietary TwoPlusTwo forum content, its forum structure, or original forum content owned by TwoPlusTwo.
By my estimation, fewer than 0.00001% of all posts on TwoPlusTwo have ever been copy/pasted to PokerFraudAlert.
PokerFraudAlert's forums contain almost exclusively original content. Only an infinitesimally small percentage of PokerFraudAlert's 700,000+ posts contain any copy/pastes from TwoPlusTwo's forum.
PokerFraudAlert's copy/pastes of third party posts appearing on TwoPlusTwo are always for commentary and discussion purposes. There has never been a post copy/pasted for the sole purpose of reproduction or imitation.
No third party poster on TwoPlusTwo has ever asked PokerFraudAlert to remove the copy/paste of their TwoPlusTwo post.
PokerFraudAlert does not run for profit, and exists as a public service to warn the poker community of scams and scandals taking place. All third party posts copy/pasted from TwoPlusTwo were done for this altruistic purpose, and not for any sort of commercial gain.
TwoPlusTwo cannot show any damages as a result of their claims against PokerFraudAlert.
Conclusions
- By TwoPlusTwo's own terms of service, posts on TwoPlusTwo made by third parties belong to the individual poster, and not TwoPlusTwo.
- TwoPlusTwo does not have any form of copyright infringement claim against PokerFraudAlert for this reason.
- Additionally, the copy/pasting of TwoPlusTwo posts by third parties on PokerFraudAlert is very rare, and only comprises a tiny percentage of messages on both sites.
- Additionally, the copy/pasting of TwoPlusTwo posts by third parties is done for commentary and discussion purposes, and not for commercial gain. In fact, it is done as a public service in order to provide discussion, analysis, and to spread the word regarding ongoing poker scams.
- Despite the above, I made a generous offer on May 26th to remove such content, simply to avoid Mr. Malmuth's known litigious wrath.
- Mr. Malmuth, his agents, and his attorneys have not responded to my offer, but instead Mr. Malmuth has been posting defamatory messages about me on his forum, full of false accusations. Additionally, Mr. Malmuth is threatening to "sticky" these accusations in order to further damage my name.
- It is likely that Mr. Malmuth is taking these vindictive actions just days before my World Series of Poker tournaments in order to cause me emotional distress, thus affecting my ability to play with a clear head.
- My offer from May 26th, which received no response, is now rescinded, due to both Mr. Malmuth's failure to respond and his vindictive actions on June 2 and 3, 2017.
- I am already in contact with an Intellectual Property attorney regarding this matter, who I will likely be formally retaining shortly.
- I plan to file a countersuit if presented with a lawsuit over this matter, including malicious prosecution, libel, and defamantion. Mr. Malmuth has long stated a personal disdain for me and the various websites I have been part of.
- While this matter is being resolved, I am still going to disallow copy/pasting of material from TwoPlusTwo posted by third parties. However, unless Mr. Malmuth and I come to an agreement, I may allow it again if my attorney decides this is advisable.
- I strongly urge Mr. Malmuth and his attorneys to come to a fair and proper resolution of this matter with me, rather than engaging in an expensive lawsuit he is not likely to win.
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Originally Posted by jsearles22
