Dentist Who Used Copyright To Silence Her Patients Drops Out of Sight 260
According to a report at Ars Technica, a dentist named Stacy Makhnevich, who billed herself as "the Classical Singer Dentist of New York," threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits, along the same lines as the online dental damage-control outlined in a different Ars story in 2011. This time, though, there's something even stranger than bargaining with patients to forgo criticism: when a patient defied that demand by describing his experience in negative terms on Yelp, Makhnevich followed up on the threat by seeking a takedown order based on copyright (putatively signed over to her for any criticism that patients might write, post-visit) — then disappeared entirely when lawyers for patient Robert Lee filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the validity of the agreement.
Re:What's most surprising about this story. (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, since you mentioned the verbal part I thought it was essential to your dispute. Something else has been nagging me, though, and it's your statement, "The 'bad debt' from 1991 was still on my credit report last I looked. It's 'active' and renewed for another 7 years every time it's sold from one collection agency to another."
That looked so rotten that I had a hard time believing it was legal, and a preliminary search shows it isn't [experian.com]:
"[..] Federal law requires the lender to report the original delinquency date of the account that led to charge off and any subsequent collection efforts. The original delinquency date is the date from which the seven year period is measured.
The original account and any subsequent collection accounts are deleted seven years from the original delinquency date. Because each account must include the original delinquency date, none should return to your credit history. [..]"
Re:Probably Not Enforceable Anyway (Score:5, Informative)
The Better Business Bureau has a mechanism to take complaints and give the business a way to respond and resolve the issues.
The BBB is a scam, they just have really good marketing like DeBeers quality marketing.
The way it works is that dues-paying BBB members get to have their records wiped of any unresolved complaints after a certain period, usually about a year although it varies between BBB offices. Non-members do not get their records wiped under any circumstances. So when a disgruntled customer files a BBB complaint about a non-member business, the BBB uses that as a marketing tool to get that business to start paying dues.
The end result is that you can only trust BBB records of non-members, because they never get wiped, while a dues-paying BBB "member in good standing" may have hundreds of unresolved complaints that have simply expired. Occasionally a BBB office will "fire" a really egregious dues-paying member, but AFAIK there is no consistent set of rules across all BBB offices for when, if ever, that is required.