On November 19th, I received 6 versions of the letter below from WordPress.

It was nice to see that, unlike GoDaddy, WordPress takes the time to investigate claims and doesn’t automatically suspend a site.

The emails mentioned were never stolen, they were sent to Andrew Breitbart and released by breitbart.com after his death years ago. The emails appear across the internet.

Hi there,

We have received a DMCA notice (https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/IP#dmca) for material published on your WordPress.com site.

Normally this would mean that access to the material would need to be disabled. However, because we believe that it falls under fair use protections in this instance, we will not be removing it at this time.

Section 107 of the (US) copyright law identifies various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. You can learn more about that here:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Whilst we believe that your use of the material is protected (and have fought for our users in similar cases in the past – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorship/ ), the complainant may choose to pursue this matter directly. If you would prefer, you are still able to delete the content from your site yourself.

The notice we received from the complainant follows.

Thanks,
WordPress.com

==BEGIN NOTICE ==
Email Address: vestedprotection@gmail.com
First Name: Jeff
Last Name: Joy
Company Name: VESTED PROTECTION SYSTEMS, LLC
Phone Number: 732-499-8100
Address: 206 Westfield Avenue
City: Clark
Country: n/a
State: NJ
Copyright holder you represent (if other than yourself): vestedprotection@gmail.com

Offending URLs:

http://markbaybridgeexposed.wordpress.com/category/zapem-emails/

Original materials:
The private emails are not located online. They were never intended to be online. They were stolen from the recipient.
Copyright holder:

Description of original materials:
We are a licensed, private investigation service in New Jersey.

Emails were stolen from the recipient and republished online of which our company holds the copyright and is the authorized agent of any confidential information passed through our machines.

The infringer seeks the identity of confidential sources who provided law enforcement with criminal activity and other information. We don’t intend to submit to extortion via the internet. We own our machines and any emails we send out. The infringer is not entitled to steal private mail, publish it on your servers and demand to know who the source was. This infringer has pulled this nonsense with GoDaddy and was suspended from their servers.

The header of the private email published belongs to our company, Vested Protection and is clearly visible in the republication.

This entire blog is harassment of myself, family, employees, and others in violation of your terms of service.

Understand that after the suspension by GoDaddy after filing our first DMCA complaint, they came to WordPress to accuse various other individuals. They also filed a bogus counter-notification where they insisted that because other sites broke the law and posted this material, they were immune to DMCA. They did not provide a valid address (we checked) and refused to disclose the actual address of [Redacted], the known author of this material. The address they did provide did not come back to the person on the domain registration known as [Redacted]. It came back to someone completely different. The counter-notification is an unlawful attempt to seek names within a private email, ie, the source, which we do not intend to give them as it’s none of their business. This additional information is provided in the event that a counter-notification is attempted again. The local authorities have been notified as well as the FBI. Your CEO was also put on notice via your shareholder’s office and we awaiting his response.

Note that your user has seen fit to republish this blog using your services, over and over, naming several individuals including myself and business, in a repeat, contradictory fashion at the following harassing and duplicated blogs:

jerseyjoys.wordpress.com
g0thhatsecrets.wordpress.com
vestedprotectionsucks.wordpress.com
zephyrzapped.wordpress.com/
nojoyhere.wordpress.com
markbaybridgeexposed.wordpress.com

Third party links:
n/a

Signature (legally binding): Jeff Joy
Signed on this date: 2014-11-17 03:54:48