Back in January of 2023 MCS’s registered DMCA agent received an email from an attorney trying to get us to disclose our insurance police information to them, which felt like a new attempt at a scam or spear phishing attack, but like all messages sent to the DMCA agent, it was treated as a legitimate DMCA take down notice, and the content was removed within a few hours of the report. The requesting attorney was informed of this, but they chose to ignore the emails we sent back to them, then opened another email thread with another attorney or paralegal (they were never very clear on who exactly they were), and the end of that conversation lead me to believe that they were well aware of our nature as a community of bloggers / image enthusiastic weirdos.

Then in June MCS’s parent company was served with a lawsuit saying that we’d essentially time traveled to 2014 when an image was copywritten, then intentionally posted that copyrighted image in 2012, and went out of our way to strip the image of all the copyright information from the image.  They didn’t mention that during those time travel shenanigans that someone had added words to the images that said “coat hangers really bring out the child in you” and “the joke is abortion”, an obviously crass and low brow attempt at humor, something that we here at MCS excel at.

Those of you that have any sense of what’s going on in the blagosphere know that there’s a well funded cottage industry involving teams of image specialists doing reverse image searches on their client’s images and hitting up the websites that their copyrighted content has been posted to.  I would imagine that this is profitable enough for there to be hundreds of law firms sending out thousands of these types of notices every day, and we’ve received our fair share (around 20 to date), but this is the first one were the opposing party had no concept of Section 230 protections or that the whole point of MCS is to bring people together and look at girls playing golf or dogs playing pool or talking about the most recent Trump indictments.

Now here’s the really fun bit, the website nor it’s owners can represent themselves in federal court, so the company has had to hire itself an attorney and folks, I’m here to tell you, attorneys are not cheap.  MCS has been running pretty lean for the last few years, mostly because the primary dev had some crazy stuff going on involving health scares, going back to college, and looking for a new day time job, so the reserves that we had in reserve for server bills have had to go to retaining counsel, which just finding an attorney that even knows what the DMCA is has been a real struggle, but it’s a task that I finally completed today.

SO NOW FOR THE BIG ASK: We need financial support.

The absolute best way is to paypal a couple bucks to [email protected] or visit the MCS Legal Defense Fund donation page and make it a recurring donation.  If you have a recurring donation and the email it’s sent from matches an MCS account, I’ll do my best to give you MCS+ for the duration. Stop by the discord channel if you don’t see the benefits of MCS+ within 24 hours of your donation!

The second best way is to join the MCS Patreon at any of the levels that you feel most comfortable.

The third way is to send thoughts and prayers.  This will obviously be the one that does the best good in the world, especially after everything we’ve said about religion on the site, right?

For those that give, thank you, for those that visit and don’t give, keep coming back and leave some comments.  I know in the last two months there’s been a ton of changes around the site that have mostly been on the backend and code side of things, but with the release of Spaces I’ve found a new pool of enthusiasm to continue to focus on and improve your experiences here on the site.