Below is a press release by Oscar Michelen regarding a rather welcomed development in the Matthew Chan v. Linda Ellis appeal.

Last year I wrote about the overreach court order aimed at silencing Matthew Chan — the founder of the anti-troll community ExtortionLetterInfo (ELI). While ELI fights primarily against stock photo copyright trolls, the antagonist in this controversy is a self-proclaimed poet Linda Ellis, a heartless copyright troll who shakes down people that shared her “Dash” poem, mostly in the moments of mourning diseased loved ones.

In February 2013, Chan lost a case against Ellis where she charged him with allegedly stalking her, and posting her home address, family information, and death threats on ELI. However, many of those posts were made by third-party visitors to ELI, not Chan himself and neither Chan nor the website was ever requested to take down any of the allegedly offensive posts. Nevertheless, Ellis was awarded a sweeping Permanent Protective Order by the local court. That order, required among other things, a wholesale removal from ELI of all 2,000 posts by anyone that ever mentioned Ellis, her poem, or her business practices in any way.

This speech-chilling order was appealed, and now the case is unexpectedly being transferred to the Georgia Supreme Court, which, according to our friends, is a good sign:

In October 2013 one of the most notorious attorneys behind the Getty Images extortion racket (and, naturally, a persona of interest in the ELI community), Timothy McCormack of Seattle, filed an amicus curiae brief, quite an entertaining (in its cluelessness) read, which provokes the following question: is its author an ignoramus that has no clue what the First Amendment is about? The answer is an easy yes.

Make sure to read Oscar Michelen’s reply and decide for yourself: which one of the two documents — McCormack’s brief or Michelen’s reply — has been written by an actual attorney, and which one is a disturbing signal that passing the Bar exam is too easy in some states.

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