Retraction Watch readers may recall that earlier this month, WordPress removed ten of our posts about Anil Potti — the former Duke oncology researcher who has retracted or corrected 19 papers — after a false DMCA copyright claim against us. The site which claimed the copyright violations — and which no longer exists — actually plagiarized our posts, not the other way around.
We’re still waiting for those posts to be reinstated; our understanding is that they’ll be back later this week. In the meantime, Nanopolitan, another site that wrote about Potti has been hit with what looks like a false DMCA claim.
Blogger, Nanopolitan’s host, has taken down one post. One of the owners of Nanopolitan, Abi, writes:
All I can say here is that the post has no copyright violation whatsoever — it had a bunch of links to stories and blog posts about Anil Potti…
Abi tells us that Blogger has yet to share the actual takedown notice with him.
We’ll update with anything we learn, and will of course let readers know when our posts reappear. You can read coverage of the case on various other blogs and news outlets.
It is really potty and petty. It is incomprehensible why this guy wants to keep his name in the spotlight for longer than necessary. Lie low and things will blow over in no time at all.
Lame attempts!
The nanopolitan blogger is charmingly vague about the details of his takedown notice. Just saying his post had be changed to draft status and he had received a letter of terrifying legalese.
Fortunately (although he does not mention it) he has a mirror of his blog and you can read the offending post here
http://www.haaram.com/CompleteArticle.aspx?aid=233297&ln=
It is not entirely true that there is no copyright material in it, because he has a CBS video embedded – but generally these news outlets are quite happy for this as a form of promotion – so it is very unlikely CBS made a complaint. Googling the phrase “The scale of the fraud boggles the mind: Retraction Wach” [sic] fails to reveal the source of the web address that might have complained to Blogger – all I find are aggregators. Correcting the spelling mistake doesn’t help either.
It is, of course, interesting to speculate why someone concentrated on the Blogger post and not its mirror post that is still freely available. I think it might have something to do with the comments that are found on the deleted post (still available in cache)
I believe the remark by Gautam Menon is particularly insightful
“Since the papers appear to largely be based on statistical analysis of the data purportedly generated by Potti (who is by training a medical doctor and not a statistician), some blame must also attach to the co-authors who did this analysis. (The questions regarding the data appear to have been largely a consequence of the statistical analysis which experts agree had large gaps.) However, the coverage doesn’t give this particular issue much weight and the co-authors seem to have got off relatively lightly at the administrative end.”
He also highlights comments he thought were particularly insightful on retraction watch by Steve McKinney.
We might, therefore, speculate that what motivates the takedown notices is not the articles themselves, but comments that appear beneath the articles which suggest that Anil Potti, as a clinician, may not bear sole responsibility for the statistical and bioinformatical errors that lie at the heart of the Duke University fiasco.
Of course we should, as always, stress that any attribution of responsibility can only be speculation at this stage.
Thanks for discovering haaram.com, also noted by a commenter yesterday on my blog. While clarifying that I have *absolutely* nothing to do with haaram.com, let me also add that I’m not terribly upset to see this post up on that site 😉
Just a new occurence of the Streisand effect.
Anil Potti is certainly a poster boy for the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
A few more links are returned with the Google query, “Narendra Chatwal” “Anil Potti” I believe that this likely attempt by Anil Potti, while consistent with his conduct in allegedly falsifying research results, will backfire.
Wouldn’t a site as valuable as this be worth paying $7 a month to host somewhere? Then neither Blogger nor WordPress nor anyone else would have control over your content.
Thanks for the suggestion, but our understanding is that it’s the DMCA, not where we’re hosted, that’s the problem. Lengthy discussion on the original post: http://www.retractionwatch.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-anil-potti-posts-from-retraction-watch-in-error-after-false-dmca-copyright-claim/
BTW we’re actually paying for retractionwatch.com through Bluehost now, anyway. It’s just a redirect until we figure out how to port over all of the functionality we have on WordPress.com. The DMCA part of their terms of service is quite similar to what WordPress did: http://www.bluehost.com/terms