Another goal is to further educate people that many problems can be “resolved” without expensive attorneys and going down a road that favors their better-financed opponents.

They constantly feed April Brown and ELI. Another goal is to remind Team Linda know, they have a lot of people who don’t like them watching and monitoring them.

One goal for my writing this piece is to let the world-at-large that ELI is now for hire to hit back and help get revenge against those that legally threaten them. His posts did state a vague intent to engage with Ellis offline, but it’s tough to characterize any of them as truly threatening, or even intending to invade Ellis’s personal space: He obviously disagreed with her tactics and had also apparently been paid, by one (or more) of the recipients of Ellis’ letters, to engage in a PR campaign to force Ellis to back down. (I wasn’t really sure what the deal was here, although my uninformed guess is that the lawyer and Chan had tangled in the past, in correspondence or via email.)Ĭhan was admittedly antagonistic towards Ellis. The court also considered the affidavit of a Seattle-based lawyer, who strangely weighed in on Chan’s supposed dangerousness, but then went on to author an amicus brief in support of Ellis. Some of the posts were by Chan and others were from third parties. The totality of the evidence in support of Ellis’s request for the protective order consisted of posts to ELI. She obtained an initial order ex parte, and after giving an opportunity for Chan to weigh in and conducting a (what one party described as a somewhat harried) hearing, the court made the order permanent. Ultimately, Ellis sought a protection order under Georgia’s anti-stalking statute based on several different posts to ELI. This abuse notification was not as effective as the earlier one, because the new web host stood firm. This resulted in Chan having to change hosts, and Ellis sent an additional message flagging supposedly abusive content posted to ELI. Ellis then sent an “abuse notice” to ELI’s web host, saying that ELI had posted harmful content about (or directed to) her. In 2012, after receiving information from a Seattle businesswoman about Ellis’ collection efforts, Chan added a forum to ELI titled “Linda Ellis/Linda’s Lyrics/Dash Poem Forum”.Īccording to Chan’s brief, one of Ellis’ employees sent a DMCA notice targeted at a document that Chan posted to Scribd. Receipt of a demand letter from Getty prompted him to start the ELI site, which has become a clearinghouse of sorts where people discuss, strategize, and vent about copyright enforcement campaigns. He’s a Georgia businessman involved in a range of ventures. In other words, she is alleged to be a copyright troll.Ĭhan runs the “ Extortion Letter Info” website. According to Chan, the defendant/respondent, Ellis also engages in scorched-earth copyright enforcement tactics, sending threat letters and extracting settlements from a wide-ranging group of people or entities who post or publish her poem without permission. The poem is about a person who speaks at a funeral, and Ellis encourages people to recite (but not publish) the poem. She has achieved some degree of public figure status through the poem’s notoriety. Ellis, the plaintiff/petitioner, is the author of a poem called “ The Dash”.

Poem called the dash