News: Ayo Sogunro replies Linda Ikeji who replies Mr Aye Dee

Hey guys! Trust y'all doing great!!
Remember TBW reported a few days ago about one Mr Aye Dee who claimed (via Twitter) that Nigerian blogger, Linda Ikeji used some of his materials on her blog without his consent?
Well, Linda has now responded to that claim and if what she wrote is true, which I somewhat think it is (the guys being IT experts), then it's a shame! 
I say it's somewhat true because the same day I blogged about this issue, I mentioned the Aye Dee on Twitter and that same day, that same minute, my blog was taken down by google saying it was spam! Huh spam ke? How?? Fresh blogger like me, green horn TBW!!!
What I did was to file a complaint to google (with the help of my sister because I was too shocked to do anything) and within a few minutes/hours, it was reviewed and re-instated.
Anyways, thank God for that, now back to the matter....
Some people just hate success and hate to see others succeed! Why are these guys beefing this poor girl (oops rich girl I meant to type), isn't the sky big enough for all birds to fly without any collision?
Check out the pic of the message sent from google to TBW.

Linda Ikeji's story:

So something has been going on for the past couple of days that I haven't reacted to because I wanted to see it play out and see how far these people will go. They have gone far and it's now time to react.

The only reason this is happening to me is because I'm number one...so I am flattered. I am currently No.10 on Alexa.com, more read than all the other news sites in Nigeria, so I understand why I am the target. If I were them, I'd hate me too...lol. 

So here's what's going on. Sometime last year, some guys decided it was time to run me out of business (duh, like you can...lol). So they began to spam by blog. And when your blog gets a lot of spam, Google (which hosts my site) can take your blog down. But instead of taking my blog down, Google took my Adsense down for a few months and eventually re-instated it. So they didn't succeed. These same people started sending strange emails to me...looking for different ways to have access to my blog. But I wouldn't let them. If they could, they would have hacked it, but they couldn't so they continued to look for different ways to attack my blog. Please continue...


In April 2014, these guys decided to close down the blog again. In the emails they exchanged back and forth, they said 'plagiarism is a good excuse to finish her'. (they forget that if they succeed in closing down LIB because I'm on blogger...I could easily start a website). Now let me tell you who these guys are. They are IT people, security experts who know how the internet works. They are hackers and cyber-squatters...and only go after the biggest internet setups. 

Immediately after I shared photos of my new SUV, these guys re-connected again and decided it was finally time to end LIB because there were quite a few people who were mad that I bought the car and they wanted to play on their emotions. The head of this team is a guy who goes by the name @MrAyeDee on twitter. They decided to use the plagiarism card. He said it was the strongest claim to make and easiest way to get support from other people. And then the campaign started with him claiming that I took something from him without crediting him or asking for permission. 100% false. If he owns a website, I've never visited it. He started by writing all sorts to get people to notice...and then he acted. Like I said these guys are IT experts, they know what to do to get blogger/Google to come after you. So he and his team started filling several reports, sending links of my blog posts and making claims to Google. Outrageous false claims. And because Google acts first before they contact the blog owner, they took down some posts and asked me to file a counter claim if I felt I had a right to re-publish those articles. Now that my blog is under Google review, these guys have started to spam it again.

They want Google to shut it down. That is their aim. Will they succeed? I sincerely don't know. I'm not an IT expert...I know they are spamming and filing complaints, I don't know what else they are doing behind the scenes but they are relentless.

Now let me give you guys a bit who this Aye Dee guy is. He's anonymous on Twitter. Nobody really knows who he is but according to those investigating him, his name is Emmanuel Efremov simply known as EE by his friends. He's the owner of 15Past8.com media group. Based in Manhattan. Gets funding from some US organization. (His number - 212 9608127). He's apparently been stalking me for years now and have registered quite a number of my domain names...lindaikeji.net plus 8 others. He also owns 9jalife.com...yep, he owns a blog. He accuses me of copyright infringement but when you go to 9jalife and other websites he owns...98% of the things he has on there are other people's content. You see pot calling kettle black? Lol.

Immediately he was found out yesterday, the IT expert immediately started to redirect lindaikeji.net to my blog. If you click lindaikeji.net now, it will redirect you to this blog. He panicked yesterday and quickly did it. A name he register as far back as 2011. Lol. Choi!

Not only that, he's also a cyber squatter. Yep, he registers 100s of websites belonging to others around the world and tries to make money off them. Guess one of his aims is to run me out of blogger so I come to him and his team and pay thousands of dollars to get one of the several names he's registered. Not going to happen, boo! Hehe

Below is an article from lawyer and blogger Uduak Udouk of Africa Music Law about this guy and his cyber-squatting criminal activities

"According to a twitter handle owned by @MrAyeDee, celebrity blogger Linda Ikeji was accused of copyright infringement of his works. He reported these infringing activities to Google and what resulted was a take down of his articles/works on her site. He also claimed with the rate and way things looked, Linda Ikeji’s site could be shut down within a week.

I get the fact that this guy was concerned about Ikeji’s activities and got Google to do something about it. What I don’t get is his very strong response and continued massive tweets talking about the same issue in an almost vendetta like style towards her. This got me curious to know who he was and what could be a motive behind all of these.

I began by looking at his twitter page and narrowed in on his website www. 15Past8.com. The description of the services he offered through his media group raised my curiosity. He says his media group owns “hundreds of websites.” He also claimed some of the infringing content on Linda Ikeji came from his site. Well one of his hundreds of websites is 9jalife.com because it has the 15Past8.com media group stamped on it. I did a basic search on 9jalife.com to see who owns it. The name ‘Emmanuel Efremov’ came up as the registered owner of 9jalife.com. 9jalife.com is clear it is owned by 15Past8.com media group, @MrAyeDee’s company.

For my article on Linda Ikeji, many have been saying they are surprised she does not own her own domain. Purely out of curiosity, I looked up Lindaikeji.com and noted it is owned by someone else, a case of cybersquatting. I also look up Linda Ikeji.net and see the same ‘Emmanuel Efremov’ come up. Now I am very curious. How is it that Emmanuel Efremov owner of 9jalife.com, a subsidiary of 15Past8.com, also owns LindaIkeji.net? Am I missing something?

Needless to say, I google the name ‘Emmanuel Efremov’ and lo and behold, there is a case by Volkswagen against an Emmanuel Efremov for cybersquatting. Looking at the description of 15Past8.com, the registered domain owner of 9jalife.com and Lindaikeji.net and the case by Volkswagen against Emmanuel Efremov, I am left feeling that the credibility of @MrAyeDee is shot and very weak at best. It also makes me wonder about any prior existing relationship between him and Linda Ikeji as to the issue of domain ownership i.e. cybersquatting. It is not uncommon for cybersquatters to ask you the legitimate owner of a trademark to pay them to own your own website.

If you accuse someone of copyright infringement, it is a good idea to make sure your hands are very clean and there is no connection whatsoever with a possible bad faith attempt to hijack their domain name. I am curious to see where all of these leads." Uduak Udouk

Now talking about copyright infringement, Mr Aye Dee feels that crediting source is not enough, that I have to write a written permission to the website owner. That's laughable at best. So if there's a breaking news on TMZ, I will first write to the editors and wait for the 2/3 days it will take them to reply me...that's if they even bother to. 

I admit that I take content from other sites. Plenty of it sef, but the question is, which website in the world doesn't? If you go on Bossip.com, 50% of what is there is from other sources. Daily Mail UK takes from other sites, re-writes and give credit. UK Mirror takes from other sites. MediaTakeOut quotes other sources. E! Online, Us Weekly, People and even CNN take news from other sources and give credit, so why is mine an offense to the extent that my blog deserves to be shut down? Even in Nigeria, which site doesn't take news from other sites? Which? That is how media runs. Perez Hilton makes $10million a year from blogging and 50% of the content on his site is not originally his. As long as you give credit...which I do! Except in cases where you don't know the original source of the story or photo. So many blogs take content from my site, how many of them have I gone after? In fact, I'm happy that they do so, I have nothing against it. If I take content from another site and they approach me to take it down despite giving credit, I will take it down. But that doesn't happen. 

I try as much as possible to get as many exclusives as I can, but because I work from home my team is so small. I've been planning to employ more hands which I will do eventually and then get a proper office. I'm kinda glad this happened. It's now pushing me to act and take my business more seriously.

So Mr Aye Dee, Mr EE, Mr #bringmedown or whoever you are and Jeremy Weate (look who is talking ..lol) and all the others talking, I am not afraid of you! You didn't bring me this far and you're not enough to bring me down. Like if you dream it, speak it, act it, hope it, envision it, see it, pray it....YOU are not enough! You can't bring a good woman down. You can try boo, oh please keep trying...but you see this lady, she ain't going nowhere. You don't even know who you are dealing with. You don't know what drives me and how far I plan to go. I've been a hustler since I was 17, doing it on my own...on my own terms. Plus I have the backing of God...and of course my hundreds of thousands of readers. I repeat, YOU are not enough!

I have been blogging for close to eight years and I plan to be around for many more years to come, so get used it. If you manage to close down LIB, I'll come back bigger and better. So keep trying boo! And enjoy all the attention you will get from this post...you've earned it. Kisses!

Oh by the way Mr EE, one of your friends who you were doing the #bringlindaikejidown campaign with has turned against you and contacted me. He's a LIBer just like you...hehe...but decided it wasn't fair and reached out to me. God bless you Mr Aye Dee. I hope your hustle also pays. All the best.

To others reading this, if you want to be successful in life, please prepare yourselves for something like this. People don't go after failures. You have to be really crazy to gather to plot the downfall of an orange seller or a gate-man (with all due respect). These people go after successes. Once you succeed in any field, they will come after you...it's inevitable. Ask everyone who has succeeded. It's not whether they will try, because they will...it's how you respond to it that matters.

Don't you ever, listen to me, ever let anyone defeat you. You didn't work so hard to get to the top for somebody who didn't know how you struggled to bring you down. You will be disappointing God. You don't even know how disappointed He will be. How dare you let them win? They will come for you...that's a guarantee just make sure you defeat them.

These people are not even haters..they are excuses...they are the natural reaction to success...put in this world to take actions against people who are climbing the ladder of success. If they see you're about to fly, they will try to cut your wings because when you fly, there's no stopping you anymore. And that's what they want to do...to stop you! Don't let them distract you. Stay focused on your dreams and keep flying.

Lastly, You know how negative voices can be so loud that you can't hear the positive ones? In moments like that just quiet the noise and listen again...listen only to the positive ones...because they are all that matters.

May all your dreams come true! May everything you put your hands into succeed. May your enemies show their faces so you know who they are...but may they never win.

Thank you so much to all LIB readers for your loyalty all these years. I keep saying you changed my life and I will always be grateful. Long live LIB.

Thanks guys and have a blessed day.
Now back to blogging!

Now, below is Ayo Sogunro's letter / reply to Linda.

Dearest Linda Ikeji,

Re: To the Guys That Want To Take Down LIB

Permit me the indulgence of a few lines to your eminent personality. I have been a constant fan of your work, although from afar. To be honest, I rarely open your blog volitionally, never scrolled through the news items on a slow day, never typed out the address on my browser to open it; yet, like hundreds of thousands of other Nigerians—I find myself falling into your domain through the intricacies of internet sharing and their damn hyperlinks. Despite this non-conscious increment of your page views, I dare say that I have had no cause to complain about the content of LIB—I expected to find gossip and entertainment not Shakespeare, and you have never disappointed me.

So, again, I am a huge admirer of your intrepid work.

But this is not to say I have not had some mixed feelings—possibly on the verge of “beef”: as a writer who has managed to capture some viral attention on social media myself, I know how difficult it is to get to the top. Like you have rightly pointed out, you are highly ranked in the Nigerian cybersphere. And, you could say I envy—to use our recent diction—your super-megastar blog status.

Yet, this is not an automatic “hating”.

You see, I do not hold your successes against you. The fact that gossip and entertainment blogs rank higher than informative or analytical ones is hardly your fault—it’s just a simple reflection of our society’s intellectual values. More importantly, if you don’t make the money from this, someone else will, anyway. Considering your status as, I think, a single black woman, it is all the more inspiring that you are the one raking in all that cash and influence. Believe me, this is a really inspiring story—worthy of its own biopic sometime.

But on the other hand, here is the problem: we live in a world of laws and regulations, and most of your critics have come from that angle. And a lot of people cherish these legal values. In fact, some people are almost insane about the extent to which they are prepared to enforce laws. These people are passionate enough about their rights under the law to come across as your “haters”. I, for one, am willing to ignore a lot of these unreasonable laws—but not everyone one can be as patient as I am.

Now, what do I mean?

Take, for example, the other day when you published my letter criticizing that son of the Abachas: I was quite happy to see it posted on your blog even without you requesting permission. Practically the whole of Nigeria’s internet did, anyway. I didn’t mind. I am crazy like that. For people like me, we are happy to see our content shared around the world without restrictions, even where the person sharing it is making money from it. To people like me, the moral right to be acknowledged as the writer is sufficient, and we do not care much about the economic rights—which is why I will never get to buy a Range Rover.

You got the moral rights acknowledgment aspect correct in your response to these so-called haters. But, a lot of my writer friends are not haters, they are simply hard workers who would also like, very much, to buy their own Range Rovers someday; a difficult enough ambition in Nigeria, where writing is about the lowest paying job or business an African can have. Consequently, a number of my writer friends are very guarded, not just about the moral rights, but also about the economic rights of their writings.

Now, I do not necessarily agree with their position about sharing online content. This is where you and I are on the same page—afterall, we should all be grateful first to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who gave us this medium without copyright or licensing restrictions. But, we do not control the laws or the regulations governing copyright—and so we have to understand the point of my writer friends. These people are not “haters” and they do not want to take down your blog just to make some money. No, they are mostly writers with genuine economic copyright grievances—and that 2014 Range Rover Sport Supercharged didn’t help them to suddenly become more understanding.

Consequently, we should be able to see their perspective, considering also that Google sees their perspective.

All of these is why: first, as a publisher, you need a lawyer to help you circumnavigate the murky waters of copyright—forget the excuse that everyone else is doing it, and focus on doing it right; secondly, start some payment terms for the hungry, trekking, writers whose writing you “borrow”—you will be surprised how cooperative they can get. Thirdly, you may need an accountant too, just to balance the costs of all these economics. It’s a small price to pay to save yourself the burden of critics—and you may end up having to own, maybe, not a Range Rover. But you will rest easy from spammers, hackers, and critics who will stop at nothing to get you off the charts.

These, of course, do not mean you will not have genuine haters determined to make cyberspace a warfront for you—but for genuine haters, just like you said, you have “the backing of God”, same as the rest of us mortals. Meanwhile, get the backing of the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for all the other stuff. You’re in the big leagues now, and the legal world comes with the package.

On a personal note, I am also very keen on changing my car; My 2004 Honda Accord is so not supercharged and has become a bit of a drag with old age. A retainer with my firm would be a quietly and quite satisfactory arrangement for both of us. As a bonus: you get the services of a great writer into the bargain—particularly to help with all those pesky original content.

I look forward to your prompt response.

Yours respectfully, sincerely, faithfully, captivated and so on, etc.

Ayo Sogunro

P.S.: You know you don’t need my permission to share this—we now have an understanding.

Ayo Sogunro is the author of The Wonderful Life of Senator Boniface and other Sorry Tales. A lawyer by profession, he also indulges in quasi socio-legal philosophy on this blog. You may interact with him on Twitter via @ayosogunro.