Disqus - Latest Comments for Jonathan Bailey

Re: 3 Ways to Handle Content Theft Online Without Getting a Lawyer Involved

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:57:52 -0000

As somone who has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own content, I agree wholeheartedly that writing the person should be the first step when practical. However, it is important to be aware of relevant laws, especially the DMCA, that let you file with Web hosts to get such content removed directly.

My luck with getting content credited/removed has been about 50/50 when it comes to direct contact but about 95-98% when dealing with hosts. It is often faster too.

It is just something to keep in mind. If you need any help with that, feel free to drop me a line. I've also got some stock letters on my site you are free to use.

Re: A small note regarding Facebook Connect

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:09:53 -0000

First off, thank you for posting about this. I noticed a problem with my WordPress statistics but was unsure what caused it. Thank you for clearing it up.

That being said, here is what I am noticing as of right now:

1) The referrers on my site in WordPress Stats (though not Google Analtyics) are screwed up. They are showing facebook.com referrers from almost everything and the API key matches the one I used for Disqus.

2) I have seen a spike in traffic. I can't tell if this is because of the API issue or because I fixed a bug on IE about the same time that fixed a long loading time for users of that browser. GA reports a similar spike.

The question I have is in what way are the analytics being skewed? The referrer issue seems to be Disqus but what about the traffic? Is it causing both WordPress Stats and GA to count significantly more page views?

If you could give us a great idea how the stats are skewed, I'd be appreciative. Also, an ETA on repair would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

Re: Steal Content From Download Squad to get links!

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:28:35 -0000

I read that article earlier but never checked to see if they nofollowed the links. I guess I should have. That's head-smackingly dumb. I make it my policy to nofollow any link that has or may have infringing material on it specifically to discourage content theft while being free to talk about it and link to it.

I hope it was just an honest mistake and not one out of ignorance. It seems likely enough, everyone forgets...

Thank you for pointing this out!

Re: Steal Content From Download Squad to get links!

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:28:35 -0000

Re: Outsourcing & Plagiarism Checkers

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:44:54 -0000

It sounds like a very interesting service and I'm going to have to give it a look. However, I'm pretty much inherently skeptical of all plagiarism checkers. I've found that hmost are products of convinience, not practicality. This one though, with its translation and synonymn checking tools might be more useful.

Still, new tools are being developed all the time and, right now, I know of at least two companies that are going to enter this market on behalf of bloggers. There might be a third.

This is a very rapidly evolving field.

Thank you for the information!

Re: Outsourcing & Plagiarism Checkers

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:44:54 -0000

Re: Ippon Blog Plagiarism With Moves Like A Judo Blackbelt

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:21:05 -0000

Excellent article on the topic, but one thing I wanted to point out though is that it doesn't take long to deal with plagiarism once you know how to handle it. If you take the time to have your stock letters ready, it never takes more than fifteen minutes on your end to handle a case.

Something to consider when dealing with this complicated issue. Sometimes, much of the time even, it is worthwhile to after content theft.

Re: Ippon Blog Plagiarism With Moves Like A Judo Blackbelt

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:21:05 -0000

Re: Ippon Blog Plagiarism With Moves Like A Judo Blackbelt

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:53:14 -0000

One potential thought then, why not use a Creative Commons License on your content and give the implicit OK for anyone who wants to use your material in such a way. I do not find such use terribly offensive myself, so long as I am linked and attributed, I have mentioned that on my site and have an appropriate CC license.

Any thoughts on that?

Re: Ippon Blog Plagiarism With Moves Like A Judo Blackbelt

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:53:14 -0000

Re: Digg Favorites Slapped By Google

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:21:22 -0000

AF: I noticed that too but oddly enough search engine traffic is actually up today and yesterday. Go figure...

I think it mistook my long blogroll as spam, I removed and I'm going to reintroduce a new one soon.

Re: Digg Favorites Slapped By Google

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:21:22 -0000

Re: Digg Favorites Slapped By Google

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:15:03 -0000

Ok, I'm noticing a slight trend upward in my pagerank following my corrections. I checked my PR this morning and I now have eight datacenters putting me back at an eight. A few still had me there after the drop but not eight. I don't think the PR correction can be that fast but who knows?

I've seen no measurable drop in SERPS nor have I see an drop off in search engine traffic. Perhaps, for my site at least, PR is just an age.

Re: Digg Favorites Slapped By Google

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:15:03 -0000

Re: Blog plagiarism — Steal this blog!

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:47:17 -0000

Mathew: DMCA notices are just a sad reality right now. It used to be that you could handle copyright issues by just going straight to the abuse team of a site. Abuse teams would check the evidence to make sure the case is reasonable, take appropriate action and do it more quickly than a DMCA notice. DMCA notices, which have to go through lawyers, take forever, offer no protection to the plaintiff and offer only one recourse.

Still, I use them regularly and teach my readers how to do so as well, though only begrudgingly. I don't like the law, but it's a fact of life and the only way to get things done. It's the way the Web hosts wanted it and the way they got it.

Sad but true.

Thank you for the interesting article and for helping to shed some light on this issue!

Re: Hey, CEOs can steal too! Neener, neener!

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 23:12:31 -0000

One minor correction, copyright law can be a criminal offense. See title 17 section five chapter six of the U.S. legal code:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506

Most of the time it is treated as a civil matter for many different reasons, but there is a potential for a criminal offense. This is how they arrest piracy and counterfeit DVD rings.

There are differences between the two, but they aren't as simple as civil vs. criminal I'm afraid...

Hope this helps!

Re: Thoughts On YouTube, The Beatles & Copyrights?

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:55:13 -0000

The answer, simply put, is that this isn't legal and yes it is the type of problem that the new fingerprinting service is designed stop.

However, the copyright of the Beatles is a pretty interesting case as the rights holders have been very slow to enter into the online market. It seems likely that they haven't submitted their content to be fingerprinted nor expressed a great deal of interest in shutting down infringements.

It'll be interesting to see if these videos go away any time soon.

Re: Nobody Wants To Steal, But Videos Are Better With Copywritten Content

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:03:09 -0000

I'll talk more about it on my site later, but to give a preview here, what is inconsistent at YouTube, at least when it comes to copyright issues, is not YouTube's policies, but the detection and enforcement by copyright holders.

To use NBC as an example, YouTube only removes clips from NBC that it is told to do so. It is rarely, if ever, proactive. If NBC only reports one clip, that clip gets removed and others stay. Also, if YouTube gets a copyright complaint from someone overstepping copyright law, like with Uri, they usually do remove it though they don't have to. It's cheaper, in their mind, to blindly follow the notices rather than wrestle with potential consequences later.

Sadly YouTube's policy is inconsistent but its not really their fault, they can only do what they are told. Now, this only applies to copyright law, I'm not making any comment on their other policies.

Those they can take full credit for...

Re: YouTube Is Screwed?

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:20:24 -0000

The problem here is that, under the law and in the eyes of the court, it is worse for YouTube to let infringing videos linger than to delay the removal of new ones. The DMCA provides protection for hosts, under some conditions, if they "expeditiously" act to remove infringing materials once notified, but, if they don't, they lose all hope of protection.

In short, if they act to remove works after notification, they have at least an argument in their defense, if they don't, they're probably toast.

Though there really isn't anything about this kind of filtering technology in the DMCA, it seems to be an attempt to show good faith and smooth things over with rightsholders.

That being said, I don't think Google relies as heavily on infringing videos as we think. The top videos are almost always amateur content and there seems to be plenty of non-infringing material on the site. Will it take a hit? Absolutely. But I think it can survive it.

At least I hope so...

Re: You Can’t Stop File Sharing, But You Can Kill Your Brand By Trying

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:47:53 -0000

Yehuda: Actually the legal issue with what she did was not necessarily copyright itself, otherwise the fair use argument you mentioned might have merit, but that recording a movie from inside a movie theater is, in and of itself, illegal. That's actually what this case is about, at least in the legal sense.

Re: You Can’t Stop File Sharing, But You Can Kill Your Brand By Trying

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:22:14 -0000

Actually, that's where you're wrong. Recording a film in a theater was made illegal by the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. It is actually classified as a felony. This wasn't a mere case of a movie theater policy, there is a Federal law here that prohibits this, rightly or wrongly. See this article for more info:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

Re: You Can’t Stop File Sharing, But You Can Kill Your Brand By Trying

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:47:49 -0000

The problem with the FEaCA is that it, like the anti-circumvention protocols in the DMCA, do not have exemptions carved out for fair use. It's frustrating and unfair. But it is the law. A fair use defense might protect the copy of the work, but it doesn't protect the method of copying if it is done via camming or via circumventing DRM. It's a it like saying that you are free to use someone's car, but you can't hotwire it and you can't have the keys.

I don't agree with what they did to this girl at all, I want to make that clear. If I had been the theater owner I would have handled it much differently. But it seems to follow the letter of the law, if not the intent.

Re: RSS Scraping, Scavenging, Stealing, And Content Theft…Get Thee Behind Me!

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:02:24 -0000

Joe: I am very sorry to hear about your recent troubles here. The Anti-leech plugin is a very good first step but, in reality, shutting down most of these spammers is pretty easy. I can help you if you want. I've stopped over 600 plagiarists of my own content and will certainly do what I can to assist.

Just drop me a line if there is anything I can do. You can either use the email address here or the contact form on my site, both go to the same place.

No matter what, best of luck with this!

Re: Spam blogs and plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:23:27 -0000

Sadly, these spam blogs, or splogs, have been around for a long, long time. At least a few years. I've been battling them myself and helping others to do the same.

If they are using your content without permission, regardless of whether or not they link back to your original post, you can simply file a DMCA notice with their host and get the content removed. You can also report them to their advertisers and see about getting their funding cut.

If you need any help with that, let me know and I'll gladly do what I can.

Hope that this helps you out some!

Re: How to Stop Sites That Steal Your Content Using The Digital Millenium Copyright Act

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 12:38:23 -0000

It's worth noting that the DMCA only requires an electronic signature and that the electronic signature act specifies that such a signature need only be any kind of electronic mark that shows an intent to sign.

The result of this is that, in 99% of all cases, you can easily email your DMCA notice to the host. The only exception, at this time, appears to be Google. Of course, there ways around that.

Hope that this helps!

Re: Working with Associated Content

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:36:25 -0000

I have to say that these types of sites always make me a bit nervous. With the copyright and plagiarism climate so tense on the Web right now, a middleman like AC seems to be an added risk rather than a benefit.

However, I will be following them closely so please let me know how things go!

Re: The Different Viewpoints on Plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:09:12 -0000

nortypig,

First off, thank you very much for the post and for the clarification. I appreciate you adding to the discussion.

To answer your question though, there isn't a law that requires adding a link to a post you use in another blog. The link doesn't provide any protection one way or another.

You see, if you use a whole work without permission, it's copyright infringement with or without the link. If you use a snippet and attribute the original source, it doesn't matter if the attribution isn't in the form of a hyperlink so long as it is easily located.

I'm pretty sure that there are other ways to attribute a source other than hyperlinking. However, it's by far the easiest and most direct way. I suppose you could use MLA or Chicago style, but it seems to me that a hyperlink is much easier. It's a win-win.

The problem is that most people who don't hyperlink don't attribute at all. That's where plagiarism comes in. Even in the case of small snippets that might fall under fair use, you have to attribute your source. Any non attributed use of someone else's work is a violation of copyright law.

Hyperlinks are just the easiest and most accepted means to an end. If you want to find another way to bring an attribution up to legal code, I'd be willing to hear it.

Oh, and though I'm glad you love the look of the site, I can't take much of the credit for it. I borrowed heavily from a theme and other code snippets, the credit is in the footer. I did a fair amount of hacking on my own, but I had a huge head start. Once I get back home, I'm going to start on a custom layout though.

Cary,

I'm sorry to hear that someone stole your site. If there's anything that I can do to help, just let me know. My resources and knowledge are at your disposal.

Let me know how it turns out!

Re: The Truth About ArticleBot

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:21:27 -0000

Even though the create wants to make it look like a legitimate tool we all know it has only one single purpose: Getting away with plagiarism. Come on, who on earth would want a program to rewrite his/her carefully crafted essay? It just makes me laugh while typing this.

The site you're linking to at the bottom of your article actually contains tutorials on scraping (!)

While Articlebot itself may not be a scraping tool it's well known as a black hat SEO tool used to either get away with scraped content (avoiding Google's duplicates detection schemes) or to generate loads of spammy pages for search spiders to digest. Bad stuff in all kinds of different ways.

Re: Protecting Your Images

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:52:39 -0000

Marco,

I do agree with you, like I said, it'd stop the lazy and incompetent thieves but not the skilled ones that are determined. There are other ways of course, including scowering the HTML source.

Still, it does thwart the "right clickers" that make up the bulk of thieves. It's not perfect protection by any stretch, but it's a step and it doesn't mutilate the work.

Re: OpenDiary.com: Nobody’s Home

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 11:30:08 -0000

Kait,

I'm not implying that at all. Still, nearly every other blog provider offers some means of contacting individual diary owners. Be it an email address, a PM feature or an IM name. OD is the only one I know of that forbids people from posting contact information.

However, I'm not talking about the individual diary holders, but rather, the administrators. By law, under the DMCA, they have to provide for a designated agent to deal with copyright infringement taking place on their servers. However, I have found no valid contact information for them.

Finally, if it is my work, it is my business, it's that simple. U.S. copyright law allows for up to 150,000 in damages for intentional acts of copyright infringement, regardless of whether or not profit was made. Plagiarizing work is illegal, profit or not, and I speak for a great number of people when I say I don't want my material being copied and pasted under other people's names.

It's that simple.

Re: The “No Select Text” Script

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 17:41:30 -0000

Works fine for me in Firefox. However, it does NOT work fine for me in Opera. Interesting thing to note...

Re: When Fans Infringe Copyright

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:47:10 -0000

Joe,

Unfortunately, that is simply not true. I strongly encourage you to check out these links for examples of fan fiction sites getting taken down for copyright violations:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/fanfic/
http://www.whoosh.org/issue25/lee1.html (check section 2.1 annd 2.2)

Anyone who knows their way around copyright law knows that all incidents of fan fiction are, technically, unlawful derivative works. It's not that they're copyright non physical elements, technically only the story itself is copyrighted, but copyright law protects the non physical elements of the story.

I'm sorry, the law does not favor your perspective and both t he 2nd and 9th circuit have said so.

Re: Study Chronicles DMCA Abuses

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 14:37:43 -0000

Jennifer,

First off, thank you very much for your thoughtful reply. I'm glad that you were able to clarify a few points and you answered several questions that I had on the study.

My main problem with the sample being so Google heavy is that, in my personal experience, Google is a target for misguided DMCA notices. In fact, I warn heavily on my site against sending notices to Google for just that reason. In short, if I were going to use the DMCA maliciously to attack a competitor or a detractor, I would do it by filing a notice through Google, not their host and, since Google is so big, I wouldn't waste time with any other search engines. 512(d) is just too ripe for abuse and Google is the main target for such abuse.

Also, Google's main hosting service, Blogger, is more prone than most hosts to "hostile" DMCA notices. Blogging is one area where fair use copying, commentary, strong opinions and corporate enemies make it a ripe minefield for DMCA abuses. I would imagine that traditional hosts, like ThePlanet, will probably see fewer such notices.

I do agree that the main skew comes from the voluntarily submitted collection, however, there are elements of Google's business that make it a more attractive target for malicious and erroneous notices.

I'm going to send you an email in a second regarding the coding. I have a few questions that I want to be off the record as I don't want to inadvertently mess with your carefully crafted system. I know how hard researchers work to develop coding techniques (having done journalism research projects in the past).

I think it'll be interesting though to see if Google's results stack up to other hosts or if there is a skew. Honestly, I'm guessing based upon my own experience dealing with various hosts. One thing research has taught me is that anecdotal evidence can be wrong.

I hope that you have a happy Thanksgiving!

Re: Punditry Saturday: With Friends Like These…

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 18:54:11 -0000

Testing...

Re: Linkworthy: Columbia Law School Music Plagiarism Project

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:55:59 -0000

Mark,

Plagiarism is defined as "taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own". You can certainly do that with a work in the public domain. I can very easily append my name to "Hamlet" and try to convince people that I wrote it. It's not illegal and not actionable in a court of law since the work is in the public domain, but it is still plagiarism.

Sadly, since artists in the U.S. don't have moral rights to their works, the only way one can sue for plagiarism is by suing for copyright infringement based upon the illegal copies the plagiarism produced. Other countries have systems in place where copyright law isn't needed to take a plagiarist to court.

Still, it's a pretty awkward situation where plagiarism is more of a moral crime than a legal one. The attribution given to a work doesn't change whether or not a copyright violation took place, unless the copyright holder gave permission under such circumstances, but copyright law is the only resort for those victimized by plagiarism.

It's a strange legal world we live in.

Re: Wrap Up: Newspapers Attack Google News

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:01:12 -0000

I sent you an email about it. It should have all the info you need...

Re: Statute of Limitations in Copyright Law

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:53:41 -0000

From your own link:

"In copyright infringement actions, the period of limitation begins on the date of the last infringing act."

In the case of Internet works, that is three years AFTER the work is removed. You are focusing on the wrong thing. You are seeing how long the SOL is, not when the clock starts running.

Even your own words prove the point. Arose and occured are both past tense indicating that the infringement is over. Even if the infringement does end, tolling an SOL is very common practice in the event the plaintiff could not have been aware that they had been injured.

You don't have to be psychic, the court doesn't expect that of you and I have not found one case where an SOL defense worked in which the plaintiff did not wait despite knowing of the infringement.

Furthermore, the link has no merit in this case as it deals with CRIMINAL copyright matters. We're interested in civil matters.

Think about it logically for a second. Many file sharers that were sued by the RIAA had been sharing for well over three years. How were they successfully sued if they so easily could have played an SOL defense?

Finally, I strongly suggest that you take a look at this page in the Wikipedia which sums up the situation nicely. "...a civil suit for copyright infringement can only be brought within three years "after the claim accrued." A claim accrues every time a work is illegally copied and every time an infringing work is illegally sold or transferred, so statute of limitations defenses are usually very difficult"

There are many things wrong with copyright law and I will gladly fight with you to change them. It is an unfair and biased system with many flaws. However, simply put, this is not one of them. I'm sorry.

Re: Statute of Limitations in Copyright Law

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 16:16:27 -0000

Here's how the law sits today on the copyright Web site (copyright.gov):

§ 507. Limitations on actions

(a) Criminal Proceedings. - Except as expressly provided otherwise in this title, no criminal proceeding shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within 5 years after the cause of action arose.

(b) Civil Actions. - No civil action shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within three years after the claim accrued.

I believe what's going on is a genuine misunderstanding. I focus solely on civil law, where you can plainly see that the SOL begins after the claim has accrued (or rather, finished accruing). The Criminal law is where the SOL begins after the action arose.

Any action you take will be a civil matter. Realistically, almost no one is charged wth criminal copyright infringement. Even the RIAA doesn't do that. Criminal prosecution is reserved for the most heinous of copyright infringers, people that make and sell bootleg videos, books and so forth.

For the record, the Copyright site was last updated in 2004.

Re: Petty Theft: Plagiarism Style

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 22:05:33 -0000

Elfs DH,

First off, you are completely correct. That was the policy that I used before I took to my CC license. When I started using it, I made it clear that the CC license usurped the old one in any areas that there was a disagreement, namely the notification element. I left the old policy up for the benefit of plagiarists that had started infringing before the CC license took effect, namely early 2003.

However, I'm probably going to go back and change out the license for just the CC one and relegate that to a non-public page of the site.

I should have done it a while ago but every time I would get ready to I would run across an ancient plagiarist that had at least some of their plagiarism fall under the old policy. Even now I'm turning up acts from 2001 and before.

Still, thank you for bringing this to my attention, I'll correct it tomorrow...

Re: Petty Theft: Plagiarism Style

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 01 May 2006 16:40:22 -0000

Elf's DH,

Let me lay out the scenario that happened a few months after I switched to the CC license.

I had a plagiarist that, while not taking direct credit for a series of works, left off all attribution. His site was dated 2001. I wrote him and received no reply and then wrote the host.

He argued to the host, after being contacted, that when he found the work, it was under a license that didn't require attribution. I'm going to assume that it public domain license or something to the like. According to him, I was trying to retroactively demand attribution when I had previously allowed non attributed use.

His basic claim was that the CC license was a restriction, not a loosening and that I was trying to take away rights that I had previously granted. The old copyright policy, which at that point was still up due to sheer ignorance, proved otherwise.

It reminded me that people will do/say just about anything to avoid trouble. His logic, in addition to being provably wrong, was also fatally flawed and that's why he lost his case. Since then though, I've been reluctant to take down the old policy. However, it will be gone shortly.

As for your three scenarios:

1) Correct.
2) Correct.
3) Agreed. One of the reasons I abandoned it and only loosely enforced the notification element.

Hope that clarifies things a bit. While there's little arguing with your logic, sadly, the plagiarism battle rarely centers around logic.

After all, plagiarism itself isn't logical...

Thank you again!

Re: Ethical Plagiarism Fighting

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 08 May 2006 12:09:24 -0000

While I agree completely that the two are separate and should be kept as such (I'm going to rewrite portions of this later this week to vouch for that), there are two issues that muddy the waters in this matter.

First, since the United States does not recognize moral rights, copyright infringement is the only tort that you can bring against a plagiarist. In other countries, especially in the EU, this isn't true. Though they are different, especially when you look at the academic sense, they legally fall under the same heading. I don't like this, but such is life.

Also, I expanded the article at somewhat the last minute to encompass other kinds of infringement. I can see rereading things that I was not as thorough as previously thought I do need to correct a few things to be at least technically correct.

The question I want to put to you guys, and anyone else reading this, is what do you think of the rules and ideals? Verbiage aside, text can be rewritten, how are the principles? Is there anything that needs to be removed or added?

Thank you for pointing out the issues and for the ideas. I will definitely incorporate them soon.

Re: Ethical Plagiarism Fighting

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 08 May 2006 17:20:06 -0000

Alex,

The point you make is valid. One of the problems, and one of the reasons that I wrote this, is because plagiarists are becoming confused with file sharers. Just innocent kids that want to listen to music.

Copyright has become a dirty word.

Personally, when dealing with plagiarism, I've always focused on the fact that plagiarism is a lie. You lie by saying that a work is yours when you know full and well that it is not.

Everyone knows that lying is wrong, even children.

I support copying, the CC organization and the open source movement. I draw the line though when people try to own the whole of, not just a copy of, my work.

One of the first steps that we could take is advancing moral rights in the U.S. If that were to pass, plagiarism would become an independent crime. Of course, under the DMCA with Copyright Management Information being illegal to remove, it is technically one already.

That would free us up to distinguish between plagiarists and sharers.

I think one of the problems we have is that the people who deal with copyright infringement issues, the RIAA and the MPAA are less popular than even Microsoft. We have to show people that these matters don't just affect billion dollar artists, but also common people trying to eek out a living.

But as Dennis Miller would say, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."

Re: Plagiarism Today in the Boston Globe

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 11 May 2006 09:47:37 -0000

Markus,

The interview with Raj was a great time and I enjoyed answering his questions. The best part though, for me anyway, has been reading the comments on performancing.com. I've really loved seeing what others have had to say.

Re: “The ‘New’ Plagiarism”

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 11 May 2006 10:34:34 -0000

Matthijs: Not off topic in the least and, truthfully, a glaring omission in both my article and my guidelines. Thank you for pointing it out. To answer your question, I have not changed my view on framing.

Framing a site with the intent to implying a relationship that does not exist is never right. This is not a gray area issue but something that needs to be stopped. That goes beyond reusing a portion of a person's content to create your own post and up to taking partial credit for all of the work, including the design, images and other elements. Definitely not acceptable.

I'll have to look into adding a sentence to the guidelines to address that. Thank you for bringing it up.

Watchful Eye & Dan:

I don't judge gray sites, it's not my place, but when I linked to Dan's site I did look through it and noticed that, while he does use a fair amount of block quotes, the ratio of original content to reused content was about 50/50 over the first few pages. (Note: This is without the benefit of a word count, just an estimation).

Is this too much? I don't have an easy answer. Everyone's going to look at it differently. I tend to be a little bit copyleft and err more on the side that is in favor of attributed reuse. However, the decision should really be left to those that have had their content reused by Dan. If they approve, there is really no room for complaint.

No matter what though, his site is certainly not the worst I've seen in this regard. Others, including ones that I surveyed for this article had a 25/75 or even a 10/90 ratio. Some are so blatant as to post an entire 500 post in block quotes and at a brief "Neat huh?" at the end.

All of this raises an interesting question though, as an estimation, about how much original content should a blog have? As I said before, there can be no hard and fast rules, but a number might give us an idea of the comfort level on the Web.

Any thoughts?

Re: “The ‘New’ Plagiarism”

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 11 May 2006 11:14:48 -0000

Alex,

I just wanted to say bravo and well put there.

Re: Featured Article: My First Plagiarism Battle

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 13 May 2006 15:36:06 -0000

Kelly,

I'm sorry that happened to you. However, I think you might have just described one of the earliest incidents of plagiarism involving what would become the Web.

It's fascinating in a very morbid way. Things have evolved so much in terms of the Internet but changed so little when it comes to plagiarism.

I guess this is how some people welcomed the brave new world...

Re: U.S. Vs. Europe: Notice and Takedown

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 17 May 2006 13:09:30 -0000

Raj,

The Berne convention is an important document and one I've touched on a few times. It offers a great deal of international guidance as to what is copyrighted, what protections are afforded by copyright law and it provides a set of minimum standards for countries to follow that are, in turn, enacted in to each individual nation's code.

The problem with the convention is that, while it's important, it was drafted in the seventies, well before the advent of the Internet as we know it.

Also, the treaty doesn't deal much with procedures, only protections. You know, roughly, what protections your work has but learning enforcing those rights can still be tricky.

Finally, many member nations haven't implimented all of the requirements of the treat. The U.S., for example, is yet to enforce Moral Rights though it's mandated by the treaty.

The hope is that WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, will help provide some standards of copyright enforcement.

That, most likely, is a long way off though.

Matthijs,

My main problem with the language barrier is that it can be hard to find where to send the complaint to. Even if the person can read English, the challenge of finding their email address on a French or German site can be overwhelming.

Re: Blogburst Backlash

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 19 May 2006 13:55:01 -0000

Gary,

Just to clarify, the infrastructure I was talking about is the infrastructure to pay bloggers. Currently, when you register for Blogburst, there's no requirement to input your SSN or any other financial information. I'm forced to assume that, if they had a payment structure in place, they would be taking that information in advance

Also, I don't know how accurate BB's stats are and if they can determine how much profit they gained from each individual blogger. That's an interesting question that I regret to say I have not posed.

Such an infrastructure does take time and money to impliment and, while it might be fair to say that they should have had it in place before going live, if they don't have it now, it's going to be a while.

Just my thoughts on that...

Re: “The ‘New’ Plagiarism”

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 23 May 2006 09:22:27 -0000

Isaac,

I have no trouble with it in Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP or Linux. Is anyone else having trouble with the comment form in Firefox?

Re: Feedpass: A Cause for Conern?

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 24 May 2006 23:30:16 -0000

Randy,

I'm glad that you liked the article.

As far as the character of the use goes, I admit that there's some room for debate. I had considered that very point but decided that, since the content being reused wasn't part of the educational section, meaning the elements were separate, the actual reuse wouldn't likely be considered for educational use.

Of course, I'm sure that a lawyer for Feedpass would argue exactly as you did and, feasibly, could win. However, many courts have come down hard on commercial but also educational use of work. Recent cases involving copies of coursepacks have driven the point home.

Long story short, in recent case law, teachers, librarians and professors get leeway while others do not. The definition of "educational" fair use has been restricted, often unduly so, and would be a difficult play, as I see it at least.

Personally, I'd focus more on the market impact and the amount taken as they clearly favor Feedpass.

Once again though, there is always room for disagreement and we're always waiting on the next brilliant lawyer to change case law in this area.

Fair use is always in flux, one of the reasons it is so interesting and so hard to talk about.

Re: Google, The DMCA and You

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:15:45 -0000

Ian,

First off, thank you for the useful link. I appreciate it.

The problem with that theory is that a physical signature doesn't do anything to prove identity. If I create a fake person named John Smith, I can forge his name either by typing or signing it, it's the same either way. Physical signatures have been forged for thousands of years before electronic ones were concocted.

My basic case is that, if I can sign a contract that enables people to take money out of my checking account or credit card, verify my age, or purchase an expensive product without a physical signature, why can't I sign a DMCA notice the same way?

While the idea of the database may be flawed, the truth is that we can't guarantee the security any private information online. Credit card numbers, SSNs and other personal information are routinely stolen. I think a lo-res image of a signature is minor compared to those things and yet we routinely have that information online, even if we didn't put it there.

Sadly, security is never a promise that can be kept...

Thanks again for the helpful link!

Re: Linkrot Killing Blogger Citation?

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:16:50 -0000

Michael,

I couldn't agree more, as I said in the conclusion, MLA style doesn't guarantee that a work can be found, physical items disappear the same as electronic ones.

It would be interesting though to conduct a study and see if link rot is faster or slower than the general loss of books and other physical sources.

Logic would seem to dictate that linkrot would cause a faster deterioration, but logic is hardly scientific.

Re: “Happy” Accidents

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 23:20:19 -0000

Liz,

I know it's been a while, but I fixed the mistake. Thanks for the heads up. I'm just now getting back to full capacity and catching up on the backlog.

Thanks again for the heads up.

Re: Capturing Plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:39:08 -0000

Yaron,

First off, thanks for the heads up ont he links. I'm doing research on them now and I'll probably do a follow up post on them later today.

I greatly appreciate the help.

Re: Cloaking to Stop Scraping

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 09:40:41 -0000

Hung,

Thanks for the link! I greatly appreciate it. It's a good read and anyone that is interested in this article needs to take a look at it.

Somber One,

You don't put the code directly into your feed, but rather, in the template for your feed. It only works with Wordpress and, apparently, not with free wordpress.com accounts. If you have your own install of Wordpress, which I don't believe you have on your site, you can edit the templates.

I'm working on getting other code for different formats.

Ja,

Yes, there are plenty of ways to get around it, fortunately sploggers are a "set and forget" crowd that likely won't bother. It's just easier to move on.

I can honestly say I don't know much about Microformats. I'm going to take some time to look at it today and I'll see about doing a writeup either Friday or Monday. I'll look at your site a little bit later.

Thanks for the tip!

Merideth,

Thanks for the information, it's disappointing, but not unexpected. I'll edit the article in a second to reflect that.

Oskar,

There are weaknesses, but it is very unlikely that you'll be on the same proxy as the splogger. THe reason is that splogger software runs on the server itself usually, the same as the site. Odds are you won't have your home connection on the same proxy as a Web site.

There are plenty of weaknesses, but I don't see this as a common problem. Let me know if I'm wrong though, there might be something I'm not seeing.

Re: Feedburner Tip: Hide Your Feed

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:20:59 -0000

Matthew,

Thank you for the heads up, however, I haven't been able to replicate the problem. I ran PT through a link checker and everything appears to be ok. What page are you talking about and could it have been a hiccup?

Re: A Little Humor

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:33:37 -0000

Scribe,

I've written on the topic a few times (though not recently), here are some links of interest.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=58
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=291

Basically I agree that the RIAA has the right to go after file sharers but I think their methods are heavy handed and that they are building up resent ment against all copyright holders, not just the "big guys". Honestly, I think the way they treat copyright holders is just as dangerous as the way they treat users.

But that's just my two cents.

Re: Why RSS Scraping Isn’t O.K.

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:01:41 -0000

The victim-blaming element of it was one of the reasons that I decided to write this. I'm tired of scrapers blaming vicitms just because they provide RSS feeds.

"It's not my fault that I copied all of your content and put it on my site, it's yours for making it available."

Poppycock.

I'm glad that it helped you out and gave you some ammunition to fire back with!

Re: OpenDiary.com: Nobody’s Home

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 09:24:17 -0000

slvhwke,

The answer to your question isn't easy. Legally, it's not, that's technically a copyright violation. Ethically, however, it's most likely fine.

Most poets and authors don't mind if you use their work so long as you credit it. Still, it's a good idea to go ahead and ask permission or look for a Creative Commons License that offers permission to do such copying just to be safe.

Some people have VERY strict ideas about copyright. I'm not one of them (see the CC license below) but I do know many who are.

Hope that helps!

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:04:31 -0000

Greg,

The difference between a video recorder and Dapper is simple. The video recorder made it simple and cost efficient to make ONE copy of something. To make hundreds, or thousands, would take too much time and cost too much money.

Dapper inherently makes it easy to republish content to thousands, if not millions. It is not designed solely or even mainly for personal use.

The question isn't whether the technology is bad, but rather, why Dapper didn't make the service opt-in. Given that Dapper has the potential for horrible abuses, it makes sense to take reasonable precautions BEFORE releasing it.

This isn't about simply copying work, but republishing it. This isn't about a "bad" technology, but rather, a careless application of it.

Dapper, with a simple change, could have stopped all bad uses of their application but didn't. If past history of scraping is any indication, a majority of uses will be illegal in one way or another.

Even if you apply the "net benefit" test, Dapper will likely fail, especially once the sploggers take advantage of it. It could have easily been avoided though, if Dapper had been willing to take an extra step.

That's the sad thing.

Re: Net Neutrality and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:41:28 -0000

Elf's DH,

It's a possibility I had mulled and, quite possibly, one that they could hammer out. However, there's a strange problem. Web hosts already do that. They transmit data with no idea what the data itself is. However, since they have control over said data, they are responsible partly for it.

What the ISPs are trying to do is very strange. They want to control the data without taking any responsibility for it. I can not think of another area of law where that takes place.

It's likely that they would not be sued directly, but would have to answer DMCA notices like any Web host. That would then force them to filter traffic based upon both their neutrality status and on copyright/illegal contnet/etc. It would be overly burdensome for the network and frustrate customers.

The whole reason ISPs earned such a generous exemption under the DMCA was a claim that they had no control over the data. Now that they clearly do, their status is ambiguous and it's likely that they will have to take some level of responsibility for that.

Re: Net Neutrality and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:16:25 -0000

Web hosts actually have the data on their machines, and thus have direct control over what’s served.

That is the crux of the problem. If they start routing data based upon content, they will have direct control. They are able to route data based upon format, but not content. This means that CNN and Fox News arrive the same way to the computer. The minute that changes is the minute that they can route all kinds of infringing material away from prying eyes.

The whole niche for telecoms in the DMCA was passed because they had no control over the content that passed. If they prove that they do have control and are using it, they have a real problem.

It's not just the DMCA that ISPs took a walk on, there are other laws based upon content that they slid on because of the lack of control. If they take control, especially for the purpose of profit, lawmakers are likely to find that they also have a responsibility.

They might skate on this too, their power is great, but the risk is very powerful. If lawmakers refuse to let them have their cake and eat it too, they could be in for a world of trouble and given how unpopular telecoms are with voters right now, I'd imagine their leeway is limited.

Still, I think we do agree, this is a huge unknown and that is what should scare the telecoms. Big corporations don't excel at gambling.

Re: Net Neutrality and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:41:03 -0000

you only have to look at the information in the lowest level header in the IP packet.

It's funny you mention that, it's exactly how large hosts often handle DMCA notices, by simply routing traffic to offending domains to a special page. If a large host doesn't have the capability to physically remove the content, which is often the case with domain hosts, they just route traffic away from it. It's a common technique I've referred to in the past as the "Nuclear Option".

In a non-neutral environment, telecoms would have the ability to respond to DMCA notices, not to mention all of those other laws that aren't being discussed here. Since their pass on the DMCA was based upon them not having the ability and on being neutral, it seems likely that they will be forced to, if nothing else, adhere to it. If they can route based upon IPs and URLs, a requirement of such an environment, they have the power to filter out offending links.

You are probably right about the DMCA being low on the radar, but other laws probably aren't. What happens if the U.S. Government starts forcing telecoms to filter out lists of child porn, classified material or just about anything else that is illegal on the Web? The DMCA is only a jump away.

Once they openly admit and use the power to filter URLs and IPs, It's pretty much a given that the government is going to put that to other uses.

Oh, and as far as format goes, I was talking more about protocols such as Bittorrent and VOIP. In my rush I wasn't using correct terminology.

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:31:34 -0000

Greg,

There are two problems with what you say. First, the onus is on the new technology. Under MGM v. Grokster and the inducement test, if a new technology that is capable of mass copyright infringement does not take steps to prevent it from being abused, especially if it has the power to do so, can be held liable for said infringement.

If I am throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the U.S. Supreme Court beat me to it by several years.

Second, the legal uses for Dapper, when compared to the illegal ones are insignificant. Dapper is a service designed from the ground up solely for republishing. Does it have some legitimate uses? Sure. So did Kazaa and Grokster.

Governments already pass legislations to prevent products for being used for sinister purposes. Are most toy guns used in robberies? No. But they still have to paint their tips orange to prevent that from happening.

It was a simple step that did little harm to manufacturers and helped prevent many robberies.

My issue with Dapper, contrary to what you say, is not the technology itself, but the reckless application of it. Dapper was initially released without even an opt out feature, it was only after my urging they offered even that. Yes, opt-in would hamper them, but they will be hampered much more when and if a major company files suit against them for either secondary copyright infringement or trespass of chattles.

If the technology has a reasonably large number of legitimate uses, I'd bow out gracefully. If it were geared for personal use, I would do the same. Sadly, neither is true and my conversations with Dapper only proved that.

Finally, the Xerox machine analogy is flawed. A Xerox machine is far too cost prohibitive for massive publication for a work. Dapper makes it possible to republish content immediately to thousands, if not millions, of users for free. The threat is much higher.

In the end, I want to like Dapper. I really do. I think the technology is cool and would love to be a part of it. However, I can not endorse such reckless behavior for the sake of "cool".

Dapper is neat and I think they've got some great long term ideas for the technology. Sadly, I think that the current execution is unnecessarily risky (considering their future plans are completely opt=in according to them).

In short, I don't have the technology, I don't even hate Dapper, I just hate the lack of consideration and forethought that went into it.

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:48:12 -0000

Greg,

First off, I am sorry for the late reply, I was AFK for most of the day yesterday.

On the Dapper home page, it has the following statement:

The Dapp produces XML which you can use programatically in whatever way you like.

There is no copyright warning, save a very weak one buried in the FAQ, and that statement seems to indicate that they are encouraging users to use the content "whatever way" they like, including illegal ones. Many will take it that way and a court will most likely put more weight on that statement, and others on the home page, than on the FAQ.

As far as a specific formula goes, there isn't one. The courts determine that on a case by case basis. They've done a pretty good job so far, though it hasn't been neat. Photocopies and VCRs are not tools of infringement, Napster and Grokster were.

The problem with the law isn't that they aren't doing a decent job telling what is and is not infringing, but rather, that there is no way to know when going into it. Dapper, and anything else that uses copyrighted material, lives in a gray zone until specifically vetted or denied safe harbor.

It's also important to note that there are OTHER legal issues at stake. If you read the other articles I have about Dapper, you'll see that copyright is the least of the scraper's worry. The biggest is most likely trespass of chattles.

To avoid a trespass of chattles case, or any trespass charge, you have to be invited in some manner, see also, opt in. There are ways to tacitly invite people, putting up a web page you invite people to view it, but judgment after judgment has found you don't invite scraping.

Several cases have been handled using this law and precedent is VERY strong. Myspace recently shut down two sites scraping it even though no copyrighted work was being infringed upon. It claimed that the sites placed an undue burden on the server and were a violation of Myspace TOS. Though those cases never went to court, it seems obvious that lawyers encouraged the services to shut down.

That brings me to another potential issue for Dapper: TOS violations. Most large sites forbid scraping in its TOS and, if the courts find those can be enforced, they can be held in violation of those as well.

After speaking with the folks at Dapper and talking about their business plan, the orange tip gun analogy is a fair one. Their end goal is to create opt-in content supply chains. They have no intentions of ever being just a scraper. Their stated intended legitimate use is not hindered in any way by an opt in service.

No, I can not clarify those percentages because they are for the courts to decide. Courts look at more than just a magic ratio, but also at the potential harm of infringements, the usefulness of the legitimate uses, the marketing material and much more. As I said before, they seem to have done a decent job up to now, though I wish there were more clarity.

I admit that's unfair to Dapper, but that's the legal climate that they live in.

It really doesn't matter if you or anyone else takes my torn feelings on the issue seriously. I like Dapper's end goal and would hate to see them shut down early because of a stupid mistake.

Right now they are wading, very sloppily, through what has been called by lawyers a "legal minefield". As someone who has studied copyright law for years, I know that they are in a dangerous place and that danger is coming from all sides.

PS: Yes, Dapper is a U.S.-based company.

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:27:20 -0000

Greg,

First off, I can explain why and, if you go over my previous comments, you get an idea. The courts weigh a variety of factors including the potential for damages, the potential for legitimate use, the promotion of the product, the stated intent and more. There is no hard line, but copyright law was written to be flexible.

If you want hard lines, you're looking in the wrong legal field, just look at fair use. There are no hard lines there, just a framework for courts to make decisions by. The code was meant to be flexible and that's to make room for new technologies, not block them.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I am not backing away from my statement that Dapper is criminal. I NEVER SAID DAPPER WAS CRIMINAL. You are the only one that has raised a criminal matter in this discussion. All of the cases I have cited are civil and all of the issues I have raised are civil.

I don't even deal with criminal copyright matters on this site. You are twisting my words around there and I will not tolerate that.

Grokster is a CIVIL case and yes, that is the exact type of statement that would be considered a strike against it. The difference between the knife and Dapper is straightforward, the most of the knife's uses are legitimate and the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The vast majority of Dapper's uses are infringing or at least bring on copyright questions. Even their own examples raise issues.

Would the first step in most cases of unwanted scraping be to ask someone to stop? Sure. But what about damages already done?

Say, for example, Dapper scrapes a major site like Myspace and the dapp winds up lagging the server, causing a crash eating up significant resources. It's happened before to Myspace. Sure, Myspace can ask them to stop, but the damage is already done, they've lost business, money and customers because of problems that Dapper caused.

Say also, for example, that a user finds a way to use Dapper to scrape a hidden area of a site. That information gets out and, from the streaming information that is being leaked. Depending on the information or content, that could be very damaging to a business model and asking them to stop once the scraping has begun does nothing. You can't put the content back.

Since you can't delete anything once it has been released to the Web at large. Asking someone to stop doing something that you've already stated is illegal after they've already done it is often times very silly.

Going with the garden party theme, if someone walks off with the utensils, and then gives them away to anyone who was previously interested in visiting my party, it does me no good to track him down and politely ask him to not do it again. Sure, I can get more utensils, but the damage is done.

All it would take is for Dapper to do permanent damage to one site, one host or one company to risk being sued. Dapper, if they carry on long enough, is almost certain to step on the wrong toes.

I hope that more people come around to this view and we can see the re-emergence of cultures based on sharing and attribution, not property rights and passive consumption.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I completely agree with that statement. I just feel that it should be brought on through the free market system. The artists that choose the route will do better than those who don't. I have chosen that route personally, I have not opted out of Dapper (then again, I already offer an API and a CC License, one doesn't need to use Dapper).

I do NOT think however, that anyone should be forced into it, something that Dapper is trying to do. I believe in the right of the artist to choose how their work is used. The best ones will make the right decisions.

That I have faith in.

Re: Why My Feeds Are Full

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:10:01 -0000

Tammy,

I'm glad that you found the article useful. I'm not much of a WP expert but I can give this one a shot.

Go into your Wordpress admin area. Click on the options tab and then the reading sub tab. Ensure that your site is set to display "full text" feeds.

If that is set properly, consider redownloading WP and replacing your wp-rss2.php file with a clean version. That should be in the original file.

Finally, if that fails, check to make sure that you haven't installed any plugins that might interfere with the feed (probably a good first step in general) and then check your Feedburner options to make sure you didn't accidentally tick summary burner.

Hopefully something in that mess will fix it.

Hope that helps!

Re: Why My Feeds Are Full

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:42:24 -0000

Tammy,

Have you considered posting a note on the Wordpress support site and asking for help? You can go here to do that: http://wordpress.org/support/

The people there would be FAR better able to help you than I. I searched for your question there and didn't find anything directly applicable. Post your question there and let them know the situation. I do indeed use the  tag, though I use the Blog Editor BlogDesk rather than doing it by hand.

Billy,

I'm glad that you enjoyed the article and thank you for the link back. I really enjoyed your article and I felt that it was a valid point while keeping very level-headed the reason I chose it.

I'm glad that you were able to talk about the need to be careful with RSS without blaming the victim, something that is getting more common.

It will be very interesting to see how this RSS dialog shapes up as both RSS use and theft continue to grow.

Re: BlogBurst to Change Contributor Agreement

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:41:50 -0000

Matthew,

Blogburst only forbids advertising in the feed, not on the site. Of course, if you want to do that you can always take advantage of Feedburner and create two feeds from one original source. That way, one can have the ads and the one you give to BlogBurst does not. That is perfectly acceptable, at least when I last spoke with them.

Re: Bitacle: A Plan for Action

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:23:06 -0000

Randy,

You can get them removed for violating OTHER Adsense TOS rules, but not for violating Copyright. If you can prove the site is spamming or created just for Adsense, you can get it cut that way. However, ALL COPYRIGHT COMPLAINTS must be sent in DMCA format.

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:36:08 -0000

Greg,

First off, I'm sorry about the late reply. For some reason I was not notified about this comment. The second major glitch I've had with WP this week. Perhaps I should be submitting bugs.

Anyway, I do agree that we are much more on the same page and, though we might have some disagreements, I think we can work out much of what is going on.

As far as the "magic ratio" goes, you're making the mistake of looking for hard lines where there are none. As I've saiad before, copyright law was intentionally left ambiguous. I've studied where the line has been drawn in the past and I can make an educated guess about where it would be drawn but I can't provide a hard answer.

What would happen is that someone would file suit against Dapper, the matter would go to court and the judge would make a decision basedup up a framework set up by previous judgments. There is no magic ratio and two different judges can have widely different views on the matter. That's part of what makes copyright law so frustrating and scary.

However, to quote a Berkley law professor on her first day of teaching her copyright class she, a lawyer, told her class that copyright law is "undreadable" and "almost impossible to understand".

Could this go your way, sure, but I wouldn't bet on it myself.

I would suggest that Dapps, by their nature, operate periodically and would not contribute significantly to server load. If MySpace fell over and they could convince a judge/jury it was because Dapper hit them once every hour … well, that says something about he courts, doesn’t it?< /I>

The problem with that statement is that it doesn't reflect accurately how Dapper works. Once a Dapp is created, it is open to the public for anyone to use. As someoe who has felt the Slashdot effect, I know how quickly tens of thousands of people can be directed to a new page or service.

One page view per hour is not a big deal, but tens of thousands per hour, especially on server-intense applications can be detrimental.

If a Dapp gets dugg tomorrow, tens of thousands of people will set up multiple feeds for it. This can result in tens, even hundreds of thousands of unwanted hits per hour. If Dapper can withstand that load, the other site may not. It might slow down, crash and cost the owners money.

What then?

The cracking issue is not a red herring as some data is ONLY useful if it is stremaed and contnuously updated. A good combination of computer sleuthing and hacking might find a way to expose a data stream in a way that Dapper can scrape. It happens a lot when people put data in flash or Java. There's often a backend that is just a Web page. The page itself is useless as it is static (although updated regularly). It is most valuable when it is fed into the frontend and streamed. A Dapp could do that.

The amount of damages would be the earnings (revenue net costs) lost during the period from when the re-publishing started to when the âopt-outâ? message was enacted. This latency period is going to be a function of how vigilant the content-provider is in monitoring leakage. The more valuable their content, the smaller their latency.

That statement is flat out wrong. In the U.S. as long as a work has been registered with the copyright office (as many serials of value are, punitive damages can be awarded and those accumulate per use, which would mean view in this case. Those can be thousands of dollars per use in some caases.

If the site had opted out already, which copyright defaults as an "opt out" and had a TOS that forbid scraping, the violations would start on the first scrape.

Vigilance is a nice thought, but ponder this. I consider myself VERY vigilant regarding my work. I have Google Alerts for all of my literature, I do random searches on other search engines and am even looking into services to help me protect my work more. However, I consistently discover infringements that began years ago. Simple vigilance does not guarantee that you will be able to detect work in a timely manner, especially if the person doing the infringing sells the work in a locked part of their site.

Vigilance alone is inadequate to protect copyright. It's a major part, to be sure, but we also need cooperation and part of that cooperation is not releasing technology that has a very high potential for abuse and only limited legitimate use.

Of course the saving grace of Dapper may well be its extremely limited use period. Most people that I have talked to about it say that the service is not as intelligent as previously thought and has severe usability issues.

But as they grow and improve their product, they will run into these issues, that is almost certain. Myspace has already shut down several scrapers and other sites have done the same.

It's only a matter of time before Dapper steps on the wrong toes. Sad, but true.

Re: Dapper Update

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 07:19:45 -0000

Greg,

We're getting to the point where you aren't even reading my comments. I said this previously. This is not my view, but this is the law. Yes, I do usually agree with the courts decision, but it's not my logic that is fuzzy, it's the law itself. I'm going to repeat this.

opyright law was intentionally left ambiguous.

I am making a guess based upon past decisions. It is an educated guess, but a guess.

The decisions are made by men, if you want hard lines, take up trespass law.

The same issue could arise as a result of âhot linkingâ? images and the like. Arenât there already technological, social and legal mechanisms for dealing with this? Could not the same protocols be applied to Dapps?

Yes, and people have been held liable for damages to ones server due to hotlinking of images. What's the point? That's actually a strike against Dapper, not one for it.

(Correction 10:00 AM: I looked it up and though I found many cases where people voluntarily stopped hotlinking and some even paid out damages for it, no case law exists yet that I could find. All cases have been resolved out of court an in the favor of the original site. I spoke with a lawyer friend who reads this site though and he agrees that image hotlinking would likely fall under the same trespass of chattles and other laws mentioned previously. So the answer is still yes, this is still a strike for Dapper.)

Also, Dapper may not have enough Bandwidth to damage Myspace but A) What about after or if they gain funding and increase capacity or B) Sites that are financially important but much smaller?

A single T1 connection is enough to DOS a site much larger than it, it may not be able to bring it down fully, but it can slow it to a crawl.

Dapper works by scraping the page elements ie HTML, DOM and CSS.

As I said again in my previous comment, hidden areas of a site can be exposed in a browser through other means but might be useless without Dapper's exploitation. It's all in the previous comment. This is admittedly a weaker area, but it's something Dapper has to worry about.

I think owner-vigilance is a good heuristic for determining the cut-off for reasonable effort. If someone can’t be bothered (or justify their own costs of) monitoring their rights, then they shouldn’t be able to burden the state with it either.

Two questions arise from that, one. Why even have copyright if the state won't protect it? As I said above, vigilance doesn't work. I mention specific examples where vigilance not working to protect my own copyright and you respond with a philisophical question about it not being an "absolute right" and a petty shot at me for being an American.

I appreciate neither the change of topic nor the insult. You neither asked nor received my opinions on that matter and this is not part of the conversation.

It belittles your case.

Let me answer your two questions directly.

1) In light of the Justicesâ remarks, does the Grokster ruling support the view that Dapper being âopt-outâ? is lawful?

No. Napster offered an opt out procedure and it was found to be liable. It was not safe until it switched to an opt in system. Opt out alone is simply not enough. It is just one, repeat one, indicator. Though Napster predated Grokster, most assume that it fell under the same ruling since it was essentially the same technology.

2) Can the opportunity costs introduced by enforcing âopt-inâ? (ie from lost content creation/consumption) outweigh the failure of civil law to compensate copyright holders for abuses under âopt-outâ??

Once again, ask Napster. Second, what opportunity costs? How much does it really cost to ask someone if you can use their material? Nothing. If they had forged partnerships with a few major sites, I'm sure that others would have lined up. This is an issue of lazy marketing as much as anything. Dapper could easily make an opt-in situation work if A) their software provides real benefit to copyright holders and B) They are willing to put in some extra effort.

This is no cost to the organization.

As far as the rest of your statement goes, we live in an opt in world, that much is certain. Opt in versus opt out is an interesting debate I would love to take up, as I see both sides of it, but the fact is that the world we, and Dapper, live in is opt in.

At this point I'm going to say that this conversation is over. Since it has already degenerated to insults. I've decided to leave comments open, but will not be responding to any more of your letters. If you want a reply from me, you are fee to ask via email.

Re: Digital Fingerprints to Detect RSS Scraping

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:59:42 -0000

MaxPower,

I'm glad that you liked the article, after re-reading it I realized that my tone was more harsh than intended. I really do love the plugin and, though it has some weaknesses, I think it's VERY valuable, especially considering it was just at Beta 1 when I wrote about it.

While this plugin is only as strong as search engines’ ability to index splogs, sites that don’t get indexed probably aren’t that important in the big picture. Can it be easy to make money splogging if you aren’t in the major indexes? I think not, but I could be wrong.

Sadly, yes. Other alternatives do exist including comment/trackback spam and spam pinging. Granted, you are correct that a splog would be MUCH less effective without a good search engine presence, I still don't want my content appearing on links pointed to by comment spammers.

You are right that those without a search engine presence are much less important, I'm just not quite ready to completely ignore the ones without. Besides, the best solution is to detect theft before it hits the search engines, especially Google, to avoid potential penalties.

As to adding a tracking image, the main splogs I am familiar with remove links and images (A HREF and IMG) leaving only the text. Wouldn’t this render tracking images useless?

Very true. I guess I should have thought that one through better. The ideal solution would probably be tracking the feed page itself. Since most sploggers host their apps on their server, it could easily be distinguished from normal uses.

Its not clear to me if FeedBurner does anything at all other than report ‘uncommon usage’. I can’t block IPs using FeedBurner, and I lose a substantial amount of control over the feed

I talked with FB about this shortly after my article on cloaking to stop scraping. I was told that they were going to look into something similar for them. No word yet. It takes a while to develop these kinds of features.

As far as the splog goes, email FeedBurner tech support about it. Let them know and they'll track it down. If you can do that, you'll improve the metrics for everyone. I, personally, have not encountered this problem (I've had a few scrape my summaries via Technorati feeds) so I can't comment.

I don't think the solution is to quit FeedBurner, but rather, to use it in tandem with your plugin. The more layers, the better.

Awareness is always the first step.

Well put! I agree there one hundred percent.

Thank you for the wonderful plugin and the update!

Re: The DMCA Notice From Hell

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:42:32 -0000

Noel,

I'm not sure either about that one. I'm going to assume that it's because no one has tried since A) I have read no posts from people who have B) No one I have talked to about it has fallowed through on it and C) I try to think the best of people until proved wrong. If that happens, you'll be the first to know.

MaxPower,

I thought I had deleted that !@#4 trackback after I got it. Looks like it didn't take. I'll do it again in a second. I know their history and remove their trackbacks as I get them. I don't mind their use of my content since it is only a sentence, but I do try to shut down the trackbacks.

As far as the notice goes. It took about three hours to assemble. Not too bad and most of my delay was Bitacle's slow site. Still, considering I never take longer than 10 minutes in most cases, it was a long road.

Stopbitacleorg,

Of course. Not a problem at all. I'm going to wait another day and see what Google has to say. They usually take at least 24 hours and, given the length of this notice, it could be much longer.

Still, it was fun faxing that.

Re: 9Rules vs. Toyota

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:43:55 -0000

Mike,

I definitely agree that it is highly unlikely that they will try anything. But there are a lot of bad ideas out there in the world of IP law and I've hit the point where nothing surprises me. In a sane world you should be safe, too bad the inmates are running the asylum.

I am interested to hear how things go though. Please do keep me informed and I will continue to check up!

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Update: Google Responds (Sort of)

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:00:56 -0000

Noel,

Good luck with your notice. Be aware that it might take a while. It took me nearly a week to hear anything back and it appears that it is pretty typical for the Adsense team.

Let me know what you hear back!

Re: 9Rules vs. Toyota

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:02:30 -0000

Viccent,

I agree completely. I really don't foresee any problems but I must be getting cynical in my old age. It seems that nothing would be able to shock me.

Still, it would be interesting to see how the story would be picked up if Toyota did react...

Re: DMCA From Hell (PDF) and Bitacle Update

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:12:46 -0000

Plain Jane Mom,

I'm still seeing the ads next to the comment form. However, if Bitacle is a large site it could be that they are removing it piece by piece. What you saw might be a preview of what's to come.

Still waiting on a word from Google.

As far as who might match their ethics? My gut says to look overseas but no names jump out at me right now. The problem is that the advertisers will likely balk at Bitacle's practices, making it prudent for an ad network to steer clear.

In that regard, look for advertisers that might bite. Gambling took a huge hit with the U.S. banning online gambling and won't likely invest, despite Bitacle's high overseas presence. That only leave pornography and other spammable services.

If they don't simply try a switch to a new network (and get another beating) or shut down altogether, look for them to shack up with a shady advertising partner or partners. That's my hunch.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Re: Bitacle: What’s Next

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:09:52 -0000

Maria,

I tend not to trust DNS servers when locating the host. I've had some embarrassing incidents around that. In short, many companies get third party DNS providers so that their DNS stays up even if their hosting goes down.

I find that, generally, the IP address holds the key and a whois on that led me to ono.es. However, this is crucial, that may not be the end of it. It's possible that Deranet could be a host reselling on the Ono network.

I'm not a big fan of the shotgun approach of dealing with copyright infringement, but sometimes it does pay to whip out the twelve gauge. I'll go ahead and email them just to be sure.

No harm in that.

I'll definitely tap you when and if I get a reply!

Frenchy,

I have to be honest and say I wasn't so sure myself. There were many variables against us. Still, it was a team effort and we got it done. Now we just have to mop up...

Definitely though, I hope that others will step forward in the future and know that I am here to help if I can.

Re: Why Scrape?

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:33:57 -0000

The problem really isn't setting up a new network that caters only to the best of sites. Many networks are doing that right now. The problem is getting enough of both the advertisers and the publishers to reach critical mass. Google was able to do that easily due to their background, others have struggled.

I fooled around with Adwords some recently and was AMAZED at how much people pay for clicks through Google. It's insane at times.

The price on this is going to have to come down, especially with all of the fraud, it's too easy to make a free living off of spamming.

Re: Bitacle: What’s Next

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 10:03:04 -0000

Joe,

Thanks for your help. I heard back from yesterday. I didn't get a chance to post about it but anyone who wants to write to them should send their letter to abuse at ono dot c-o-m.

Thank you for your help!

Sarah,

This is important to note that Bitacle is NOT within the letter of the law.

Do a search on Technorati or Icerocket for your content. You'll find that they do not diplay your full content, just snippets of it. Bitacle, under their Aggregates feature, displays all of your content.

Though blog search engines, and regular ones, scrape your content to make it searchable they do not display all of it.

Also, Bitacle does not offer an opt out procedure, Technorati and others do. They also adhere to robots.txt, something Bitacle doesn't do.

In the end, Bitacle may not be displaying ads, thanks in large part to my and other DMCA notices to Adsense, but they are still trying to. If you sign in to an account, you'll find that Google Adsense code still appears on some of the Aggregates page. It just doesn't work.

There's nothing legitimate about Bitacle yet, they have a long way to go.

Re: Google Alerts Adds Blog Search

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 07:38:10 -0000

Kirk,

Sorry about that, my spell check her been going a little bit crazy. It should be fixed now.

Re: An Open Letter to Michael Crook

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:14:40 -0000

Interesting question. I can't point to any case law here but judging from the lack of plastic surgeons suing paparazzi photographers, I'd say it doesn't hold up.

The problem there probably is the lack of fixation into a tangible medium. I seriously doubt that plastic surgery, which can shift and change and can not be easily reproduced, qualifies.

Still, it is an amusing question. It would be a very entertaining lawsuit.

Re: BlogBurst Announces Reward Program

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:13:59 -0000

The Zero Boss,

Considering that all of BB's clients are newspapers, family friendly content is almost certainly a must. If you don't have much content that fits those guidelines, other methods of promotion and profit are probably better.

Eric,

Thanks for the update on the international rewards program, I'm glad that things are moving forward there!

Paul,

What can I say, usually I'm behind everyone else but on this one I was toward the front of the pack. It doesn't happen often so I have to savor it.

I really don't know how to respond to most of your comments on the system, I feel I should leave that to Eric at others at Pluck, but I wanted to offer a hint that might help with Bitacle.

First, use FeedBurner and create two different feeds for your RSS. The first is full, give that one to BlogBurst, the second is short and you post that to your site. It doesn't violate BB terms if you just give them the full feed.

I know of at least a few others that have talked about doing this.

Hope that helps!

Re: Update: Bitacle’s Insults

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 03:11:37 -0000

Ricardo,

Allow me, quickly, to go over the differences between Bitacle and every other legitimate search engine on the planet.

First, Bitacle is ignoring all robots.txt files, meta tags and removal requests. Want Google to stop indixing your site? Use robots.txt. Want them to stop caching? Use meta tags. Want them to remove everything they have on you, write them. You can do none of those things with Bitacle.

Second, search engines may store content in its entirety, but only display small portions. Bitacle displays the posts in their entirety, provided you have a full RSS feed. Sure, some search engines have caches, but those display the work in its original context, instead of just taking the post and putting it on their site, and can be switched off with meta tags.

Third, the main goal of a search engine is to direct users to the original site. Caching is used only as a backup for down or altered sites. Bitacle wholeheartedly intends to keep visitors on their site, even having their own comment feature. They even open all links within posts in a new window.

Fourth, until recently, Bitacle was displaying ads next to site's full content, something no legitimate search engine, or even Web RSS reader, does.

Fifth, also until recently, Bitacle was claiming copyright ownership over everything it scraped and placing that content under a Creative Commons license that was, often times, incompatible with the original license.

Finally, it's become clear to most that the purpose of the "Aggregates" feature is nothing more than search engine spam. When search engines use tags to ensure that cached pages don't wond up in other search engines, Bitacle works hard to ensure their scraped pages do. This dilutes the market for the original content and forces sites to compete with Bitacle for their own keywords.

These are just some of the major differences between Bitacle and a legitimate search engine. This is why we are upset with Bitacle and not Google.

The difference really isn't that hard to see.

Re: Lisensa: Licensing Content Creatively

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:29:40 -0000

Richard,

I'm sorry about the delay in getting your comment up. Apparently I'm having some problems with the moderation queue in Wordpress.

Regardless, I'm not exactly sure how to answer your question. Lisensa is a fine service and I think it has a lot of potential but it isn't a one-sized fits all service. Some are going to prefer a BlogBurst set up and others will go for a Scoopt Words approach.

Honestly though, after looking at your site, I am unsure about how someone would benefit from using both your service and Lisensa as they seem to do largely the same things.

I'll be in touch via email this weekend as I want to ask you a few questions about your service when you get some time.

Sorry I couldn't be more help right now, I think I'm just unclear on the question.

Feel free to follow up if I didn't answer it adequately.

Re: Update: Bitacle’s Insults

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 07:48:08 -0000

"As of yet, there are no laws against this. You may not like it, but you canât really stop it from happening."

You're flat out wrong there. One of the critical points that helped determine search engines were not infringing were that they offered means of opt-out. Even a mere search engine, which doesn't display full content, is infringing if it doesn't offer a clear opt out procedure. The robots.txt system was designed to provide that and all legit search engines offer a special opt out page.

Yes, it is illegal. If Google stopped listening to robots.txt, they would be sued.

"RSS feeds are re-posted on websites and on RSS clients. If you donât want someone to âscrapeâ? your RSS feeds, do not provide them."

The implied license to RSS feeds extends to individual private use. That's what most have said. Look up the previous articles on my site on scraping you'll see at least three other reasons why scraping is on legally dangerous turf.

You have no response to my third point, I'll assume you concede it.

"Take a look at many of the legitimate sites. They all contain full ads. The placement of the ads should have no bearing on its legitimacy."

According to the DMCA, a host can not knowingly profit directly from the infringement. The location of the ads is extremely important. Legally speaking, if they use the text as ad bait, knowing that the content belongs to others, and the person decides it is infringing, the host can be sued directly.

Location does matter in the eyes of the law.

"Wow, you finally realized the power of the Internet. If you want people to stop taking your RSS feeds, donât place them on your website. When I have an RSS feed of anything, I know full well that it will be scraped by websites, clients, and blogs (this is the point)."

Your basic case in all of this is that, you don't want them to scrape your RSS feeds, don't provide it.

First, I find it repulsive that I need to cut off my legitimate readers, to stop one site that takes the implied license too far. That is unfair to everyone involved. The content in your RSS feed is just as protected as the content on your Web page, you have the same rights, the only difference is the way it is meant to be viewed.

However, what do you say to the millions who don't know what an RSS feed is but provide one because it's an automatic part of their blog or site. How many LiveJournal, Myspace or Xanga users fully understand RSS and the risks? I'd wager almost none.

I did a previous article about why RSS scraping isn't acceptable. You may want to read it as it deals with many of the myths you present.

Oh, and though I'm dealing with American law, remember that the EU is even worse. That's where Google News was successfully sued, where the notice and takedown requirements are nonexistent and the laws favor hosts and search engines even less.

Sad, but true.

Re: The Bitacle Difference

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:45:21 -0000

Ann,

Personally I would give Mr. Chen a little bit of time, perhaps until Monday, but I know that GoDaddy will not act without a DMCA notice. I'd go ahead and prepare that and have it handy.

As I said in my comment, resolution should not be a problem should push come t shove. If Mr. Chen does not respond, do not worry.

Re: The Bitacle Difference

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:24:12 -0000

Ricardo,

I'll say it again, read the PDF decision that declared Google's cache to be fair use. You'll see that the opt out procedures, lack of advertising and other factors were critical to its status.

Yes, there are laws that prohibit what Bitacle does. It's called copyright law.

Re: Abusing Fair Use

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 08:11:15 -0000

Alfred,

As I said in the article, my concern with these sites has less to do with copyright and more to do with the spam issue. The site I linked to sent me at least two trackbacks and those were just the ones that got through my spam filters.

In terms of copyright infringement, they aren't horrible, but what they spawn is pretty disgusting.

Maria,

I couldn't have said it better myself to be honest. The reason I didn't comment sooner was I didn't know what I could add.

To jump in the API chain problem, it's something I'm going to cover soon. I touched on it briefly a while back when discussing spam blogs that escape FeedBurner, but you are right it requires more in depth coverage. I'm writing some friends now.

Hope that you are well!

Re: Michael Crook Update

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 20:00:49 -0000

I missed that, thanks for the catch. I guess it's a waste of time saying what a man who represents himself has for a client...

Re: Michael Crook Update

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:22:14 -0000

Craig & Interested Observer,

First off, I'm sorry to both of you that I haven't responded sooner. I was gone this weekend on a holiday and really have just sat back down to site work today.

I ran the articles in question through a battery of plagiarism checks. I used several tools including some that are experimental and I found no evidence of plagiarism. If the content was plagiarized, it wasn't from the Web.

I'm no fan of Michael Crook, I think that much is clear, but I don't believe he is a plagiarist, at least not when it comes to these articles. Many bad names can be said about Michael Crook, but plagiarist is not one of them at this time.

It would have been ironic for someone who claims to support copyright holders to be a plagiarist and there have been cases of that in the past, it's not the case here.

I hope that puts this to rest.

Re: The Six Worst Ways to Protect Content

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:27:18 -0000

Genevieve,

First off, thank you very much for letting me know you enjoy the site and for your good wishes in the New Year! It should be very exciting.

My hatred for the no right click script goes very far back. Years ago, before I ran PT, I had a friend that set up one of those annoying Geocities pages. He asked permission to use some of my writing on it and I gave him the go ahead.

I visited the site a few days later and found out that he was using a no right click script. I asked him about it and he said that he didn't want anyone taking his or my work. Noble, to be sure, but I told him that it was making it hard for me to use his site and that it was easily defeated.

This friend, in turn, assured me that THIS script could not be beaten. Frustrated, I fired up my site downloader, which I was using at that time to backup my own sites, saved his to my computer and emailed him a zip file with the contents.

The script disappeared in 24 hours but he never brought up the subject again.

Anyway, thank you again for your kind wishes!

Re: Is AdBrite Encouraging Content Theft?

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:45:43 -0000

Ed,

I'm sorry, but that is a tremendous stretch at best. The IMG tag alone does not allow you to automatically overlay a logo over the top of the image you leech nor does it automatically place ads in an around the image for you to profit from.

Sure, it allows you to leech bandwidth, but it's nowhere near the one stop shop for bandwidth theft, content theft and plagiarism that InVideo is.

InVideo is significantly more powerful in this area.

Re: Safer Without FeedBurner?

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:23:25 -0000

Shepard,

To answer your question, it is definitely trivial to impliment such code. I've experimented with it in the past. The problem is that it can also be trivially defeated, often by just disabling javascript or viewing the HTML code.

Worse still, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to select text on a Web site including quoting, some bookmarking services and keeping one's place when reading a long work. The negative impact on legitimate users outweighs the benefits in stopping plagiarists.

Besides, I encourage attributed copying of my work. Using such a script would defeat the point of my CC License.

Honestly though, for most people, it is a very bad idea to use the no select text script. I've written about it a few times on this site, most recent time here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/01/04/the-s...

Personally, I don't think I could ever use it or encourage others to do so.

Re: Michael Crook Back Online and EFF Case Updates

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:50:32 -0000

Dave,

As someone that has been reporting on Crook's site for some time, I can say that those elements have been in effect for a pretty long time. I've had to type quotes from Crook's site for a good while now.

I think it's been going on as long as the case, or at least close to it.

Still, it is funny that he doesn't allow that. I could trivially disable JavaScript and get around that, but for the short bits I want it's usually just easier to type.

Re: Warning Headers

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:41:33 -0000

Gayla,

Just a heads up on this one, to get Google Adsense to respond to your request, you most likely will need to file a DMCA complaint with them. It's a pain, especially since it has to be faxed or mailed in and is legally dubious, and I've written about it before here:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/31/adsen...

Give it a look if you're interested and, if you need any help, don't hesitate to send me an email.

Good luck with your scraper!

Re: Blogwerx Stumbles Out The Gate

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:15:24 -0000

Thanks for the heads up! That one was my fault. When I moved hosts recently I used an outdated template. I closed the forums down some time ago as it was attracting too much spam.

I might give forums another shot some day though.

I have to agree with you about Scoble, that and he seems to find a lot of controversy every time he posts negative things. I guess we'll see what happens.

Re: Blogwerx Stumbles Out The Gate

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:16:00 -0000

David -

A quick reminder to everyone, spell check does not catch all mistake, like when you turn Rob into Ron. Thanks for the catch!

Tony -

I'm very excited to see how Blogwerx evolves, please keep me informed.

I hope that it works out well!

Re: Does Anti-Copyright Help Big Business?

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:12:02 -0000

Vyonna,

There are no old topics on this site, most of these issues are just as valid today as when they were posted, this one more than most. No need to apologize.

I'm just glad that the article was able to give you whatever perspective that you needed. It means a lot to hear that.

I hope that you're doing well and that you won't hesitate to write if there is anything that I can do to help.

Re: The Worst Excuse for Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:59:57 -0000

Andy,

There are several limitations to using CC licensed work for dummy copy. On my site, for example, you could not use it in a commercial setting, you would have to apply the same license to any derivative works and you would have to attribute within the bounds of the CC license.

Dummy copy, especially Lorem Ipsum copy, is copyright free and doesn't have any such restrictions. Much better for testing all elements of a site.

Besides, who the heck would want to use this site for dummy copy? I'd imagine most would find lorem ipsum more interesting to boot.

Re: Yahoo Plagiarism Protest Scheduled March 5th

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:06:24 -0000

Saravanan,

Thank you very much for the heads up and I am embarassed to admit that I got that wrong. I've fixed the article.

Looking through my notes I see that a few other blogs made the same mistakes and I'll wager they got it wrong due to spell checking software.

The achille's heel of technology is exposed.

Thank you very much for the information!

Re: How Spam Blogs Cheat Technorati

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:55:06 -0000

Darren,

You're welcome for all of the help! I hope it works out for you. As always though, let me know if there's anything that I can do to help.

Matthijs,

Consider my past (and in some cases current) writing careers:

Journalist for a small-town paper
Gothic/Dark Poet
Noir Fiction Writer
Horror Fiction Writer
Post-Modern Essayist

For all intents and purposes. This IS the happy stuff.

As far as anti-depressants go. I have other vices that get me by. Not much of a drugs or alcohol person, unless we are debating the merits of caffeine.

That's a discussion I always enjoy.

PS: The real depressing stuff on this topic is coming up soon.

Re: An Open Letter to Michael Crook

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:05:56 -0000

Rob,

Thanks for the heads up. The link has been removed. That must have been a recent change I was using the link in my bookmarks up to a few weeks ago.

Leave it to Crook to screw over Webmasters who were depending on his link.

Re: Why Google is in Copyright Trouble

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:24:23 -0000

Psots,

First off, thank you very much for your comment. I greatly appreciate your thoughts.

I do want to clarify though, do not confuse my analysis for defense or endorsement. I'm not trying to endorse one side or another right now, that's for a later piece. I was more interested in the history of the matter and the potential implications. I'm sorry if it seemed otherwise.

However, with that in mind, it is important to note that there is, and always will be, gatekeepers. There is far more content than any one can consume. Some one, or some thing, has to filter it out. The difference between Google and publishing houses or, worse yet, the government, is that Google uses a largely automated process. Computers take control and determine what is seen.

If a page is buried to the 100th page of the SERPs, it's not censorship, but it is removed from public view. Google is a gatekeeper and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Finally, I don't need to ask a writer about publishing houses. I am a published author, though under a pen name. I know how it is and I agree. One of the reasons I went the route I did was to get away from them.

I'm not saying Google is evil, just that it too is determining what we read and don't read, even if we don't realize it. It's a gatekeeper and we need gatekeepers because of our physical limitations.

Re: The Economics of Spam Blogging

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:43:29 -0000

MacBros,

That was my fault, I grabbed the wrong picture. I wanted the now-famous Adsense check one, where it links to now. I was in a hurry when I was grabbing the links and had forgotten that I had navigated away from the link I wanted.

I agree that spam is by in large a get rich quick scheme, I think the people getting rich are the ones writing the software to maintain the 10,000 blogs. Those apps are fairly simply in nature but cost hundreds of dollars. Seems like a good scheme to me.

Still, some do make a lot of money at spam. It's sad but true.

Spammer:

I don't believe Shoemoney's cash is 100% clean, as I said, he's been called on other questionable tactics but I haven't seen anyone say he's spammed. Perhaps he isn't a saint, but he's not the devil either.

Re: When Will Google Stand Up to Spam?

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:02:03 -0000

AKA R'acquel,

The problem though is two-fold. First, Google still requires a faxed or mailed DMCA notice, as you pointed out. Second, If Google would simply tighten the controls on who gets an Adsense account, the entire problem would go away.

For every spam blog account that gets reported, at least a dozen don't. There's no way that user reporting alone can solve the problem.

Google is still going to have to step up and make some changes. That's just the way it is.

Still, thank you for posting the report procedure for Adsense. I think I have it elsewhere on this site but it needs to be with this article as well.

Thank you for your comment!

Re: Update: Six Apart Working on Copyright Issues

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:04:53 -0000

Cybele,

I understand your frustrations. I'm upset about a lot of it too. I sense that there is a bureaucracy problem taking place here though. When I first mentioned Nooz to Six Apart, they hadn't even heard of it. I'm getting the feeling that this might be something that was going on at the lower levels and the top level wasn't fully aware.

I'm going to give them a few days and see what they come up with. Hopefully they'll surprise both of us.

Re: Update: Six Apart Working on Copyright Issues

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 07:48:14 -0000

Ani,

First off, thank you very much for taking the time to comment. I'm glad to see that we agree on the vast majority of subjects and I'd like to respond to a few of your comments.

I'm glad that you're gedding the opt out and feedback emails working. I'll be sure to write them some time next week as I know several people who read this site have been frustrated by that. On that front, if anyone else tests them, please let me know.

I am also very glad to hear that you're taking these, and other copyright matters seriously. I would encourage you to listen to the TWiL podcast I linked to in the first episode as it deals almost exclusively with these issues. These are complicated areas, especially for a smaller company and I will happily point you in the way to or provide any guidance that I can.

Here's the podcast again if you are interested: http://www.twit.tv/twil3

I wholly understand the desire to create a shared reading experience and do some very neat things with RSS, but doing those things without permission is flat out illegal. Copyright is still very much opt-in, especially when it comes to posting work wholesale on another site, doubly so when you do it in a matter that could easily replace the original version and for commercial use.

The legal implications here are very simple. If someone decided not to mess with a take down notice and file suit, they would be in their right. This type of use does not qualify for safe harbor protectiona nd almost certainly doesn't qualify as fair use or as an exempt caching service. It only takes one person out of millions of bloggers.

As far as the assertation about MT, I do seem to eat a little bit of crow there. I was merely echoing the sentiment among bloggers and I should have checked my facts better on that one. It seems I really underestimated Typepad. I was also surprised to read that, as recently as a few years ago, your most popular blogging product was LJ. Still, it looks like all of the above are trumped by Google Blogger, but I call in to quesiton how many of those are legitimate blogs...

Looking back on that comment, I realize "beauracracy" was not the right word. I was trying to echo what you were saying that not all members of the team are familiar with all of the products. However, in a strange way it is correct but not in terms of people, but of sites. You have a definite hierarchy in sites, Sixapart->Rojo->Nooz. It's very unusual to have a structure like that.

Still, I am unsure exactly how to convey that, I'm glad that you did that for me.

I will definitely be in touch with you soon. I've added yout o my Yahoo and I also attempted to add you to my Skype at the same address. I'm plagiarismtoday on both.

I'll defifnitely be in touch soon. I'll be sure to text message you before I call.

It will probably be sometime later this weekend if that's acceptable.

Re: Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:41:27 -0000

Cybele,

Just to clarify, there's a difference between being a WP-driven blog and one hosted on Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com uses WP as a backend but is a complete blog service, like Blogspot. A lot scrapers are using their own installs of WP right now because A) It's Free B) Easily Automated and C) Has available plugins to do the scraping.

Fortunately, Wordpress.com has not itself fallen victim to this.

Angela,

I have to agree with you on that one. I don't see why free blogging services should try to turn users into pro bloggers. Those wanting to profit from a blog should at least make the minor investment in their own hosting.

MacBros,

I'd wager that there are a lot of things that Wordpress.com could/should do that wouldn't drastically impact spam.

I'd send the suggestions on and see if they take them up. They were very responsive to me and my questions.

Re: Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 23:27:58 -0000

Pete,

Thanks for the heads up and the link. I've looked at several different studies about Blogspot spam over the years and none have been good. The lowest number I've seen was about 50%. I'll update the story with clarification in a bit, but it's still pretty clear that Blogspot is pretty much overrun.

Oh, and I think that the limited template control with Wordpress.com makes such redirects impossible. I've only toyed with one or two Wordpress.com blogs, but I know that wasn't within the realm of possibility of what I could do easily.

Cybele,

Just trying to make sure we were all clear :) It can get a bit confusing.

That Girl,

As true as that is, even if the spam blog fighting is just a side effect, it is an important one.

Adam,

I'm in touch with Anil from Six Apart, I'm going to see if he has any insight as to why that's true. I have my suspicions, but I don't want to say anything until I hear back.

Jaypee,

I tried to clarify that in the post but I don't know how good I did with that. There is a big difference between a Wordpress.com blog and a Wordpress-powered blog.

I do agree with what you said, but I think it's too late for those service, even if they decide tomorrow that they are going to put everything they have into it. It requires the investment up front, not later.

Re: Reporting Content Theft and Blacklisting Plagiarists

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:01:36 -0000

MacBros,

Good point and one that I overlooked. That should definitely be a part of the better accountability. That's an excellent point. Thanks for bringing it up!

Re: Reporting Content Theft and Blacklisting Plagiarists

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:36:27 -0000

Will,

Good question there. First, take a look at this article from October. It lists my favorite anti-content theft plugins.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/10/09/five-...

I use the digital fingerprint plugin actively as well as Numly. I would use Antileech but I also use FeedBurner, which negates that. Bad Behavior I've used in the past but had trouble with. I'm debating trying it out again.

As far as comment spam goes, I used to use SK2 but switched to Akismet to take the load off of my server. Besides, with SK2 not being actively developed, it seemed like a safer move.

Overall, I'm happy with Akismet though it seems to dump a lot into the "moderate" bin that really is clear-cut spam.

Other plugins worth noting is the FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which randomizes your original feed to prevent scrapers from simply guessing the address and the "Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form" which prevents traditional email spam from coming from your contact form.

That should about cover it. I'm always open to any additional suggestions others might have!

Re: Reporting Content Theft and Blacklisting Plagiarists

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:31:28 -0000

Will,

Bad Behavior seems to be one of the most divisive WP plugins out there. You either love it and can't stop singing its praises, or outright hate it.

I guess we'll see how it develops.

MacBros,

*.info is pretty notorious for hosting spam, take a look at this link:

http://www.infoniac.com/hi-tech/google-blogs-sp...

It's apparently the worst of all the TLDs.

You can use FB and Antileech, but Antileech will only protect your original WP feed, not your FeedBurner feed. I have the plugin to randomize your feed address and, thus, scrapers aren't likely to find my original feed.

Antileech, however, can not help you stop scraping of your FeedBurner feed. That's hosted on their servers and is under their control.

Re: Reporting Content Theft and Blacklisting Plagiarists

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:15:03 -0000

Macbros,

Yep, fortunately last I heard they were working on it. There's just a lot of complexities in implementing something like this...

Re: Five Essential Wordpress Content Protection Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:47:32 -0000

Will,

You are correct, it did change since this was posted. It previously was thirty per month, which averaged out to one per day.

Hope that helps1

Re: Five Essential Wordpress Content Protection Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:10:01 -0000

Will,

It does work very well. First, it has several behind-the-scenes security measures that prevent it from being easily abused. Second it's secure so that it can only send mail to me, not to anyone else and, finally, I change the question from time to time to keep spammers on their toes.

There are ways around that, it usually involves somoen answering the question once and then adding it to a database. However, it's not worth doing that for the right to send email to one person. It's different when posting comments, which can be viewed by manymore.

It's adequate protection for the form. I have not been spammed through it since I installed it.

Re: Six Apart/Rojo: Now Spam Bloggers?

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:33:15 -0000

Matthew,

I don't think that you read the entire article, or, if you did, that you listened to the podcast that I linked to. You'll find that lawyers very familiar with these issues disagree strongly with you.

Also, I would encourage you to read this article on this site:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/29/why-r...

It might clear up some of the misconceptions you have regarding the intent of RSS feeds and the legality of scraping them.

Re: Six Apart/Rojo: Now Spam Bloggers?

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:32:10 -0000

Other,

Once again, READ the post in its entirety and READ the links in my comment above. I am very studied in the history of RSS, its intended usage and the legal ramifications of abusing it. Just because the truth and the history does not fit what you believe it should, does not mean I am the one who does not understand it.

Take a moment, read the post, the one I linked to and LISTEN to the podcast I linked to in this post. THEN comment.

Re: Six Apart/Rojo: Now Spam Bloggers?

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:31:37 -0000

Other,

Once again, you are not reading the previous entry that I linked to in the above comment or listening to the podcast regarding RSS scraping and implied license.

You don't have to listen to me at all, listen to what lawyers that are experts on copyright law and the Web have to say.

The law is clear. Just because you don't like the facts does not mean that changing wording fixes them.

Re: Housekeeping: BCA Nomination and House Buying

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:26:36 -0000

MacBros,

Sure, the bribe will be sent once that Nigerian prince gets around to giving me my promised millions. Should be any day now...

Re: Wrap Up: DMCA Trickery, Mob Justice & More

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:09:36 -0000

Akansha,

I realized that the post was mostly intended to be humorous, thus the strange ending to my comment, but it is interesting how a humorous post can be used, at times, for real enlightenment (or so I'd hope that's what one would call it).

Besides, the question was interesting and fundamentally challenging, especially for a copyright guy like me. It was a fun way to spend the morning.

Thanks for the comment!

Re: Google’s ClaimYourContent.com Creates False Hope

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:37:51 -0000

Sourav,

I'd be more skeptical about this call if it weren't for the fact that Google purchased the domains the same day it made the announcement. Seems like a lock to me.

Maybe, just maybe though, they will expand the service to include non-video content. That would be nice.

Jennifer,

Thanks for the link. For the most part, I agree completely...

Re: The DMCA on Social News Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:06:15 -0000

Joao,

Please reread the article as well as the one that came after it. The DMCA contained multiple parts. One part was the anti-circumvention provision that you are talking about, another was the notice and takedown provision that I am talking about that allows Webmasters to have hosts remove infringing material.

Before calling me a troll, please have the decency to read the DMCA fully and understand all of the provisions that are in it. There is a lot more to the law than just that one portion.

Re: Content Theft: A Guide for Community Admins

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:52:37 -0000

Aaron,

Thanks for the heads up, I fixed the mistake. I'm not sure why I just now saw your comment in my inbox but I did. However, it has been fixed.

Perhaps with all of the running around I've neglected my comment inbox some. I am sorry.

Re: Housekeeping: Limited Posting Next Week

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 12 May 2007 12:31:07 -0000

Anali,

Please remember that none of the sites will be able to act unless A) They have a DMCA notice in hand and B) the work has not already been removed. Just make sure that you file the right notice, with the right parties, in the right order.

Everyone,

Thanks for the well-wishes! This is a very exciting and very nerve-racking time.

Re: Content Theft: A Guide for Community Admins

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:33:07 -0000

John,

I'm sorry for the confusion, we're talking about two different situations though.

The question here is one of where the infringement is taking place. If the infringement is taking place on the community site, the administrator has a responsibility as per the DMCA to remove the material if they are properly notified. You can read more about that in the "Contacting the Host" page.

If the infringement is taking place on a site outside of the admin's control, such as a spam blog, the administrator can not do anything since they do not hold the copyright to the material. The DMCA requires that either the copyright holder or a designated agent file the notice.

The DMCA does not require the site to make a determination of ownership. If the notice is proper, they have to act. However, there is a counter-notice provision to get falsely removed works restored and severe civil penalties offered to anyone who misuses the DMCA.

The law basically says that the admin does not have the responsibility to determine who owns a work, just one to respond to proper notices of infringement that take place on their servers. Yes, the system has been abused a few times (search this site for Michael Crook) but it almost never worked out well for the person misusing it.

Hope that clarifies the situation! Let me know if you have any further questions.

Re: Photographer Gets Plagiarized then Censored

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:35:52 -0000

Dave,

I agree with you. The only thing that stops me from really jumping down Flickr's throat is that I do not know if they received a cease and desist letter or another formal complaint about the harassment. If that's the case, they might have had legal motivations for doing what they did.

However, the problem of photos, or any content, being removed solely at the discretion of the host for any reason is not a problem with just Yahoo! and Flickr, but all sites. Complete reliance on any one Web service is not a good idea.

This could, quite literally, happen anywhere. I'm not trying to support Flickr, just acknowledge that the threat is everywhere on the Web. Even paying for an account, even setting up your own server is not a complete guarantee anymore.

C'est la vie.

Re: Photographer Gets Plagiarized then Censored

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:32:50 -0000

Marcel,

Sadly, even that isn't a guard. If you pay for your own hosting, you are still using another company's servers and connection. Thus, you are still subject to their terms of use and those can be subjective. As a paying customer, they might be less likely to shut you down, but it's not a complete shield.

Even using your own server doesn't completely protect you either. Since you didn't run the line yourself, you're using someone else's network and they have their own terms of use as well. It is on their site and in your contract with them. Once again, it's less likely but not a perfect solution.

The only way to be completely sure you don't get pulled is to run your own line, host your own network and use your own servers. Not practical for anyone but the largest of corporations.

Sadly, it appears most of us will always be subjected to very fluid terms of use.

Re: Episode 7 - Copyright 2.0 Show

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:44:35 -0000

Ciarán,

Definitely! I've updated the article to include a link to the feed. But here it is again:

http://www.copyright20.com/podcasts/rss

Since the show actually goes up sometime Sunday afternoon most weeks, this is the fastest way to get it!

Re: Scraping Starts from the Very First Post

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:56:20 -0000

Morin,

As I said in the article, I'm not sure. There are two things that do disturb me, the first is that Wordpress could not identify most of the feed readers. I would thing that it would recognize one from an obvious source such as Weblogs.

Second, those it DID identify were listed as "Web Browsers" and there should not have been any human subscribers to the feed (I didn't even subscribe). Many scrapers hide their bots by having them identify themselves as Web browsers, it is a well-known trick.

I would say that about 80% of the subscribers were listed as "unknown" and the rest were Web Browsers. I wish I had taken a screenshot of that as well but I was in a rush due to the move. I might reignite the experiment later today and see what happens.

WillMacc,

Thanks for providing further confirmation to my theory. If you have any statistics on that, I would love to see them, perhaps we should work together and form a more thorough study? This was just quick and dirty to get a feel for the problem.

Obviously more research needs to be done as the problem is greater than even I imagined...

Re: Scraping Starts from the Very First Post

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:07:25 -0000

Elf's DH,

I'd heard of that but had not seen an actual case of it taking place. Sure I've gotten the spam with the text in it, but I've never seen my own work used in that way.

Sadly though, you may be very right. If that's the case, the odds of me finding this text is slim to absolutely none.

Re: Art Theft Scandals Rock deviantArt

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:42:37 -0000

Ben,

Normally, it really is impossible for me, or anyone else, to gauge fair use.

However, your case is a bit unique. I looked at the painting and it appears to have been produced in 1910. That means that the work is almost certainly in the public domain. As such, you are free to do pretty much as you please with it.

Just upload the image to your site so you don't steal any bandwidth and I doubt anyone will complain.

Re: Google Shutters MFA Accounts

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:44:50 -0000

Maria,

You'll have to let me know if this works or not. I know, historically, my contacts with Adsense that have not involved a DMCA notice have fallen on deaf ears, I hope that you have better luck!

If it does work, you'll have to tell me what exactly you did so I can help pass the information along!

Re: Photographer Gets Plagiarized then Censored

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:48:54 -0000

Alexandria,

Thank you for the welcome! I've already thanked Lorelle for putting out the APB. I have to say that writing for the BH has been wonderful and I'm already working on Monday's article.

Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

Re: New DMCA Contact Information List - 100+ Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:13:01 -0000

Jens,

I agree that it *should* cover it but it doesn't. As I said in the DMCA list itself, the USCO list is both incomplete and suffers from terrible decay. Even Myspace's USCO filing is out of date last I checked.

Many companies don't register, only a small percentage of the ones I checked were, and often times it is unclear who the host is as they often post their files under different names than what we are used to.

I really wish the USCO list was better than it is, but it truly is in terrible shape...

Re: Review: The Cult of the Amateur

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:20:56 -0000

Note to self: If ever I get a cult-related question while playing Trivial pursuit... Call Cybele...

He's definitely wrong, but I'll have to give him some slack on that one, I think we knew what he meant.

However, this is a great lesson why, in marketing, sometimes it pays to be number two...

Re: OpenDiary.com: Nobody’s Home

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:07:45 -0000

Kristen,

I don't run an open diary site. Pepole from OD were taking works from a completely different site that I run. Setting my site to "Favorites Only" is not only useless, but impossible. Please understand what is going on before commenting.

Thank you.

Re: Housekeeping: Comments Disabled on Old Posts

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:30:48 -0000

Jeremy,

I'll let you know how it goes. I'll give it a few weeks and see what the result is.

Lorelle,

Sadly, I took stock on the comment spams that got through over the last few weeks and all were to posts over 90 days. Also, I do update old posts and even have a related posts feature to further present more recent material, but I'm having a real problem with people not clicking through to the more recent posts and commenting on the old ones.

I am considering changing it so that it is extended thirty days after last comment and not post date. After thirty days of silence, one can consider the conversation pretty much dead me thinks.

Any thoughts on that?

Cybele,

It is a tough issue and I'm grateful for the feedback I've gotten on it. I'm not happy that I felt it came to this, but this is a pretty timely blog so most old material, with a few exceptions, can be closed off to comments.

What I might do is the inverse of what you do and selectively open things that are still valid and important. Posts like the Wordpress.com one could remain open but the ancient Housekeeing one about subscribing via email would not.

Thoughts on that?

Re: Using .htaccess to Stop Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:26:16 -0000

Jeremy,

Good point. Definitely a point to consider for people who put a lot of images in their feed...

Re: Housekeeping: Comments Disabled on Old Posts

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 19:34:00 -0000

Lorelle,

I've given it some though (sorry that it has taken me so long) but I have to agree with at least some of your points.

I've decided to follow Cybele's approach, if a single post is getting a lot of spam, I'll close that one off manually and leave the others open.

I'll be removing the plugin within the hour. Besides, it didn't achieve the goal anyway I can consider the experiment a miserable failure.

I might, however, have to seek out other comment spam prevention methods...

Re: Using CMI to Sue for Unregistered Works

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 15:34:45 -0000

Jeremy,

True, which is why we are fortunate to have the DMCA and other tools that let us hit back at foreign plagiarists without filing suit.

Aaron,

Very true as well, though in both cases some element of registration is required. Either way, the USCO is the door to a Federal courtroom, as frustrating as that can be.

Re: Using CMI to Sue for Unregistered Works

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:47:10 -0000

Jeremy,

The answer to the question is simple: Yes

The answer is found in section 512 under subsection (g)(3)(D)

See it here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512

They can file a counter notice and the only special requirement is that they consent to the jurisdiction where the provider is located rather than the one they reside in (which would not exist).

Foreigners have all of the same rights to counter-notice as residents of the country. The law was designed to ensure that.

Re: New and Free Performancing Legal Issues Forum

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:34:03 -0000

Will,

Me thinks you're greatly exaggerating my influence. If I had that power I would banish plagiarism from the Web and ensure Myspace layouts passed a "sanity test" before going live.

Sadly, it is not within my power.

To quote the Tick "I am mighty!" but not that mighty... ;)

I'm glad you discovered the new feature on PT, the comments edit. I was going to post about it but, since you've already figured it out, not much point it seems.

I always brag about my smart readers.

Re: Using .htaccess to Stop Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:17:30 -0000

Drmike,

Very welcome! Good luck with making them stop!

AskApache,

That's high praise coming from your background. Thank you very much!

Re: Plagiarism Today Featured in The Guardian

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:26:50 -0000

Patrick & Jeremy,

Thanks for the congrats, it is definitely an honor and very exciting.

Re: New Feature: Stock DMCA and C&D Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:27:40 -0000

Eduardo,

I have to be honest and admit that I had never heard the expression i18n before. For those, like myself, who are unaware of what it means, it is another way of saying internationalization. Of course, after typing that, I am starting to like i18n a lot more.

I think the idea of translating the stock letters is an interesting one. I don't see how the DMCA notices would benefit much from translation as they deal solely with a U.S. law and it is unlikely you'll encounter a non-English speaking host at least for the immediate future.

That being said, I think that the C&D; might greatly benefit from being translated. However, in that case, it would probably be wise to remove all mention of U.S. law from it and, in stead, just deal with abstractions.

What do you think about that? Would that still interest you?

Also, it is worth noting that, with my CC license, people are free to create translation and post them as they see fit so long as they share alike.

This is definitely an exciting idea!

Re: Stock Letters - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:07:19 -0000

Cybele,

Glad you like the new feature! I hope it serves you well!

Re: New Feature: Stock DMCA and C&D Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:03:55 -0000

Patrick,

I hope this feature helps, it seems to be going over very well!

Re: Personal: Facts About Me

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:46:08 -0000

Patrick,

I doubt I'll be opening up my own school but I am in contact with some people and may start teach Krav Maga part time. I'd have to work out a way though that I can take the week-long instructor course in North Carolina.

Glad that you liked the article!

Re: Update: Google Responds Regarding Blogspot Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:59:59 -0000

Ssiter2brother & Sean,

Can either of you please email me some information about your situations. I would like to look into it some. I have some contacts at Google I might be able to reach out to for assistance.

Just send me an email with your blog URL and any information you got from Google.

Re: Update: Google Responds Regarding Blogspot Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:00:47 -0000

Daniel,

Sorry, I didn't see your comment, you might want to check out this post:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/04/09/why-w...

Re: Personal: Facts About Me

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:20:17 -0000

Patrick,

I'd have to call my contact in Krav Maga again, they should be down in a week or two scouting locations, but I believe they said Charlotte, which would work out great for me as it is my old stomping grounds...

Used Vans Girl,

I caught wind some time ago that at least one of the leagues or clubs, depending on how you look at it, on the northshore was open again. I was going to attend one as an observer, but they hold events irregularly and information is hard to come by it seems. They don't run a Web site.

Still, I would have to get back into training more before I considered jumping into the ring.

The Cochlear implant is a great piece of technology. The surgery for it was very difficult, as any ear surgery is, but it has worked wonders. The only part about it that hasn't gone well is that his first unit, an early one, died his senior year in high school. He had to have a second surgery to install a second unit.

Supposedly, that is literally a one in a million problem. But it still was very difficult to go through. However, my brother handled it like a trooper. It was a amazing...

Re: Picking a Dead Man’s Pocket

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:19:55 -0000

Will,

There are some advantages to being on an archive site. If you don't use a non-repudiation service such as Numly or Registered Commons, an archive site can provide some verification of copyright ownership by proving that the work was up on your site at a time before the infringer started using it.

Other than that, there is little practical reason to be included in such a site, especially if you plan to remove your site from it before closure.

The decision, as I see it, is really up to the Webmaster...

Hope that helps!

Re: New Porn Group to Tackle Piracy

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 09:34:39 -0000

Used Vans Girl,

True, I guess it is entirely one thing to enjoy Metallica and Madonna but entirely another to have a large collection of "Debbie Does" movies on your hard drive.

If they do decide go to that route, I feel sorry for the first targets of the suit.

Also, did you find the Recaptcha tool easy to use? It is just an experiment right now.

Re: Five Practical Reasons for Fighting Plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:00:36 -0000

Joseph,

If you read my original guide and my article about how long it should take, you'll see that it uses a technique that goes through the host. Those cases are resolved about 99% of the time without problem and never take more than 20 minutes.

Cybele,

I can see your point about not letting the "tweeners" and the Myspace crowd get to you, but I recall once that I was accused of plagiarism and, very briefly, subjected to an attack by a teen forum who thought I had stolen the works of one of their members.

He came clean pretty quick, the evidence was overwhelming, but the rush to judgment still took place and nearly caused me a lot of grief.

I am glad that you've found that it doesn't take that long to fight it. I don't see why it ever should as long as one has a plan.

You seem to have a very good one!

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:22:59 -0000

Preston,

I tried Bad Behavior out about a year ago and it was a mixed bag for me. It did reduce the spam level some but it created a decent amount of false positives as well. It also put a drag on my server.

Granted, the plugin has probably been upgraded and I have a new host now so it would probably move faster, but I am uneasy about going back to it. Besides, it seems to only target bots and bots are getting better at not looking like bots.

Still, it is a worthwhile suggestion. If anyone reading this has great success with BB, please let me know!

Re: Five Practical Reasons for Fighting Plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:02:45 -0000

It happens and I'm afraid it's not uncommon. It seems that, when money is involved, the plagiarism is more expected. When there is no cash reward, people can't fathom the theft.

Fortunately, most of the time, these things have a way of being sorted out...

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:53:03 -0000

Patrick,

Good guess, but unfortunately that's not right. Bear in mind that I am not necessarily saying that the number choice is wrong, it could just be an issue with the reasons.

Anyone else want to take a shot?

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:56:10 -0000

Valerie,

I valiant effort but not the answer I'm looking for. Format doesn't really affect the validity of the notice. It just makes it easier for me to template :)

Most lawyers use a more traditional letter format, like the others.

Not a lame-o guess though, perhaps not as far off as you might think...

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:00:35 -0000

Valerie,

First, check out ChillingEffects.org for samples of DMCA notices that have been submitted. Most use a letter format. I find numbering easiest though.

As far as your second guess, you're much more on the right track there. That is the type of issues we're looking at...

Good luck!

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:06:02 -0000

Jeremy,

That was strange, we posted at the same time.

I'll give you three a hint since you're all starting to get closer.

Remember that the DMCA can be used to file a notice for any copyrighted material. It is not limited in any way.

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:27:06 -0000

Jeremy,

Bribery is welcomed and loved. PayPal button is to the right, I'll have the answer in your inbox is 5 minutes... :P

Very good guess. Easily the best so far. But you still have at least one problem...

You, as well as the other posters, are forgetting a requirement of the DMCA.

And yes, I am evil...

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:06:46 -0000

Jeremy,

By the by, if no one else can come up with the correct answer, I'll give you the link.

It's the only fair thing I can do.

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:06:29 -0000

Maria,

SK2 is a great plugin. Especially when you use it with the Akismet addon. However, with it running at full power, I noticed a bad slowdown when posting comments. I got complaints about it previously.

I switched to Akismet to offload all of that filtering and it worked well.

Now I'm pretty much sold on reCAPTCHA though. I'll be writing more about it soon.

Oh, and regarding my email address, it's not in plain text. The address on the right is an image with a link to the contact form. Unless I missed something, it shouldn't be in text anywhere...

Re: DMCA Game Answer

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:13:08 -0000

Patrick,

Glad you liked it!

Jeremy,

I agree completely. It is confusing, probably far too confusing. However, the confusion is from the law and you were easily the best at it.

If someone as talented as you at this struggles with it, imagine how much a layperson will?

That's the whole point of the game.

Re: Copyright Tool: Fair Use Visualizer

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:38:43 -0000

Rich,

True, the terms could use a little tweaking and some explaining. But it is still neat to see how the different variable interact with one another and what variables get the most weight.

It's a fascinating toy, but you are right that the terms are a bit over the heads of your average citizen.

Thank you for the comment!

Re: Copyright Tool: Fair Use Visualizer

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:06:29 -0000

Mark,

Perhaps then these comments will motivate him to change it. I've already tried to talk with him and would gladly help.

Re: New Feature: Top Commentators

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:40:05 -0000

Jeremy and Patrick,

Glad you like the feature. It's only a pity that I can't play...

Will,

If you have a problem reading reCAPTCHA, just hit the refresh button, you should get another one you can read. I haven't had any myself that have given me trouble but I am wary of that.

Let me know if it keeps up, I'm glad that you like the feature!

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 17 - Pandora Mashups

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:56:21 -0000

Lucio,

Thanks for the comment and the well wishes! I'm glad you've enjoyed my BH articles. Definitely, send me an email when you post your article as I will love to see it!

Ian,

All fixed. I have no idea how that got by me. I thought I had checked every link. Oh well, it was a Monday...

Thank you for the heads up!

Re: How the Copyright Office Hurts Bloggers

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:59:38 -0000

Jeremy,

I don't blame you. If you ask an attorney about copyright law you'll find quickly that even they think it is almost impossible to read/follow.

It's an insane system but one that is important to understand if you're going to create works...

Re: Protecting the Comment Feed

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:26:27 -0000

Webd360,

There are a lot of ways a scraper could use comments on their site, none of them good. I am yet to see an obvious example of this but, with the way scraping is growing, I am worried that it might happen soon enough.

Chris,

Chris, would you recommend having an ESN for the entire feed or one per comment? How would this work in this case?

Please clarify as I am very interested in this!

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:28:59 -0000

Webd360,

SK2 works good, especially with the Akismet plugin, but bear in mind that it will cause a load on your server. With most installs of WP, there is a noticeable slowdown when posting a comment and during spam attacks.

If you've got a great server, go for it, if not, I'd be more wary. I have a decent set up but I feel better with Akismet and reCAPTCHA.

Thanks for the input!

Re: Breaking News: Lara Jade Sues Pornographer

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:11:40 -0000

Webd360,

I hadn't even pondered the reputation element of all of this. Considering she has such a public face, it could be a serious problem.

Hopefully that will be weighed in too!

Thank you for the feedback!

Re: Internet Archive Ruled Inadmissible

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:15:51 -0000

Lars,

This is a very interesting service, I'm going to see about emailing you in a few days to see about covering it here.

From what I've seen though, it looks great and very easy to use.

Thank you for posting!

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:55:53 -0000

Maria,

Thank you for the praise and I'm glad I stuck around too. Otherwise, I would not have gotten the chance to meet you and the others I've come to know and love here.

Robert,

Thank you too! I've always felt that this was an issue that cuts to the heart of all art but I am biased that way. Fortunately, I do count a few a-listers among my readers. They tend to help me spread the word on the most important articles.

Jeremy,

Finally, thank you as well! That's high praise but I don't feel right taking it. I read a lot of the A-listers and am in awe at how they produce so much. I try to focus more on quality than quantity but that strategy seems to backfire a lot on the Web.

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:55:24 -0000

Cybele,

Oops, forgot one. You're right though. I don't know why I keep forgetting that one. I need to keep a list or something to keep track of these mentions.

Patrick,

Thanks! And here's to two more great years!

Beth,

I do owe you a great deal of thanks. By passing on my name to Maura, a lot of things started to happen. I don't recall if I ever thanked you properly for that, but thank you very much.

If there's one thing I'm used to doing around here its turning negatives into positives. Still, I would have preferred that you never had to put up with that in the first place.

Of course, then again, I'd prefer that a site like PT not be necessary at all...

Re: Protecting the Comment Feed

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:20 -0000

Chris,

It sounds like an interesting idea, but my fear is that it would be cost prohibitive. I'm already pushing my ESN count at the end of every month and if I had new ESNs assigned for every comment, I would be well over the limit.

Is there, perhaps, a way to reduce the number of ESNs needed?

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 20:18:44 -0000

Arpit,

Thank you for the congrats! I'm glad you like the site and definitely feel free to comment, or not, anytime you wish.

Chris,

Thanks for the birthday wishes. The questions is, what will happen to PT now that it is in its terrible twos?

Re: eBaum’s World Sells for $15 Million

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:02:11 -0000

NSB,

I don't know how well it really has agaes. What role would eBaums have in the YouTube Web? Between YouTube and Digg I think EBW was pretty much covered.

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:03:01 -0000

NSB,

Thank you for the birthday wishes!

Re: How the Copyright Office Hurts Bloggers

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:04:15 -0000

NSB,

I used to think that as well, before I stopped over 500 people taking my own work and posting it under their name.

Sadly, plagiarism is common among anyone that wants the benefit of writing something without the hassle of doing the work. That goes for in the classroom and out of it.

Sad, but true.

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:50:49 -0000

John Bennett,

Definitely give Akismet a try. But definitely also consider reCAPTCHA if you can. I've fallen head over heels for that solution these past few weeks.

Let me know how Akismet works for you!

Re: Five Practical Reasons for Fighting Plagiarism

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:53:26 -0000

John,

Take a look at these posts, I think they might have some information you could use:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/10/09/five-...
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/05/04/wordp...

Hope that helps!

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:54:21 -0000

John,

Thank you for the birthday wishes!

Re: Update: Stylefeeder Responds and Gets Banned

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:04:02 -0000

Scott,

Some valid points but a few things bother me as it pertains to the original case.

First, the original case, involving Stylefeeder, did not involve a paid link, it was a source, and there was no reason to not transfer pagerank. Second, If pagerank is the only issue, wouldn't rel="nofollow" be just as effective?

I agree with the use for Adsense, but the original case was clearly an abuse of 302 redirects. Just my thoughts.

Re: Internet Archive Ruled Inadmissible

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:42:56 -0000

Chris,

I believe that Lars accidentally emailed me his reply. I'm going to forward you the relevant portions.

Re: A Scrape of a Scrape

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:57:49 -0000

Jeremy,

Maybe we should have a competition and see how deep we can track one of these. The one I posted was three levels deep, you've had five. I wonder how low we can go...

Re: Update: Stylefeeder Responds and Gets Banned

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:16:17 -0000

I think the idea solution would be, in most cases, to use simple HTML links to link to sites and 302s for paid links. The use of 302s should be kept to an absolute minimum.

Re: New Author Group Targets Piracy

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:18:13 -0000

Maria: Very welcome! I'm looking forward to seeing how this group turns out!

Re: Ripped Art Task Force Seeks Volunteers

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:40:42 -0000

NSB,

They are looking specifically for content taken from dA members wherever it may appear. So, for example, if an eBay user sells prints of a dA member's work, they'd take an interest in that.

Hope that helps!

Re: A Scrape of a Scrape

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:45:36 -0000

Mike,

Glad to have you stop by. If more people took your interest in denying "link love" then spammers would have to find a new means of propagating their networks. Congrats on the kill.

Let me know if I can help in any way, I'm always here if I can assist!

Re: Update: Stylefeeder Responds and Gets Banned

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:58:02 -0000

I guess what I don't understand is why one would need to track a mere credit link. I understand the need for tracking ads and any referral links, but just a regular link, what purpose would detailed tracking serve beyond what you can get through javascript.

Re: Your Work, Someone Else’s Portfolio

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:08:49 -0000

Valerie,

I know I would be paranoid if I were an employer. Not only do a lot of people lie, but having a plagiarist on staff can be a huge legal liability. I've heard of cases with graphic designers that have nixed elements in over 80% of their work.

Not cool.

I'm glad I work for myself, by myself and can't afford to hire anyone else (I'm doing good to afford a night out on the weekends).

Besides, who wants the hassle of being a boss?

Re: Find Image Plagiarism with FeelImage

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:48:31 -0000

Stay at Home Dad,

The effectiveness of it really depends on the image that you're looking for. If it's a one-color image (though not black and white) that has just one subject, it can be pretty effective. If you're looking for something much more complicated, it won't work as well.

Judging from my interactions with the Ripped Art Task Force, it is already showing some impressive results. In fact, on their first search, which was just for playing around, they found a ripped photo.

Its effectiveness is limited but in cases where the image plays to its strengths, it works pretty well.

Hope that helps!

Re: Find Image Plagiarism with FeelImage

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:47:06 -0000

Andrew,

Like I said, the accuracy is mixed, give it a shot and let me know what you find out!

Re: Find Image Plagiarism with FeelImage

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:29:42 -0000

Cybele,

That is an interesting point. Granted, I'm not familiar with Flickr's TOU (I'm not a member myself and I don't link to Flickr images) but that is an issue that needs to be resolved.

However, it seems likely that the service is being cut some slack. Given all of the media coverage, I'm almost certain that Yahoo is aware of the site. Perhaps its background in education (it was created in part by a University) has something to do with.

I doubt they could have gotten so far violating Flickr's TOU without permission.

On one side note, I'm not sure there is such a thing as "private" EXIF data because that is merely data embedded in the image, any program capable of reading EXIF data can extract it. Unless you encrypted it, there's no way to make such data private.

However, I will contact Flickr about this and see what they have to say. This is very interesting and very worrisome.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 19 - McTakeDown

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 13:19:35 -0000

Mr. J

If you can send me a link to that story, I'd appreciate it. That is very worrisome, especially since there are very severe consequences for filing a false DMCA notice.

There could be some very bad repercussions for this kind of behavior if someone decides to take action.

As I said, if you have a link or know more about what happened, I would be very interested in it.

Thank you for the3 heads up!

Re: Find Image Plagiarism with FeelImage

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:06:29 -0000

Cybele: If you haven't already, you might want to check out yesterday's post on the subject. It appears that FeelImage is no longer indexing Flickr. It appears that they have been blocked from doing so.

It is sad that they could not get a handle on these copyright issues, it is, potentially an exciting.

However, you are right. There is a lot of reason to not trust feel Image. I had just assumed they were using the Flickr API, which would have been the easiest way, but it appears I was wrong.

Jess: Looks interesting but, sadly, is also infringing itself in some ways. A terrible shame.

Thank you for the explanation on how Flickr handles EXIF data.

Re: Your Work, Someone Else’s Portfolio

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:58:14 -0000

Cathy: I can imagine that, as a ghostwriter, the issue comes up a lot. How do you handle those situations though? Being a ghostwriter raises a whole slew of other problems since, depending on your contract and employment situation, you may not hold a copyright interest in the work.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Re: Plagiarism Today Turns Two

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:03:28 -0000

Cathy: Out of curiosity, I have to ask which Wordpress plugin was it? If you have a question about how I'm liking a plugin, just ask me either via comment or email. I'll always answer questions about the software I use to get this thing up and running.

Thank you very much for the birthday well wishes! Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

Re: Protecting the Comment Feed

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:07:31 -0000

Cathy: Are you talking about Numly? If so, I support the move.

It is a strange thought, someone scraping the comment feed, but I can see reason for it. I don't think too many have tried it yet though. Sadly, it's only a matter of time.

Re: How the Copyright Office Hurts Bloggers

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:12:57 -0000

Cathy: I'm not sure how much a letter-writing campaign would do if it were sent to the USCO. They only advise on copyright policy and aren't likely to agree to shut themselves down. What I think needs to happen is work with senators and representatives on the matter, getting them involved.

However, the idea of a letter writing campaign is a good one. I might have to see about setting that up.

Re: Copyright Tool: Fair Use Visualizer

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:17:44 -0000

Mark: I'm sorry I didn't get an email about your comment. That is very strange.

It is a bit confusing and needs some work, I have to agree with that. I'm really unsure though how he would simplify it too much. Right now it seems to be aimed toward being comprehensive. Too much simplification or explanation could hinder that.

Cathy: It isn't a simple issue I'm afraid, even with this tool. I'll see about drafting a brief tutorial for a later update.

Re: Find Image Plagiarism with FeelImage

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:39:59 -0000

Cybele,

I don't want to count them out either. I really like the idea behind what they are trying to do but they need to obey the same rules as everyone else and I agree that they were doing some things that were wrong.

I hope they can go back and fix those issues. I'd like to see them apply for an actual API key and go that way, it'd work better in the long run.

It is a neat service, this was, in truth, probably more of an oversight than anything. I hope they can fix it and get back on track.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 19 - McTakeDown

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:23:26 -0000

Justin,

That is a very frightening tale, especially considering the potential repercussions. Knowingly providing a false statement in a DMCA notice is not just punishable by means of a lawsuit, it is also punishable as perjury.

The fact that some would take the DMCA and use it in what amounts to little more than a prank war and a heated argument is sickening to me. It's a situation where someone is going to learn a hard lesson fast when they get taken to court over these kinds of abuses.

Thank you very much for sharing that, it's given me much to think about and I'll probably be writing an article about it in the coming days.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 20 - Outbound Confusion

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:55:34 -0000

Mr. J: Seems like Pink's life is going through a bit of a rough patch right now all around. Hopefully she'll pull out of all of it. As far as posting lyrics to your site goes, since that is something out of the record label's hands, odds are that no one will care, but still, I'd be careful as it technically an infringement and an artist could come back at you if so desired.

Still, it seems as if most of their interest is with spam bloggers, not legitimate users.

RS: Simple, it'a Public Domain Torrent site. They deal only in movies whose copyrights have expired. Most downloading over BitTorrent, especially movies, almost certainly is illegal, but this is one free and clear torrent tracker...

Re: A Closer Look at iPlagiarismCheck

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:07:19 -0000

Eduardo,

That is actually very similar to what Blogwerx is trying to do. I've talked about them before on this site, but they are still coming together and trying to get their final product out. I need to email them and get an update.

iPlagiarismCheck,

You are very welcome, I really enjoyed using your service and can not wait to experiment with it some more. I'm sure the need will come again soon.

Also, thank you foryour honest on the MDB issue, you were very straight with me over IM and I appreciate your candor. I wanted to address the issue because I know many of the readers of this site have a great eye for it and I didn't want anyone to jump to conclusions, I always do my own research.

Thank you again for your time and help in this matter!

Re: The DMCA on 7 Photo Sharing Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:33:09 -0000

Everyone: My apologies. For some reason these past few days I have not been receiving comment emails (I thought things were a bit quiet) and haven't been responding due to that. That's what I get for entrusting Gmail.

NSB: Unfortunately, there is a major problem with that. First is that the actual infringement comes from the copying of the image and making another one available online. It doesn't matter if it's to a few friends. Second, most social networking sites are also available to the public at large. Your page might only be seen by a few friends, but it is available all over the world. Simply put, the size of the audience of a Web page does not change whether or not it is infringing.

RS: I'm glad that you liked the article, as I said, it's going to be an ongoing series, the next one is already up as of this writing!

Will: Unfortunately, the fact that a photo is for sale actually makes the potential infringement worse by raising the actual damages that can be claimed. One has to be careful about those things. If a site doesn't clearly explain its license, you could argue that you were an "innocent infringer" but that does not necessarily offer much protection. It's up to the person using the image to find out what the license is, obtain permission and use it appropriately (or determine the likelihood of fair use). It's a permission culture when dealing with copyright and if you don't have it, then you could be held at least partially accountable for the infringement.

Bright: As I said above, Myspace pages and whatnot are available world-wide and do appear in Google/Yahoo results. They might be intended for only friends, but non-private pages can be viewed by anyone and can negatively impact copyright holders, especially if the work is plagiarized, as is often the case with my work.

Kate: Actually, as strange as it is, that's how the DMCA is supposed to work. Yes, Photobucket says "May" and I"m sure there is some flexibility in their decision, but the law necessitates the putback of the work. They did the right now.

However, in doing all of that, the thief has opened themselves up to a world of hurt. First, the could be guilty of criminal perjury. Second, they could be liable for up to $100,000 damages and attorney fees. Third, they could be held liable for, well, libel. Fourth and finally, they have made a copyright claim against themselves very easy by providing their full name and information.

My advice would be to speak with an attorney and go after the plagiarist, not PB. They were only doing what the law required them to do. Could they have kept the infringing work down? Yes. But then they might have been held liable for chilling the speech of the infringer.

These companies live to avoid legal risk and they aren't going to take a bullet for anyone. My advice would be to fire some at the plagiarist and watch everyone else jump out of the way.

Re: The Need to Modernize the DMCA Agent List

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:36:07 -0000

Jeremy: I agree, the fee is WAY too high, especially for such a simple form. Yes, it is easy to understand, but that's because it just asks for the name, address, phone, fax and email of the agent and not much else. If you look around on the site, you'll see it looks like some were filled out by first graders drawing in crayon.

RS: I couldn't agree more but our entire copyright regime is outdated it seems. Laws, infrastructure, policies, attitudes, etc. We need an overhaul in this, and a lot of other, areas.

C'est La Vie

Re: Five Essential Wordpress Content Protection Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:40:56 -0000

FranchiseBrief,

I would take a look at a plugin that came out after this feed was released, CopyFeed. You can read about it here:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/05/24/copyf...

If you don't use it at the same time you use FeedBurner, it should be fine. It's by far the most powerful plugin out there right now.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Social Networking Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:55:04 -0000

Cybele,

That is strange, I've had no problems with Myspace since I realized their registration with the USCO was out of date. I've sent several DMCA notices to the email above and have had no problems. Can you forward me some of that correspondence and let me look?

Until recently, Xanga was a major problem. They are not DMCA compliant though and I've had several successful runs with them. Once again, if you want me to look at the correspondence, I'll be happy to see if there's anything that leaps out at me as being different.

Hope that I can help!

Maria,

I'm not so much worried about someone copying anything off of my LinkedIn profile, I just feel that their way of handling abuse, all kinds of abuse, is very unprofessional and I don't want to be connected to a site that isn't a good neighbor on the Web.

As far as what can be copied, anything that is on the site really could be. You mention the resume as one possibility, also summaries and other crafted descriptions can be as well. I admit that the risk is relatively low on LinkedIN when compared to other social news sites, but the possibility exists and, in a professional environment, could be much more damaging than, say, on Myspace.

Like I said, it has more to do with principle than a serious threat. It would be nice to know that, in the unlikely event something did happen, there would be an easy channel of complaint.

Sadly, that's not the case.

Hope that explains it some!

Re: The DMCA on 7 Social Networking Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:35:13 -0000

Robin: That is interesting to hear. They're probably still working out a lot of the bugs in Myspace News as it is a fairly new service, but you're right, they should have removed you. Can you give me a link to that form?

Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Myspace news is no more coming soon, it appears to be a miserable failure of an experiment.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Photo Sharing Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:10:32 -0000

Kate:

Why did Photobucket allow the bogus counter-claim?

Because they had to. The law requires putback after 10-14 days after a counter-notice is received if they do not receive an injunction regarding said putback. Even the fact that the infringer admitted the work was not his does not necessarily prove that it was infringement, at least as far as Photobucket is concerned. Counter-notices are regularly filed for fair use cases and fair use can, in some instances, involve the entire work, especially when dealing with images.

Photobucket was in no position to make judgments about whether or not this use was an infringement, even if they were, could not do much under the law. Section 512(g) covers this pretty thoroughly, their hands were tied by the law once they received counter-notice and did not receive a court order.

Why are they allowing anyone to post libel?

Because under Communications Decency Act they have no obligation to act on such claims. Courts have generally found that hosts are completely immune from libelous statements they have no control over.

Why are they allowing stalkers to solicit personal information?

I admit I don't know the laws in this area, but this is something you might want to report to their abuse team specifically. It is not a copyright issue, but there may be other abuse violations here. See their terms of service section 5e for more information.

All in all, Photobucket followed the letter of the DMCA pretty closely from what I'm hearing. Is it fair to you? No. But that's because you're dealing with a judgment-proof defendant that can't be sought after in court. The DMCA was not designed for these types of conflicts nor really should it be.

My advice is to take these stalking and libel issues to the Photobucket abuse team (libel is also disallowed under 5e) and put it in their hands. Don't go through their copyright team, contact their abuse team here:

http://photobucket.com/contact

Those issues, to me, are much more serious and few hosts will tolerate them.

As far as the question marks go, did you perchance type your original post first into Microsoft Word or a similar program and then paste it over? The reason is that most advanced word processors use curved apostrophes and quote marks. They can understand them fine, but Web forms can only understand straight ones like these (' &").

Since the form doesn't understand the character, it gets replaced by jibberish. You can generally overcome this by first converting your file to plain text and opening in Notepad/Textpad before copying it.

Hope that helps! Please let me know what I can do, I am here to help, believe me.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Social Networking Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:19:47 -0000

Robin: That is a nice form, pity that it doesn't seem to work. Overall though, I doubt Myspace News will last to the end of the year at this pace. Still, it'd be nice if they actually did what their form said it would

Re: New Feature: Top Commentators

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 10:48:02 -0000

Teeceo & Suzanne,

Here's a link to the plugin I used: http://www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-...

It is completely free and works well. They've also made a widget but, Suzanne, both widget and plugin are for WordPress only that I know of. No word yet about a Blogger one.

Hope that helps!

Re: How Spam Blogs Cheat Technorati

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 18:32:25 -0000

Laura,

It appears they are doing something, my attempts to visit that link were thwarted by the fact that Technorati seems to no longer be indexing that site.

As far as reporting spam to Technorati goes, there's no easy way on their site. Content owners can file DMCA notices and third parties can file notices via their contact page http://www.technorati.com/about/contact.html but there is no direct route to lodge of a complaint.

I think they are trying to trust their algorithm to handle such matters, which is sad because it obviously isn't working.

Re: Tip: Getting Around an IP Block

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:33:34 -0000

Recording Studio: Glad you liked it. You can also use the trick with Babelfish and any other translation service out there. I just rely on Google because I know that it is so rarely blocked.

Mr. Bulist: Your average thief probably isn't going to know squat about how to block by IP, I agree with that. I see this a lot at message boards where an admin doesn't want to deal with a plagiarism issue or is the plagiarist him/herself. They have a lot of experience and all of the tools needed to block IPs.

However, it is becoming more common on blogs as anti-spam tools raise the awareness level of IP blocking.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Social Networking Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:35:48 -0000

Recording Studio: I agree it is shocking. LinkedIN, due to its structure, is not a huge worry but Friendster is. Myspace is not shocking considering the site and nature of their business, the minimum to get by is a cost-saving procedure at that point, but I am hurt by Orkut, Bebo and the others. I agree, they should have the lawyers and eggheads to get this right, sadly, they don't seem to have bothered.

Re: Bebo.com: Victim Blaming?

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:38:08 -0000

Shannon: I am sorry for the delay, I must not have gotten the email confirming your comment. I'm really unsure what you are describing though, if you want send me a private email (the address is on the right) and I'll see what I can do. If there's an issue I can help with, I will.

Charlie: I'm afraid that's out of the scope of this site and this article. You'd be wise to ask help from Bebo's support staff.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Photo Sharing Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:09:22 -0000

Kate:

I'm sorry about that, consider it an old habit from both marriage and running this site, I answer every question directed at me. It's an annoying habit.

I can't answer all of your points, as you seem to have made up your mind, but I do want to note at least a few points of contention.

First, your comment about fair use being mainly about text is outright false. There have been many cases involving fair use and images, Kelly v. Arriba and Perfect 10 v. Google just to name a few. Do they apply to your case? Most likely not, but it proves that fair use is possible with images, even when using a whole image. Both of those centered around thumbnails for search engines, others have centered around use of images for commentary and review. Photobucket is in no position to debate the issue of whether or not their use was fair.

Second, you have to realize that the DMCA is a very rigid system. There is little room for flexibility here. You might not want to believe that their hands were tied after receiving counternotice, but consider that Wendy Setzler, quite legitimately, got a clip from the Super Bowl put back in her YouTube account after a counter notice. The use was indeed fair, though the NFL submitted another DMCA notice.

If you listen to my latest podcast, you'll hear a similar DMCA/fair use battle is brewing up over a jingle from a law firm, this one less likely to be fair use.

I'm not saying this use was fair, I don't believe that it was, but the host is not in a position to make that judgment. If you wish, I will gladly put you in touch with any of my attorney friends and have them look at your case and see if there are options I don't,

As far as why do hosts have TOS that they don't enforce, I've wondered that myself and spoken out against it. However, much of it seems to deal with that TOS are written to CYA. Most hosts will only remove what they are legally obligated to remove, even though they have to take a stand against a much broader array of things to shield themselves from other forms of laibility. Libel seems to be one of those areas of conflict. They can't encourage it, even tacitly, but aren't required to remove it or act on it when discovered.

I think we agree more than you realize. I agree there were ethical issues with how Photobucket has handled this and I would like to see more effort from them, but the law, as I read it, protects them.

I am sorry to say that as I truly do sympathize and want to help.

Bright:

Yes, I am very familiar with Lessig's work. He and I have actually spoken on several occasions and his retirement from the copyright arena was a great blow to me. I actually consider him something of an idol in this area, my own CC license is something of an homage to his impact.

If someone wants to copy my work and post it on their site, with proper attribution, I am fine with it. See the CC license again. But I know that others don't agree with me and that is their right. Lessig understood that and acknowledge that CC wasn't for everyone.

I agree that copyright law is not ideally suited for "students and deadbeats" but here's an intersting fact. Of the plagiarism of my own writing I've seen in the past year, over 60% of it has been on social networking sites. Most of the remained has been on blogs. If someone uses my work with attribution, I leave them be, as per my license, but I will not tolerate plagiarism and you yourself indicate a disgust with that.

Why do I help others who are just protecting their copyright and not necessarily dealing with plagiarism? Because I don't think anyone should be forced into a license agreement they don't want. If they are hurting themselves, as I suspect in some cases at least, I view it as their decision. I've written several times about the benefits of CC licensing and copyleft, but everyone has to make their own call.

In the end, the free market, not the law, will decide what uses are acceptable. The law moves too slow. In the meantime, all artists deserve a voice in that. I'm not going to deny someone the tools to defend their legal rights just because I think it is a mistake to do so. I don't know their situation, I don't know their beliefs, it is not my place to say.

I believe in letting people making their own decisions about right and wrong and, so long as their decisions do not run afoul of the law, I respect their wishes.

All in all, I try to keep my personal views about licensing and copyright out of the equation and stick to the law itself. If people ask my opinion, I give it, but otherwise stay out of it.

I don't see that as championing, but perhaps pragmatism.

I hope that helps you understand where I'm coming from. I think we're, much like Kate and I, are more on the same page than is obvious at first glance.

Re: A Closer Look at iPlagiarismCheck

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:31:25 -0000

Nicole:

Do they specifically use iPlagiarismCheck or do they use another service? I have family that teach part time at UP so I'm familiar with their service but I could not determine what service they used.

No matter what service you use though, it always a good idea to process your own works. As you said, it makes you a better writer and helps with citing.

Re: Plagiarism Today Now on Twitter

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:33:27 -0000

Mr. J:

I'll consider it, I am looking into doing some vidcasts. But really I don't know how much interest I have in being in front of the camera.

Letters:

I don't really think there's anything magical about Twitter, but I do see it as a new means of communicating. Plus, as someone who follows content theft issues closely, I need to be up to speed on the latest tools. If the experiment fails, it fails and that will be that. If it succeeds, then I'll have a new tool to add to my arsenal.

I see it is a low-risk, high potential reward situation.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 21 - Free Music

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:46:04 -0000

Mr. J:

The worry about YouTube is not the embedding, but the rights that YouTube takes for itself from everything submitted, embeddable or not. That's what worries me the most there.

As far as PeTA goes, I agree, I'd pass around the bucket of KFC but sadly I'm out at the moment.

Nintendo is definitely not a company to mess around with this kind of thing. They're up there with Disney and Warner Brothers in terms of companies that do not tolerate any kind of trademark/copyright infringement.

I wouldn't mess with them, that's for certain.

Re: Copyscape Premium: An Epic Letdown

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:03:24 -0000

Cybele: It seems like Copyscape is a bit weak in the actual detection department and I can't understand why. If they're algorithm is so advanced, they should catch MORE than Google.

C'est La Vie...

Google Alerts isn't right for every site, but you've got a good counter proposal there. At least Technorati feeds are better than Google Blogsearch. That is utter garbage...

Re: Copyscape Premium: An Epic Letdown

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:54:42 -0000

Letters: I'm glad I'm not the only one, I was pretty worried I'd take a beating for this. That's why I took so many screenshots to prove my point. I think it's pretty clear that Copyscape just does not work...

Re: Your Work, Someone Else’s Portfolio

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:02:37 -0000

John Cage:

Some great tips there. I've talked about the idea of naming images with unique phrases or numbers in other articles. It has worked well for myself and others.

Out of curiosity though, what service do you employ? Would you be willing to provide a link either via comment or email? I'd be interested to learn more about them. I'm familiar with some such services, but only a few seem to be willing to deal with copyright issues.

Generally, it's more of a reputation management service.

Thank you very much for your comment!

Re: 7 Lessons Learned 2 Years After Katrina

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:35:46 -0000

Well, I debated it. But I have to agree its overdone. Besides, there were/are more important things to be said.

Still, I wanted to find a place for my favorite FEMA acronyms.

Fix Everything My Ass
Fumbling Emergencies and Mismanaging Assets
Former Equestrian Managers Association
Flood Evacuation? Maybe Afterward
Few Emergencies Merit Attention

We have a million of them here...

Re: The DMCA on 7 Video Sites (YouTube Beats Viacom)

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:11:36 -0000

Asi:

First off, thank you very much for your comment and explaining how things work behind the scenes at Revver. It is very enlightening and very reassuring to know that you have such a proactive policy on keeping infringing material off of Revver in the first place.

I honestly think the human review is a great idea and, if I had to wager, I'd bet it eliminates the vast majority of DMCA notices to your company. Since you don't have to worry about Viacom or NBC clips appearing on your site, you don't have to worry about organizations such as Bay TSP blasting you with DMCA notices day in and day out.

However, as great as that is, I know that no human review is perfect and, sadly, anyone that does have a need to file a notice will be a layperson. With the Viacom's out of the equation, the most likely person to have their work slip through the crack is your average YouTuber that doesn't want their video to appear on other video sharing services (for whatever reason).

My intent behind these series is to approach the sites as a layperson. Having sent hundreds of DMCA notices myself for my own work (expecting that Bay TSP recruitment letter any day now) that requires I break things down into parts and imagine how I would feel if I had never done it before.

As great as I think your policy is, I think the second line of defense (or at least it is the second line in your case) needs a little bit of work. It's not bad, as I tried to point out, but could definitely be better. If I were unfamiliar with the DMCA and did find some of my work had fallen through the cracks, I would be very intimidated with filing a DMCA notice at Revver.

I say all of this though but I was having a conversation with my wife last night. She read the article and asked me where I was going to host my videos when I start work on that. My answer was, well, Revver.

After reading and reporting on (in my podcast) how other video sites were taking far more rights than needed from their users, I was pleased to see Revver's policy on the matter and, even though I have quibbles with your DMCA policy, it's by far the best balance that I can see.

I admit, this is a bright focus on the public aspect of one narrow part of your policy. But that's what it is designed to do. I work with many people and guide them, as much as I can, to file DMCA notices with a variety of companies. I know how much a well-written policy can mean.

That being said, I've never had to help anyone with or heard of anyone filing a notice with Revver. I guess now I know why...

So please, keep up the good work and don't take the criticism too harshly. It is just a small piece of the puzzle, especially with video sites.

Re: 7 Lessons Learned 2 Years After Katrina

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:47:13 -0000

Lorelle,

I didn't realize that we shared Hurricane Katrina either. I knew many people in Mobile before the storm, I didn't realize that you were among the people I knew who lived there. It is a small world after all.

I think that, like you, Hurricane Katrina was a lesson in both the worst and the best in humanity. I saw that humans were capable of so much, it literally filled my heart with hope.

I'll miss a lot of things from my pre-Katrina world. But, right now, one of the things that weighs on me the most is that I will not be able to share a coffee with a good friend. If ever you do visit Mobile, we will have to change that.

Keep us in your hearts. We will rebuild this place and we will welcome you whenever and however you decide to return!

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 22 - iPhone Unlocking

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:49:01 -0000

Jeremy,

There was a glitch in the editing. The track we used for the disclaimer in the past hiccupped and couldn't be recovered and, due to the holiday weekend, couldn't be re-recorded. We'll be doing a new one for next week.

Thanks for the heads up! Just imagineour relief that the important part was still there!

Re: 7 Lessons Learned 2 Years After Katrina

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:36:22 -0000

Mr. J: I'm glad that you understand what I was trying to say about home. Some people don't but it seems more people do than do not.

I've heard a lot of great things about Newfoundland and definitely plan to visit sometime. If nothing else, I love the Arrogant Worms song about the island, it sounds like a place with a good sense of humor.

I can get behind that.

Re: Personal: Facts About Me

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:38:49 -0000

Mr. J: Go for it! It's actually a lot of fun. I'm glad that you enjoyed learning a little bit more about me. I'm a very private person, but sometimes it is fun to share a little bit more.

Re: 7 Lessons Learned 2 Years After Katrina

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:08:55 -0000

Mr. J: Here's the lyrics to the song as linked from the official Arrogant Worms site:

http://artists.letssingit.com/arrogant-worms-ly...

Re: Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:02:54 -0000

DrMike: That's the reason for the "virtually" statement. I don't think any large site is 100% spam free. I just think that some are havens for spammers, such as Blogspot, and others are not, such as Wordpress.

As far as the plugin goes, it's a plugin called WP Ajax Edit Comments. I discovered it on accident. You can find it here: http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit...

Hope that helps!

Re: Why Fair Use Suffers on YouTube

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:17:47 -0000

Mr. J: The odds of you getting a takedown for a video that is not infringing in some way is slim to none. They are being vigilant and are pursuing cases that might have fair use arguments, but I wouldn't worry abuot the DMCA issues unless you're actively using other people's content.

I would, however, worry about the rights you sign over to YouTube when registering, be sure to listen to the latest Copyright 2.0 Show for that.

Jeremy: True, but the odds of getting DMCAed when you only host the video on your site and your only use is clearly fair is slim to none.

Still, the concern is valid.

Perhaps a middle ground then, a third-party file hosting service like S3?

Re: Why Fair Use Suffers on YouTube

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:38:21 -0000

Recording Studio: I have to agree with everything you said but one minor point about the expense. As expensive as it might be to consider fair use and research claims, the losses from a wrongful takedown suit could be much greater, in the hundreds of thousands per piece.

Viacom and others need to balance the risk, cost and reward carefully here.

Re: Autodiscovery and RSS Scraping

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:12:53 -0000

Iantrepreneur: Did Copyfeed not work for you? If so what went wrong?

Re: Why Fair Use Suffers on YouTube

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:42:27 -0000

John: I'm sorry that your comment didn't go through. I have to agree with what you said though. The problem with fair use is that it is handled on a case by case basis. I can tell you what *should* make your use fair and what likely would not, but I have no freaking clue what will or will not pass when you actually get in front of a judge.

This was intended to be a more general look at the issue. However, your point is well taken and is something I've brought up in the past.

That being said, if we can not rely on fair use at all, even under the most basic of circumstances, then having the provisions makes no sense. I agree with what you're saying, but I shudder at the thought of living in such a world where every reliance on fair use first requires consultation with an attorney. When I do my DMCA Seven series, I should, in theory consult with my lawyer(s) about my use of company logos.

I don't because I am confident the use is fair, both in terms of trademark and copyright.

Still, the point is taken. Reliance on fair us is always a risky gambit. I agree totally.

Bright: Actually, we covered that in the last episode of the Copyright 2.0 show and it was one of the (many) stories that inspired and necessitated this article. Between this, the NFL copyright notice takedowns, the million or so Daily Show takedowns and other Viacom foot-stompings, this just had to be said.

Re: Copyscape Premium: An Epic Letdown

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:40:00 -0000

Walter: I'm glad that you've had good results with them. But out of curiosity, have you also checked with other methods? I'm just wondering if Copyscape maybe works better with some content than others.

Re: Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:42:31 -0000

DrMike: Maybe the problem is getting worse then. This is an older article, from back in early April, so things might have changed. I did several spins on the next blog feature and found only one the whole time. Contrast that to Blogspot where most were spam.

I'll have to follow up with WordPress on this.

Re: Updated About the Author Page

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:50:46 -0000

RS: Thank you very much for that. It means a lot. I do find it a bit strange that you find it inspiring. I've never seen it that way and most seem to feel that its sad. Still, a lot of good has come out of it all so I have a hard time complaining.

As far as being a gifted writer goes, thank you for that, but I see myself as only a mediocre or good writer. Maybe with more practice and work, I can be come a great one.

Re: Mahalo’s Anti-Plagiarism Tool

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:56:54 -0000

RS: I heard about it from Andy Beard too (as per the hat tip). Personally, I haven't been that impressed with Mahalo up until now but they seem to be growing and I really hope their spam-free approach can take off.

Re: Why Fair Use Suffers on YouTube

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:21:58 -0000

Bright: Yes, that is your punishment. However, I think you made two typos in your comment. I believe that should be inciting and rude. That seems to better describe the podcast most weeks.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Blog Hosts

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:52:44 -0000

Rose: I'm glad to hear that you've had good luck with WordPress and Blogger. WP has always been good about it but it does appear that Google and the Blogger team have been making a renewed push to get rid of spam blogs on their service. Let's hope it works, fingers are crossed.

Re: Preserving Evidence: 5 Tools to Make it Easy

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:11:30 -0000

Michael: A neat program there. I just downloaded it and tried it out on PT. I now know that the home page is a whopping 7559 pixels high. That's roughly six screens tall on my monitor.

Yeah, it might be time to see about putting fewer entries on the main page.

It is a very neat work though. It's too bad we can't get this in a site though. Still, I will definitely be using this some more.

Thank you for the tip!

Re: Legal and Ethical Link Blogging

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:06:10 -0000

Andy: That is a point worth mentioning. I spoke with an attorney friend of mine the other day and she felt Google was on "thin ice" with Google Reader's linkblog tool. I do have a question though, that stripping you're talking about, is it something that appears on every single item in a feed or just in the header of the feed itself?

I read your great article on the topic but that wasn't completely clear to me.

Also, just a heads up, your site has a bug in Safari 3 that's causing the sidebar to appear below the text. It could be a glitch with Safari, but I wanted to let you know.

Re: Preserving Evidence: 5 Tools to Make it Easy

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:46:52 -0000

RS: I hate to admit it, but My Web beats Furl in my book. I've already ported my collection over there. You are right, it does cache the page too. I used Furl previously as my bookmark dump for articles for the Copyright 2.0 Show and then used Delicious to create the show notes. Now that's changed.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: Legal and Ethical Link Blogging

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:25:24 -0000

Andy: I'm going to download the ebook now and will probably give it a look this weekend if at all possible. You're right that marketing isn't my thing, but I am an advertising graduate so it isn't like there's nothing of interest to me in there.

That being said, I think I better understand your point.

What there needs to be is a universal way, built into the RSS standard, to allow people to give the OK for content reuse or to deny it. Ideally, such a system would be able to set flexible rules such as no images, only 250 words or only one article at a time.

I think the reason Google is stripping out these things is because they aren't in the RSS standard. Still, I do agree they should keep the header information in, it's just clear that improvement is needed on both sides of the fence here.

Re: RSS Brief: Another Scraping/Spam Threat

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:34:49 -0000

The problem with the Technorati comparison is simple. Nothing in Technorati is designed to actually replace the original feed. All links on Technorati that I have seen point back to the original site or original feed.

You can subscribe to Technorati watchlists, but those only display the beginning snippets, not what is supposed to be the heart of the work, as RSS Brief does by their own description. Looking at fair use and transformative use decisions, I see bad things for RSS Brief.

It's a separation of degrees, I grant, but search engines notoriously flirt with the line on fair use and RSS Brief seems to take that line and push it a few more steps into the really dark grey area.

Strangely, the thing that might save RSS Brief is that it doesn't actually work. If it did and successfully replaced the original work, it'd have a much greater problem in my eyes.

Once again though, if anyone wants an excerpt feed of PT, I'll offer it.

(Note: You say that you've seen the full text of articles on the site, I haven't seen that. Here's PT's site link there:

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.plagiarismt...

There are only intros to the articles and links to the page, admittedly the intros are a bit longer than on, say, Google, but nothing too outrageous. Is there a page I don't know about?)

Re: RSS Brief: Another Scraping/Spam Threat

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:53:22 -0000

Andy: Ah, I see what you're saying. That would make it basically an RSS reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader. At that point, you aren't replacing the feed, you're simplly subscribing to it and using Technorati to do it. Technorati doesn't appear to be creating a new feed that you are supposed to subscribe to instead of the original, like RSS Brief Does.

Will: The concept bothers me too. There's a lot wrong with it from a legal and ethical standpoint. Hopefully this is just the alpha and we're going to see these issues addressed sooner rather than later.

Re: Attributor Signs Up Reuters

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:29:34 -0000

Rupal: I agree completely, when I heard what Attributor was doing, I got very excited about the product. Their goals are very lofty, but if they can achieve them there are a lot of people out there that will line up to use their service.

And I might be able to take that vacation...

Ramana: Once again, agreed. I'm excited about this service. But more importantly than that even, I"m excited to see a lot of companies entering this field and, if any of them can make a change in this area, it will be welcome.

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:53:47 -0000

Preson: it is strange. I'm banning the IP behind those two spams and then forwarding the messages on to reCAPTCHA for analysis.

Re: Attributor Signs Up Reuters

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:57:10 -0000

Ramanath: I think there's always going to be a human element in detecting plagiarism. Someone at some point has to actually read the work to see if it is a plagiarism or not. The best systems will work to minimize and simplify that work.

Reena: While I personally agree with what you said, I also have to say that it is up to the individual authors to decide how they want their content used. I feel that a more liberal system benefits both me and the world, but others feel differently and that is their right. I think an application like this should be there for everyone, including those such as myself more interested in plagiarism and others who want to enforce broader rights.

Pramath: Agreed, however, plagiarism of ideas is not enforceable under the law. An idea can not be copyrighted, only the expression of it. Ergo, a system used to detect plagiarism of ideas would only have a very limited use.

Alet: It definitely seems to be raising the bar a bit. I hope it goes well.

Chrisat: Hopefully Attributor can be a big part of the solution, absolutely agreed.

NTG: I have to say that I am unsure about the impact TII has had on academic plagiarism. I wonder if it has simply shifted the plagiarism from copy and paste to a more paraphrase plagiarism or, worse yet, to a custom paper mill kind of plagiarism.

In that regard though, the situation of bloggers is very different from that of professors and a service like Attributor might make a real difference. Here's hoping that the execution is as good as the idea!

Re: RSS Brief: Another Scraping/Spam Threat

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:20:57 -0000

Steve,

I'm glad to see that I"m not the only one that sees some serious problems with this service. Of course, I didn't even think about the defamation issue. That could be a very serious problem.

If it summarized the sentence "I am not a plagiarist" into "I am a plagiarist" or something to that effect, it could be a major problem, I completely agree.

I have to wonder if the makers of this service really thought the legal implications through.

Re: Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:21:22 -0000

Stephen: See this post - http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/07/27/dmca-...

Re: The DMCA on 7 Search Engines

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:14:40 -0000

CK,

First off, I have to give you a lot of credit. That is the fastest turnaround I have seen in commenting on and addressing one of these issues. I am, in a word, stunned.

Yes, it was a harsh grade I admit that and it tore me up to give it. However, according to the scale, given the legal issues that not being registered and not mentioning the repeat infringers issue, I felt that I had to do it. After all, these reviews are focused on the policies and not the prevention.

However, with your word that the USCO registration is on its way, I can now adjust it accordingly. It is definitely at least a C+ now. My major complaint now would be the fun I had trying to find it

Anyway, I intend to respond in kind, updating the review in just a few moments.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Search Engines

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:19:22 -0000

CK:

Also, regarding the repeat infringers issue, the law simply requires that you have done the following:

"adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers; and"

In short, just a line in the TOS stating that it is your policy to ban repeat infringers is usually enough. If such a line exists and I didn't see it, I apologize. Finding small things in a TOS can be like looking through Ask for good search results.

Sorry, I had to get one more Ask joke in...

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 24 - Oddities

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:20:06 -0000

Jeremy,

Why am I not shocked that you're the one that would post instructions on this?

Actually, I use a program called eraser on my Windows machines to keep erasing the free space. I use the built in Mac tool as well.

So that's good at least but I still doubt one can easily break a hard drive with a sledgehammer...

Re: RSS Brief: Another Scraping/Spam Threat

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:19:53 -0000

Andy and Will: For some reason my previous comment didn't take. I'll just say that I agree completely that what the AP and Yahoo did here is entirely wrong. If I had been the content owner, I would have sought to register the works with the USCO and then file against both of them considering what happened. That is especially true for the AP.

I agree that these are worse sins than what RSS Brief is doing and that we have to prioritize our efforts. However, we to at least look at all types of content misuse. We can't ignore one type because it's not the worst possible. That's like ignoring assault because it's not murder.

Still, I agree that the AP and Yahoo need to pay for this. This was a tremendous faux pas.

Re: Attributor Signs Up Reuters

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:30:57 -0000

Geetha: Let's hope that Attributor can do just that.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 24 - Oddities

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:35:04 -0000

Jeremy: I'll just repeat the notice... Don't do that!

Re: Attributor Signs Up Reuters

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:46:40 -0000

Geetha: Unfortunately, I doubt that Attributor, or any system, will outright prevent plagiarism. There have been effective anti-plagiarism tools available to the academic and the literary arena for some time. Those tools do a phenomenal job detecting verbatim plagiarism but have not done much to prevent students or writers from engaging in it.

What Attributor can do is provide a steep deterrent and reduce the people who dare to try. In this modern climate, anyone who plagiarizes, especially regularly, should expect to get caught.

Re: Update: Copyscape Drastically Improved

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:47:24 -0000

Ramana: Sadly, it's a game of small steps, but at least progress is being made!

Re: RSS Brief: Another Scraping/Spam Threat

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:49:13 -0000

Ramana: I wonder that myself. You simply can not summarize 1000 words of content in 50 words of summary. I noticed that no one, in email or comment, asked for a summary feed of this site. I'm going to guess that there is no interest in it.

Therefore, I believe others here feel the same way.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Search Engines

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:08:03 -0000

RS: Though I agree that banning repeat infringers is limited in what it can accomplish, it is also all that the law requires. There is precious little else that can be done.

For original authors to be more interested in filing suit against plagiarists, there first needs to be a shift in the nature of U.S. Copyright law. Right now, it is financially infeasible to sue for most infringements due to the registration requirement. Lift that, as it is in other countries, and there may be more opportunities.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Advertising Networks

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:50:10 -0000

Cybele: I've worked with Adsense before with similar results. I think I've waited as long as a week for a reply, I'm not sure what causes the wild fluctuations in their response time.

RS: It's a simple bell curve issue. Microsoft, with a C, should be in the middle of the pack, not at the lead. When I started this series, I envisioned there would be a tall, narrow bell curve hovering on the C range. Instead, it's proved to be very lopsided, centering on the C-D range and favoring the F crowd. Besides, when five out of seven services have severe problems with their DMCA/Copyright policy or no policy at all, there is an issue.

I guess we'll see how things evolve though.

Steve: Generally, when I look at these policies, I look for the following things.

Registration with the USCO
Complete information on their site
That the information between the two matches
A policy to ban repeat infringers
Full contact information for the DMCA agent
A thorough explanation of how to file a notice
That the policy is easy to locate on the OSP site

If a site is missing two or more of those things, I bump them down to a D. The exception is if the site has a single issue that puts it in direct conflict with a law, such as with Google.

If a site shows a great deal of thought in one or more areas, I upgrade it to a B. It gets an A if it shows some kind of radical advancement that makes things much easier for Webmasters who need to file a complaint.

That's a general rundown of the process. Not complete in every regard but it gives you an idea of what I do with each host.

Hope that answers the question!

Re: iParadigms Accuses iPlagiarismCheck of Abuse

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 01:15:02 -0000

Deborah: I won't answer the comments directed at Susan. I will say that you're welcome for the English recap and, yes, Google Translate did a bang-up job. If it made it so that a non-speaker like myself could understand it, it is impressive.

Also, you are correct that MyDropBox and SafeAssign are the same product and thank you for clarifying that here. I wanted to list them as separate since A) They were listed separate on your results and B) They are two separate brands with two different targets, as you pointed out.

In that regard, it's similar to how iThenticate and Turnitin are the same service, but different brands. Of course, that brings me to my real screw up with this article, flipping the names iThenticate and iParadigms. Easy mistake, but iParadigms is the company and iThenticate is their business product.

I've corrected the article to reflect that and confirmed that I got far too little sleep this week.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 25 - Media Defective

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:04:05 -0000

Valerie and RS: Neither of you missed, it was left out of the final draft of the show and I completely forgot when drafting the above overview.

I've got some information on that topic in my latest Blog Herald Post:

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/09/24/how-to-pre...

You can also read more about the issue on CNet here:

http://www.news.com/Web%20ad%20blocking%20may%2...

I'm sorry for the confusion and the late reply!

Re: Article Marketing: Death By Spam?

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 01:18:43 -0000

RS: I guess, for me, the real question is whether or not the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and, quite frankly, I don't see that being the case here.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there are better ways to promote oneself.

Re: A Closer Look at iPlagiarismCheck

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:49:08 -0000

Deborah: Thank you for pointing that out, that is very worrisome indeed. I was told that it would be handled in a week. I'd gone by there but hadn't seen the image. I must have been clicking the wrong link.

I guess I should have used my own research on that one and clicked the link in my own article...

Re: iParadigms Accuses iPlagiarismCheck of Abuse

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:55:32 -0000

RS: Thank you for your sympathy and vote of support. It's not easy for me to admit that I made a mistake but I'd rather come clean with my errors and set the record straight than continue to tacitly support a potentially bad company.

As far as letting everyone speak their peace, that's just me being a journalist. The four years in college wasn't a total waste.

Thank you again for the support!

Re: The DMCA on 7 Advertising Networks

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:45:34 -0000

George: First off, to clarify these reviews a bit, it's not a review of the backend of these systems, just the front end. I deal with backend issues on the Host Report page. This is more about looking at their policies and how well the sites comply with the disclosure requirements of the law.

I also agree that there is a lot of room for improvement in the currently law. There needs to be greater defense against false DMCA notices, but also greater incentive to use filtering technology on sites such as Youtube. In short, the current arrangement serves no one.

As far as Google's response goes, I'm sorry to hear that you've had so much trouble with them. If you want to, you can email me the particulars and I'll see if there's anything I can do.

I hope that you're doing well and thank you for the comment!

Water: I wouldn't know, I gave up on the Web advertising game a long time ago...

Re: iParadigms Accuses iPlagiarismCheck of Abuse

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:03:08 -0000

Kat: Since the answer might help others, I'll go ahead and reply here.

When you create a work and get copyright protection over it, you have a set of exclusive rights over that work. One of those rights is the right to create derivative works, including translations.

If someone is taking your works and translating them into a foreign language without your permission, that is a violation of copyright law and you would handle it like any other situation, through either a DMCA notice (or other host contact) or a cease and desist letter.

However, there is a difference between translating someone's work and using someone else's idea to create a work in another language. Copyright does not protect an idea, just the expression thereof. You'll have to determine how much of your original work is being used and the best way to do that would be through an automated translation tool such as Babelfish and/or a human translator.

If you need any help on the specifics of the case, feel free to send me an email!

Re: Copyscape Improved Again

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:09:58 -0000

Will,

Thanks for the heads up, if you can email me the links I'd appreciate it. I delete any spam comments that get through as soon as I seem them but most of them aren't actually comments, they're trackbacks. reCAPTCHA stops pretty much all of the comment spam.

I tend to stamp those out as I get them but, in a moment of bitter irony, I'll wager the emails for them are getting filtered out by my spam filters.

I hadn't even pondered that until now...

Re: What the RIAA Judgment Means to Me

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 10:32:23 -0000

Michael:

On one foot, I agree with you. There is no doubt in my mind that Ms. Thomas deserves to be punished. I am merely asking for the punishment to fit the crime. She is a single mom who makes a little over $30,000 per year and has two kids. Does a quarter of a million dollar fine really fit? It is the law, I don't argue that, but there is a human element here too.

If anyone had had her best interests in mind, they would have told her to settle. Settle, pay a small fine (relatively) and move on. With others being settled by the truckload, there was no reason to make this the test case.

RS: You laugh. But I've got my application to law school right here on my desk...

Don't tempt me.

Re: Dealing With Plagiarism: A Video Presentation

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:09:08 -0000

Mr. J: The comments seem to be going through, have you been noticing any errors? I might need to see if there is something more that I can do.

Re: Copyscape Improved Again

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:41:59 -0000

Will: The tao of Homer comes to mind here - D'oh!

I completely misread your comment and I'm sorry. That makes much more sense. Proof I either need reading glasses, likely, or have been hit on the head one too many times, also likely.

I think you're right about the nature of spam bots though. What I've seen some do is quote a portion of the original article and say "I Agree!" or something like that. Others says something like "The thing about <keyword from="from" article="article"> is that they can't be <keyword2> and thus we can only hope to <keyword3>."

Sometimes it is garbage, but sometimes it actually works.

I think you're right about that, in short.</keyword3></keyword2></keyword>

Re: What the RIAA Judgment Means to Me

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:45:33 -0000

Doug: The issue here is not whether or not copying took place. When you obtain copyright in a work you receive a set of exlusive rights to the work, reproduction is just one of those rights. Another, the one that is relevant here, is the right to publicly display or perform the work. The argument isn't that her "making available" equals copying, that it equals public display and violates that exclusive right.

So the beer analogy, though entertaining, is a bit flawed in this case.

There is still a valid legal question about whether or not making available constitutes public performance, but if this issue reaches the supreme court, I have a pretty strong feeling they will rule that it is given their track record in this area.

Re: Watermarking vs. Fingerprinting: A War in Terminology

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:21:35 -0000

RS: I think you're about right there. At least at the core. The problem is that watermarking also can describe a process done to audio to add copyright information to it, either audibly or inaudibly. Also, you can "watermark" a word file by embedding copyright information into it that can only be read through a special plugin but can not be easily removed.

Also, digital watermarking can be visible or invisible. Further confusing things. It's a messed up issue and even after all of this I am not one hundred percent sure I got it all right.

Sad, but true...

Re: How to Write an Effective DMCA Notice

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:23:23 -0000

Avish: Since this involves filing a DMCA notice with a host and not an actual DMCA policy that an OSP would need to create, the repeat infringer element is not necessary generally. If you wanted to add it you could, especially if its the same person ripping you off again and again, but most of the time a person filing a notice will not have an idea if the person is a repeat infringer or not.

Hope that clarifies!

Re: Dealing With Plagiarism: A Video Presentation

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:24:44 -0000

Mr. J: Strange, could have been a server issue though. I just received word that my host was upgrading their MYSQL databases to include multiple users. Might have been an issue while that was going through.

Let me know if you see any other problems!

Re: Copyright 101 Quiz Answers

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:13:15 -0000

Jeremy: Nope, I didn't reverse you. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was the right answer and it is what you guessed. It might have been dumb luck but luck counts. The goal was to tell which one was NOT in the public domain.

You were right on that one. Scary as that might be.

I think Amita might have misread the question though. She seemed to guess one that was one in the public domain.

Re: Watermarking vs. Fingerprinting: A War in Terminology

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:14:51 -0000

RS: This is what I love and hate about IP issues. It exists somewhere between hard science and magic. Making it probably the most confusing thing I've ever dealt with, bar none.

I should have stuck with physics.

Anyway, please do let me know what you find out!

Re: Copyright 101 Quiz Answers

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:30:48 -0000

Jeremy:

So you cheated and used your brain on the bonus question, I'll be sure to remember that.

In regards to your question, I'll respond the USCO would "Excellent question!"

The truth is that they don't know and neither do we. They seem to have decided that putting something on the Web is NOT publication by itself but if you take extra steps like that they leave it up to the copyright holder to make the call.

Yeah, that sounds dumb to me too.

Amita:

First off, I'm glad you had fun and that you found this site useful. I am going to subscribe to yours in a bit as well.

As far as misreading the bonus goes, it happens. You were absolutely correct about Alice though. In fact, without that, I doubt we'd have the "Alice" video game that is so much fun. Well, that and three dollar copies of the novel in bookstores.

In regards to the Rowling story, you were actually the first to let me know about it though another copy of it came into my feed reader today. It's a strange tale and, if I knew more about copyright in India I might have something insightful to say about it.

I know that, in the U.S. at least, characters are protected by copyright and that protection is often separate from the protection the rest of the work has. That's what makes fan fiction illegal unless permitted by the author.

So, could you be sued for dressing up HP for Halloween. Theoretically, yes, but the odds of that happening are slim to none. For one you would probably just a buy a costume that was properly licensed and second, even if you did it yourself, there would be little in the way of damages that they could collect.

Besides, here you can always claim parody.

In short, such a suit would be valueless and fraught with legal challenges.

I think what made the case in India a target is that it was a for profit event, at least by Rowling's standard, and was much more public.

In the end though, all of this is for nothing. The case was resolved and the party goes on:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kolkata/Pott...

So, Jeremy, you were wrong on this one... She can't win just anything after all. I'm shocked too.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Message Board Hosts

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:19:25 -0000

RS: It's just one of many reasons I'm afraid. I personally think that board hosts could easily find a place in the current market if they maintained their services, participated more in the social Web and offered a unique product. Sadly, everything with these sites is decrepit.

DrMike: You mean to tell me that was the LONG version of their TOS. Jeez. Their policy stinks and seems to have only gotten marginally better. I'll be sure to keep in mind what you said if I have any dealings with them.

As far as your question goes, a host operates under the laws of the country where its servers are. I've gone through with most of these and indicated sites that are foreign in nature and changed the grading a bit. But most operate within the U.S.

Though they server an international base, if they were to be sued, they would have to be sued here for damages to be claimed. Since registering with the USCO is a requirement of the DMCA, a law they are operating under and theoretically gain protection from, it seems worthy to mention.

Hope that clarifies things

Re: Copyscape: Not Ready for Prime Time

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:21:18 -0000

Jest: You might want to see some of the updates to this article. The latest one is here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/10/02/copys...

They've made a lot of improvements to their service and much of this article is really out of date. It was written in 2005 after all.

Hope that helps!

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:30:29 -0000

Dan: There's a lot fishy about that law firm and the more I read the more suspicious things become.

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:31:19 -0000

Steve: I will quote the Smothers Brothers and say "Touchey Touchey"

Welcome for the link! Thanks for the help!

Re: The DMCA on 7 Print-on-Demand Publishers

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 08:46:15 -0000

Charlene: There is actually one big difference between a vanity press and a "traditional" POD publisher.

When one buys a contract at a regular vanity press, they not only have to write, edit and layout the book, but also buy X number of copies. With a POD publisher, they don't have to do the latter. Every copy of the book they sell is free to them.

So, the way I look at it is like this.

New POD Service: Everything is free.
Traditional PD Service: Pay for everything but copies.
Vanity Press: Pay for copies too.

Hope that helps!

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:41:00 -0000

RS: Yes, you could easily create a never-ending cycle of silence here if both parties were so inclined. Too funny... in a scary way.

Re: Limited Posting Next Two Weeks

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:12:30 -0000

RS: I'll be around, just not as much. You shouldn't get much of a chance to miss me.

Re: Limited Posting Next Two Weeks

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:45:28 -0000

RS: Nothing like that fortunately, just that posting will be shorter and less frequent, that's all...

Re: Updates on the Lara Jade Case

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:48:18 -0000

RS: Where did you get that impression from? For some things they are very quick but for most they are painfully slow for most things. This is not an atypical pace.

The problem is that the courts are backlogged. The queue to have your case heard can be months or years.

Think about this, the RIAA verdict I reported on a while back, that case was filed over four years ago. I'm sad to say courts here can be dreadfully slow.

Re: What the RIAA Judgment Means to Me

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:56:29 -0000

Maria,

I want to be clear that I am certainly not coming out in favor of copyright infringement or in letting those guilty of it go. That would be suicide both to me as a creative professional and as the Webmaster here.

But I have to believe that this woman was given some terrible advice. She clearly did it. She should have taken the deal, spent 3000 dollars and moved on with her life. Instead, largely at the behest of the anti-RIAA movement, she pressed on and now is saddled with nearly a quarter million dollar judgment.

I believe that she deserves to be punished and severely, but that amount is unreasonable for someone in her position, especially when she has two kids.

I agree that Ms. Thomas did something wrong and needs to be punished. I just think the verdict might be out of balance and that she was set up as a sacrificial lamb.

She made poor decisions, but I think her lawyers made the dumbest ones of all...

Re: Updates on the Lara Jade Case

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:12:43 -0000

RS: I was thinking about this last night and I believe I know where you got that impression.

You see, in general, our criminal courts move very fast. They have to. Defendants can be released if they are not arraigned within X number of hours. There are also rules regulating when they need to be tried by and so forth.

The civil courts are a different matter. There are too many lawsuits and not enough judges. A sign of our excessively litigious society. With no constitutional pressures to push things through quickly, the cases often linger for months on end.

Does that clarify things a bit more?

Re: Watermarking vs. Fingerprinting: A War in Terminology

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:58:23 -0000

Recliners: Welcome to my world :)

Re: Updates on the Lara Jade Case

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:04:32 -0000

Recliners: Like I said, the criminal courts move at pretty good speed though I doubt you could ever wrap up a case in an hour like on TV. But our civil courts are just so burdened that there is no way to keep up.

We are an overly litigious society and that is a shame. We've been taught that the courts are the first step in resolving disputes, not the last, and that it can be a veritable lottery of free money.

However, the only people getting rich are the lawyers, trust me, I know.

Sere: It is a shame and the problem is that legitimate cases, like this, one keep getting pushed back. Also, as you pointed out, the delay favors larger companies with the resources to stick it out. Little guys either can't sue or are forced to settle for pennies on the dollar because they can't afford the fight.

We need to start A) Beefing up our civil system and B) tossing out stupid lawsuits early. If we can do both, we might be able to save the system at a reasonable cost.

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:08:35 -0000

Recliners: I wouldn't worry about this case. However, if they did try, it could still cost the defendant a great deal of time and money to fight back, even if it is an easy win for them.

That's the problem with the system, you can sue for anything and the person on the other end has to defend themselves.

Re: iPlagiarismCheck’s Eptiaph

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:09:32 -0000

Recliners: Own accord, though I am certain the matter would have gone to court soon enough if they hadn't.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 29 - Usenet Sued

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:42:50 -0000

Jeremy: You and me both. I really though Usenet was just a realm for Uber nerds and old guys who remember the "good old days" of the Web. Looks like I was wrong.

Mr. J: I haven't heard of this taking place. In fact, YouTube has been pretty clear that their technology doesn't have such capability. According to them, they can't even use it to distinguish between porn and other types of content or detect copyrighted material that has not been submitted. It seems unlikely that they have the capability to read faces.

I could be wrong though, have you seen an article on that?

Re: iPlagiarismCheck’s Eptiaph

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:50:52 -0000

Seems that way to me too. I think they knew they were in the wrong and decided to run rather than fight. Probably very smart.

Re: Updates on the Lara Jade Case

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:53:04 -0000

Honestly, I have to say I blame the lawyers as much as anyone. The truth is that almost no one gets rich from the courts these days but many wind up paying their lawyers tidy sums.

Lawyers are the only ones who get rich and they often tantalize potential clients with dreams of big payouts knowing that it really means a bigger check for them as well.

Get rid of the bad lawyers, the problem becomes less of an issue...

Just my thoughts on it.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 29 - Usenet Sued

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:16:35 -0000

Recliners: The idea is that since Usenet hosted some of the groups, they could use the technology on their servers to prevent the files from being uploaded to begin with or to take them down before they get downloaded.

This is similar to what YouTube is doing now.

Hope that explains it!

Re: Numly Plugin Seeks New Maintainer

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:18:22 -0000

Recliners & RS: Thanks for the well wishes, understanding and support! I'll be sure to post video of photos of it as soon as practical. Should be a lot of fun!

Re: Numly Plugin Seeks New Maintainer

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:24:07 -0000

Recliners: See today's post for more info!

Re: Numly Plugin Seeks New Maintainer

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:43:00 -0000

Will: Thanks for the heads up on that one, I haven't deactivated the plugin so I had no idea. I'll be sure to add that to the list. I'll be in touch with Chris tonight and see if anyone has contacted him.

Re: Whois Service Comes Under Fire

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:51:20 -0000

Aaron: I'm not too keen on it either but I know that it is an important tool for many people, myself included. I think if access to the data could be restricted in a productive way, it could be very productive. First, I would like emails to always be ofuscated, second, I would like mailing address and phone information to ony be given out to users with clearance and a need for it.

That would be a start at least.

RS: Sadly, not much. You can write emails and blog posts on the topic, but it seems unlikely from my past experience with them that those are seriously read.

Patsi: Glad that you enjoyed the blog! I've commented on your site once or twice, you're doing some great work yourself!

Valerie: Ah, yes, how could I forget about them. My proposal in my reply to Aaron would also eliminate them as a problem. Still, they are an excellent example of the issue.

Recliners: Yes, let's hope for the best, it is about all we can do.

Everyone: Article updated!

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 30 - Takedown Central

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:58:31 -0000

Everyone: I'll see if I can't get some of them up this weekend. Thanks for the support and understanding!

Re: 1. How to Find Plagiarism - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:47:51 -0000

Will: For that kind of situation, you might want to use something like Copyscape or a professional plagiarism checking service such as Turnitin or MyDropBox. They can better detect synonymized plagiarism and examine the entire work rather than just a snippet.

Re: Attributor Launches Content Monitoring Service

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:43:26 -0000

Let us hope so, there is a lot sort out!

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 31 - RIAA Blues

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:57:28 -0000

Recliners: See the latest post!

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:45:44 -0000

Will, the instructions for modifying the .htaccess file is in the readme file for the plugin. It is a manual modification that you have to reach in and make yourself. I ended up briefly causing this site to blank out due to my modifications so be careful! It doesn't seem to like other modifications being present.

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:00:04 -0000

It was probably the single hardest install of a plugin I did, why there wasn't more of a story today for PT. It took me a few hours and, yes, any other htaccess mods can affect it, that is what happened to me.

I had to wipe my file, set up my permalinks again and recreate the file from scratch. Fortunately, I only had one other mod and I've readded that.

It is worth it, but it is also a lot of work. Backup before you do anything!

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:06:39 -0000

Jeremy, Like I said, worst plugin install I've ever had but it appears to be worth it. Now if only I could get Divshare to light a fire under it we might be doing good.

Hopefully they'll simplify future versions of the install though.

Glad you liked the haunt, or at least I'll take gory as a compliment. The "And we're out" is actually a funny side story to the night.

We had been working for about three and a half hours, the actors were hot and tired but had to do this one thing before they can go home. I felt like a slave driver since they were all working for free.

I hurried through the walkthrough and, when I said that, they hit the door running. They were all cool about it and hung out for some of the pictures.

It was hot in that garage though and next year we're adding A/C.

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:50:44 -0000

Will: Hm, that is disheartening. The install of super cache seems to have done the site some good (at least no one here has said PT is moving slower) but it was very difficult and, as I said, it did bork the site for a while.

Now that I have it working I'm not going to remove it but I'm also going to not recommend it unless you know how to deal with server errors. I've been doing sites for 10 years and that stuff still spooks me.

I have to agree about the complaint regarding WP speed and the resolution for it. All of these plugins are just a stopgap.

Jeremy: What, open source software get slower? No way! Everyone knows that Firefox 2 is MUCH faster than 1.

Kidding aside, the problem is widespread. Linux has the same issue, look at the latest version of Ubuntu vs. the previous ones. That is why I'm back on Mac. Deleting code just isn't as glamorous, or as easy, as adding so I guess it isn't done as much.

How do you reward programmers for the code they don't write?

And I am glad that it was a compliment, of course, even if it wasn't I was going to take it as one anyway. ;)

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:48:32 -0000

Jeremy: We talked about that on the podcast some, Chris has had a hosting issue as the provider he was using closed up shop. His Ruby sites are totally borked until he can get new hosting. I'm trying to get him to move in with me here at Media Temple but he doesn't seem to be ready for that phase in our relationship.

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:38:55 -0000

Recliners: Glad that it's moving good for you. Hopefully it will stay that way!

Re: workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 21:09:43 -0000

RS: I doubt workFRIENDLY will do anything given that they didn't even respond to this article for a few weeks and it doesn't seem as if Google has any interest in this either, even though it is their database being flooded with duplicate data.

I don't see much hope for an easy resolution here.

Re: workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:58:00 -0000

Recliners: Agreed. It is an interesting idea, just a flawed executions.

A. Marques: The way it works is like this. Though workFRIENDLY creates everything dynamically, the URLs are static.

For example, if you visit this page: http://www.workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Bl...

You'll always see their version of this site. If someone links to it, the search engine will pick up that link.

Everytime someone visits that link, be it a human or a search engine, workFRIENDLY visits my site, pulls down the content and formats it into their page. So, even though no actual page exists on their servers, to the search engines, it's real.

In that regard, it works a lot like Wordpress or any other dynamic CMS. The pages don't actually exist, but are created dynamically by combining information from a database with a template. If you look at the server, no directory or files exist, the pages are just made by the server on the fly.

By the by, it appears that the banning technique I talked about is not working any longer. I am going to examine my log files this afternoon and see what is going on.

Re: workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:00:25 -0000

A. Marques: I failed to answer your second question, what you're seeing are search engine or watchlist scrapers. They either scrape relevant search engine results or subscribe to blog watchlists and scrape those.

The copyright situation of these is much more dubious as there is a much stronger fair use argument to be made, I've seen lawyers and experts come down on both sides of the issue.

There is no easy answer to your question but it is very common and becoming much more so as the years move on.

Re: Modified Scraping on the Rise

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:50:27 -0000

Albert: The problem with Google's watching for duplicate content is that, as Attributor showed, they aren't doing a very good job with it. Originals consistently rank lower than copies.

It's a good idea to use robots.txt, I admit that I need to be more careful myself but I also use meta tags to prevent problems.

As far as reCAPTCHA goes, I have read the TOS, as I do with everything I use here, and didn't find anything out of the ordinary with it. However, as a user, you don't have anything to fear and here is why.

First, there is no TOS when just using reCAPTCHA as a visitor. You sign no agreement with them. They can hold you to nothing. I am the one who signed the agreement and, unless they add something to the CAPTCHA itself, they can not legally hold you to anything.

Second, transferring copyright, by law, requires a written agreement, I doubt anyone has signed such agreement with reCAPTCHA. I haven't.

Third, any input you put into reCAPTCHA will, almost certainly, be uncopyrightable. A pair of words is not a copyrightable product. It can be trademarked, if used for a business, but not copyrighted.

Finally, given the nature of the work, if any input could be deemed copyrightable, it would seem that the damage would be minimal.

As someone with a hearing impaired brother who has worked closely with both the blind and deaf, I tend to support what reCAPTCHA is doing and the fact that they have very solid spam protection is a great bonus.

If what they are doing bothers you and you feel that they are taking something from you, consider it a donation to a worthy cause, making books readable to the blind.

It seems like a worthy cause to me at least.

As I said though, you as a user don't have anything to fear from reCAPTCHA, at least not that I see. However, I am going to forward your comment to a contact I have there and see if they have any input on this.

Re: Modified Scraping on the Rise

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:15:29 -0000

Ben: Thanks for commenting, I appreciate the input!

Robin I have to agree, you win the writing competition hands down but the humor one, eh, that has to go to the other guys. They are MUCH funnier.

On that note, I'm proud to announce the new blog based on PT that will have comedy spinnings of all my posts. Entitled "Lie Copying in the Moment" it will be a laugh riot.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 32 - Ahoy Pirates

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:33:24 -0000

Recliners: Patent law really isn't my bag. I'd heard about the lawsuit too but questionable patent lawsuits are just par for the course these days, especially against deep pocket defendants.

I wish I could say this shocks me, but it doesn't.

How sad is that?

Re: CAPTCHAs and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:38:38 -0000

Ben,

Excellent points all around there. I can't find anything to take issue with, which is rare for me!

It is very important to remember that changing technology is easier than trying to change the law. It takes only a short while to upgrade a CAPTCHA system, well, at least when you compare it to the years and years it can take to track the person down who cracked it and bring them to court.

I also want to stress that I love reCAPTCHA in part for some of the reasons you stated. It makes much more sense than installing a plugin that has to be upgraded every few months as new cracks arise.

I was very skeptical about using reCAPTCHA on my site, or any CAPTCHA system, but am glad I did.

I have zero regrets and nothing but praise. Your system is the first real deal bloggers have had available.

Re: CAPTCHAs and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:29:23 -0000

Recliners:

Agreed on all points. Fortunately though, as long as the nice folks at reCAPTCHA are monitoring the situation, there is little need from me to follow the situation.

Someone has to stay vigilant, just not always me. Doesn't mean my eyes aren't open for the next big more in this area tough.

Re: workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:28:34 -0000

Valerie: Welcome aboard! Let me know if I can help in any way.

Also, visited your site, how are you liking BlogRush?

Re: Is Trademark the New Copyright?

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:05:42 -0000

Recliners: I think TM has always been pretty well protected by large companies, at times too much so, but what is different today is that trademark is the business model. The New York Times protects its TM, but only to help it sell more papers. Today, we're seeing the reverse happen.

Still, protecting trademark more than it already is would be very hard because trademark is so narrowly defined. That is kind of by design considering you can trademark words or phrases but not claim copyright.

However, I do have to agree, there is a need for more enforcement, especially by new companies.

RS: Thanks for the compliments. It is very flattering. Hopefully this will be a topic to revisit in the coming weeks.

To answer your question though, it is almost impossible in this day and age, where everyone is a publisher, to prevent this.

When I was in college and in my journalism law and ethics class, we played a "trademark game" where the prof gave us a list of terms and asked us to pick the ones that were trademarks and the ones that were generic.

We all failed.

All you can do is have a good trademark policy, ensure that your core followers know the rules and that they work to correct mistakes. Even then all you can do is slow the tide, not stop it.

Of course, if you're so popular you're worried about your name becoming overused, that's a pretty good problem to have in the big scheme of things.

Sorry I can't give a better answer.

Re: Google’s Shell Games

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:25:11 -0000

Maria: I can't add much to that other than to say thanks and that I agree completely.

But even if they have won this round, they won't win in the end. You can't make a profit by sabotaging your money maker. This is a short-term strategy at best that will implode at some point.

Lets hope it doesn't take the whole of the Web with it.

Re: Google’s Shell Games

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:57:56 -0000

Andy: Thank you for the compliments and for the add! Greatly appreciated! I didn't talk about how U.S.-centric their Adsense policy is and I probably should have. Sending a fax or a postal mail is bad enough if you live in the country, it'd be ten time worse if you lived across an ocean.

There is a workaround and a way to send an email using a PDF with a scanned signature, but it is a pain to say the least. That, and I don't know the email for Adsense, just for Google and Blogspot.

Still, one could try the other account amac at google dot com.

RS: As true as that is, one thing I've learned from watching the financial markets is that it is all quarter to quarter. When a company is in a growth cycle like Google, they tend to obsess over keeping the growth going and making next quarter's results better than the last.

That leads to some stupid decisions if one asks me.

I'm sure if Google did what was actually in the shareholder's best interest, the shareholders would bail on them as the stocks slid in the short run.

People are fickle that way.

Thanks for the compliments!

Re: Is Trademark the New Copyright?

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:07:11 -0000

Recliners: While not the biggest problem, it can be one. If a trademark becomes so diluted that it actually becomes a generic, the mark itself can be lost. These are very rare cases and I don't know of any that have happened in recent history, but it is a theoretic possibility.

Trademark dilution is still offense once can sue for. Obviously many feel there is still at least some threat.

Personally though, I'd be happy if people would use my trademark as a generic. Then again, I'd be happy if they used it at all...

RS: Agreed.

Re: Google’s Shell Games

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:45:25 -0000

Recliners: I think there is indeed a very strong sentiment against Google right now. One of the big problems though is the lack of a better competitor. Microsoft is viewed as being even worse, Yahoo! doesn't seem to return accurate results on may queries and Mahalo is years away from being viable.

Who wants to found a new search engine?

Maria: I've noticed similar issues with FeedBurner since the transition as well. I used to promote them openly on this site but I have not done so since the transition. I've been debating leaving them but know that would likely cost me many of my readers.

The answer to your second question is that Google is paranoid, wanting to stop everyone from making money from them that isn't paying their cut. That is sure how it seems.

Re: Numly Plugin Seeks New Maintainer

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:45:33 -0000

Will,

I don't think there have been any takers. I haven't noticed that problem but, then again, I haven't updated any old posts. It could be an issue dealing with the WP hooks though.

Definitely ask Chris about it. I'll direct him to this comment too.

Re: Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:23:16 -0000

Daniel: As tempting as your theory is, it runs totally counter to what has actually happened here.

First, my site was many caught up in the recent pagerank shifts. Apparently Google didn't like my blogroll (I've never bought or sold links on PT) and I was knocked from a 5 to a 3. I've request a reevalution from Google but that hasn't gone through yet.

As a spam target, PT has become devalued due to this. Alexa has held pretty steady, though has always been dead wrong, and there's not much else to be said about PT.

However, what I find interesting isn't the slam that I got over the weekend, but the URLs that were involved. I think that's the real story here.

Re: Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:30:46 -0000

Daniel: Well, it appears I spoke too soon. I should have checked my PR before I said anything. It appears my reeval request has done something, I'm back at a five.

However, it was a three when the spam attack began. I left a comment on the Blog Herald on the seventeenth. This was a few hours after I had gotten the first trackbacks.

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/11/17/is-google-...

This roller coaster is very annoying. Still, I am glad for the good news!

Re: Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:54:57 -0000

Ben: reCAPTCHA has served me very well during this attack. I am grateful for it now more than ever. Despite thousands of attempts, no comment spam has gotten through. It's just too bad reCAPTCHA doesn't do trackback spam. I'm seeing a fail rate of about 10 a day on that front with Akismet.

Speaking of which, I'm now giving Defensio a trial run to see if it can do any better. I guess we'll see.

To answer your question about Sportsbook.com, the law is actually unclear here. If we follow the CAN-SPAM act, companies advertised in spam can be held accountable by the FTC. However, that law only deals with email spam, not Web spam.

If we look to copyright law, which makes sense considering so much scraping goes on as part of Spam, there is no clear indication. The DMCA protects hosts and other OSPs, but not advertisers.

Personally, I would think they have a responsibility here simply because, if they were found to be encouraging or otherwise inducing people to spam, I have no doubts a ticked off judge would have no trouble finding something to hit them with.

There's no clear law here but, when it comes to something like spam, judges find a way to fold the law to get you.

If you're going to court, don't be evil...

Jeremy: Glad it isn't just me getting hammered by this. But Akismet is not holding up. Three more got through just last night. I've decided to test out Defensio and it seems to be working right now.

Recliners: Glad to tip you off on this one. Sadly, I don't think I'm all that high value of a target, just in the way.

Amy: Since a fan fiction is a derivative work, it is unlikely that, even if you could find the original author, they could do much about it. Though Paramount is pretty lenient about fan fiction with Star Trek, they're the ones that hold the copyright interest in the work itself and the ones best suited to stop this sale.

If it is obviously a Star Trek fan fic being sold, contact the terms of use address at Star Trek and let them know about it.

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/contact.html

They will likely forward it on to whoever needs to see it at the company's legal department.

Hope that helps!

Re: Update: Trackback/Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:59:32 -0000

Carl: Thanks for stopping. It has been working wonderfully so far. I'm hoping it keeps it that way!

Re: CAPTCHAs and the DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:16:18 -0000

Nwill:

I feel pretty certain that they do analyze the traffic too. There is no such thing as absolute security, just layers. Also, I doubt that the audio CAPTCHA is a target for cracking because it is much more CPU intensive to crack than an image one. Not as viable for cracking large numbers of CAPTCHAs, like what spammers have to do.

I could be wrong on that though.

I think you are confused about an element of the case though. Ticketmaster is not accusing the company of copying anything, but rather, accessing. The DMCA makes it illegal to traffic in tools that allow you to circumvent access controls or to use them.

Caching, as you describe, is actually very well protected under the DMCA. Furthermore, there is an implied license to copy a page as is standard practice for viewing it on the Web. In short, I don't think anyone is going to court over personal caching.

As far as torturous interference goes, that is part of the suit as well. Like most lawsuits, it is a shotgun approach, with many different torts in it, we were just focused on the copyright and DMCA issues here.

Brach of contract and interference are other matters that will be decided later as well.

Hope that clarifies things!

Re: Housekeeping: New Contact Form and MyBlogLog

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:18:30 -0000

Aaron & RS: My goal wasn't really to promote MBL. But hey, it is neat service and I've enjoyed using it. Glad to see you guys on board!

Re: Updates to “Stopping Internet Plagiarism” Series

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:34:12 -0000

Voyagerfan: I hope you won't have to use it either. I wish no one did. But I am glad that it is there and I hope it is useful if it comes up!

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 34 - Internation Incidents

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:45:09 -0000

Recliners: Let me know what you think of it!

Re: Updates to “Stopping Internet Plagiarism” Series

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:59:31 -0000

RS: Glad to hear that it might serve you some good. However, the material there is very basic, most likely, the people who would get the most out of it are those who have never been to this site before.

Still, let me know if it is of use.

Re: Making the Switch: Going From Partial to Full Feeds

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:18:37 -0000

Mike: Glad you liked the article, out of curiosity though, did you notice any increase or decrease in traffic when you changed back? I'm just wondering what your experience was.

Thanks!

Re: Making the Switch: Going From Partial to Full Feeds

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:21:25 -0000

Mike: Thanks for the input there. It seems to me, at the very least, it didn't hurt. That's pretty much all that is important.

Cybele: First off, you're free to email me porn any time you want so long as it is for the purpose of fighting spam. I spend all day looking at gambling, viagra and porn ads anyway. I'm glad I'm not easy to offend.

However, I do find it amusing that your partial feed is getting scraped. But I have noticed that rise in summary scraping for some time. I think it's an attempt to parlay some of the copyright issues that arise from scraping the full post, even though it doesn't actually change much in that regard since the use isn't transformative.

The other possibility is that it is a means to escape the duplicate content filters on Google. I'm not sure how well that one flies though.

Anyway, feel free to send any samples that you have. The same goes for anyone else. I deal with spam, I can't afford to be a prude.

Opal: I got your email and I'll be responding more there in a bit. But I would definitely try AntiLeech and see if that works.

As far as CopyFeed goes, you might want to make sure you had the latest version as WP just redid its plugin structure some. CopyFeed wa supdated not that long ago and I think there were some compatibility fixes along the way.

If that doesn't work, you'd be better off seeking help from the makers of the plugin. I don't use it on PT as it isn't compatible with FeedBurner.

I'll be writing more soon!

Re: workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:02:23 -0000

Valerie: No problem. Your views pretty much mirror what I've read elsewhere. I was tempted by it but I can't find anyone who has benefited from it.

That being said, one neat trick I have learned is Commentful. It's a great way for tracking comments on the Web, I'd go insane without it and it's my secret weapon for keeping track of where I posted to.

Thanks for the info!

Re: Akismet and Spam Blogs

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:05:08 -0000

Recliners: Very welcome! I'm glad it helped.

RS: I don't know about exhaustive, it didn't take that long to figure out the solution, but it was an interesting puzzle. It would still be very worthwhile to see these plugin makers rise up and address this issue though, for our sakes.

Re: DMCA Contacts - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:46:28 -0000

I've worked with Yahoo! several times, both with the Flickr service and their Geocities service. My question is if you filed a full DMCA notice or just a traditional email?

Typically, with a full DMCA notice, I've gotten a very good reply. I can't testify one way or another without one.

If you need any help with this, please let me know.

Re: Video: Finding the Host

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:46:14 -0000

Recliners: You might want to check out today's post, could have had something to do with the site outage. Try it again today and see what happens.

RS: Glad it was useful. I'm not sure if I'm going to release a new version or not beyond trying to use different sites to see how it encodes them. It could be a screw up on my end (I'm pretty new to this screencasting stuff). Thanks for the feedback

Re: DMCA Contacts - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:38:03 -0000

Richard: The eSIGN act states you don't need a handwritten signature on any kind of notice or contract, just something that shows an intent to sign. It is how clickwrap licensing works and you can purchase things online without a signature. I just usually include the line "Signed" with my name.

As far as the response, it goes both ways. Some hosts reach in and do it themselves, often by disabling the account, while others nudge their customer first.

The usual route goes something like this, they tell the customer they received the notice, give them 72 hours to comply and, if they don't, take down the entire domain. I've seen it many times.

It is strange though that Yahoo!, with both Flickr and Geocities, will simply take down the infringing material. I guess this is the perk of being a paying customer.

Still, this procedure is most common with domain and other paid hosts. It doesn't violate the DMCA in any way that I can find as the DMCA only requires the host to act expeditiously to disable access to the works. There isn't anything that says they can't ask the customer to disable it first.

ALl in all, I'm glad that the situation was resolved. Let me know if I can help in any way in the future!

Re: Making the Switch: Going From Partial to Full Feeds

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:35:15 -0000

Bobby: Thanks for all of the positive feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

I'm glad that AntiLeech is working for you still. I"m kind of surprised but very relieved that is the case.

As far as hosts monitoring their customers, I don't see how that is possible. A host might have 100,000 customers but only able to afford six abuse agents. Besides, the DMCA prevents them from having to do that.

It would be nice, but it is impossible both in terms of practicality and legality. Some hosts do make some attempt, such as ThePlanet, but most don't.

In th meantime, good luck with everything and let me know if I can help!

Opal: There's a constant shift in what sites scrapers are using. I've been seeing a lot on Google Groups and private domains. It's all a matter of what network you've attracted the attention of and what they use.

Generally, it is easy to deal with, but it still is very frustrating.

Re: Site Down Time

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 21:03:44 -0000

Harry: Though I am definitely not happy about the outage. There are a few points here to consider.

First, this is the first major outage I've had in over a year of hosting with them. There have been other outages, all well less than one hour in length, but all have been planned in advance, as this one was.

This one spilled over due to an issue with a vendor that was supposed to be upgrading their storage solution while repairs were being made to the power systems. Frustrating, yes, but it is something that could happen to anyone. No matter the size.

The biggest point though is that, with MediaTemple, I am guarded against Digg, Slashdot and Reddit effects. If this site hits one of the major social news sites, I know first hand it will stay up. In the time I've been with MT, I have survived one Digg, one Fark, one BoingBoing and about three thousand StumbleUpons.

So, being on MT, I suffered a single outage of about ten hours due to a planned upgrade that did not go smoothly. On other hosts, I would have suffered dozens of outages of equal length due to my server being flooded.

I'm not opposed to moving, the site slowdown issues have been annoying and, though it is what they were trying to address with their latest updates, they failed. However, I am understandably hesitant to move my site over to another host with an unproven track record for dealing with traffic spikes.

Traffic here is VERY unpredictable and I doubt a shared host could handle it. Still, I will write E2 and see what they have to say.

Perhaps they can convince me.

Re: Linkblogging and PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:13:53 -0000

Aaron & Cao: I'm going to see if there is an easy way that I can do this that won't require me to spend too much effort and I'll try to make it a regular Saturday post.

Thank you both for your input!

Re: Linkblogging and PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:19:52 -0000

Jeremy,

Cool, this should be a lot of fun.

Oh, and speaking of that article, I did hear about it but outright forgot to bookmark it since I read it about ten minutes before we recorded the show. Thanks for the reminder!

Re: CopyFeed Plugin Now Available in English

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:19:05 -0000

Emila: Most welcome! Please let me know how the plugin works for you!

Re: Site Down Time

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:23:50 -0000

Murali: Unfortunately, I can't tell for certain if it did address the slowdown issue. As RS pointed out, the site is loading very slow today and has been intermittently down over the past 48 hours. Though I'm wanting to work with MT, I'm really starting to consider moving.

RS: Point taken, I've noticed it as well. I'm in talks with another host now and may move sometime in the next week.

Re: Video: Finding the Host

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:28:17 -0000

Murali: Glad it worked for you. I actually tried a few different zooms but the problem is making the text visible. Since things had to be visible on that tiny Revver/YouTube player, I had to zoom way in.

If I can get my hands on a more advanced screen recorder, I'll be able to do more things with it.

Re: Linkblogging and PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:31:46 -0000

RS: I think you might be a bit confused. I'm not changing anything with PT. I'm talking about adding a weekly column, likely on Saturday, that is just a list of links for the week in copyright news. It similar to what I do now with the Copyright 2.0 Show only all of the links, not just the ones that made the podcast.

I certainly wouldn't want the job of summarizing all of this in one post. That would take forever. I like it the way it is too...

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 35 - Digital IQ

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:01:03 -0000

Recliners: It's been one heck of a week for copyright new...

Re: Linkblogging and PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:56:12 -0000

RS: No problem. I would do that to you!

Re: Akismet and Spam Blogs

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:46:09 -0000

Melantrys,

It is frustrating, but in most cases you can do something about it. What I've taken to doing is hitting back at the advertisers and trying to cut off the revenue stream. If you can do that, then spammers will have no motivation to take your work.

Still, it is nice to know that I am not the only one seeing those trackbacks, I need to go back into my folder in a bit and see if I have anything new. I try to do it once every few days now.

But that raises the question, what kind of idiot scrapes Plagiarism Today?

Re: The Copyright Office’s Online Registration System

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:02:04 -0000

Murali: It'd be nice, but I somehow doubt it.

Chris: Several years and, most likely, several million dollars went into this system. Meanwhile, lone developers working out of garages are turning out better work.

It is sad, but that's government for you.

However, I do think that you're right. With the USCO having a monopoly on official registration, they can release whatever they want. They don't even HAVE to do this.

I guess I should be grateful for what I get from the all and powerful USCO. Even if it does stink.

Re: Site Down Time

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:29:24 -0000

Murali: I'll keep an eye on it on my end for a bit and see if the slowdown gets any worse or continues. It has been faster these past two or three days though and I have not moved. Sadly, any move will have to wait until after the new year at this time.

Re: The FeedBurner Question

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:23:38 -0000

Daa: How dare I forget that. Now I have to think even harder about leaving...

Re: CopyFeed Plugin Now Available in English

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:12:32 -0000

Emila: Not all blogs that scrape grab the fingerprint, especially if you do it at the bottom of of the post. It is entirely possible they could grab the intro to the piece, possibly even from another site such as Technorati. The DF plugin wont catch all scrapers, just some of the worst.

That being said, I don't know if it goes back and puts it on posts retroactively, it has been far too long since I installed it. I thought it did though.

Sorry I can't be of more help

Re: RSS in the Mainstream Media

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:14:30 -0000

Jake: That kind of brings me to a point I totally forgot in my analysis, that none of the feeds were monetized in any way. There was no advertising, no paid content, nothing. It was completely free. I suspect that they won't give away their content for free and, until they can find a way to effective monetize RSS feeds, I guess we'll be seeing partial feeds too.

But I do know what you mean, I had planned on subscribing to it as well..

Re: Update: Trackback/Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:32:17 -0000

Tiesto: I've done a few posts since. I had to disable Defensio due to a conflict with reCAPTCHA. Akismet seems to be doing better now.

Thank you for stopping by!

Re: Housekeeping: New Contact Form and MyBlogLog

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:33:43 -0000

Tiesto: It's small progress at least. I'm glad you like it!

Re: RSS in the Mainstream Media

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:38:07 -0000

Murali: I am not sure what I would do with RSS readers. I'm more interested in the content distribution end and not the reading end. How you choose to read the feed is up to you!

RS: I have to say that it was the changes at the NYT that motivated me, in part, to do this study. I realized that there were some big changes going on and I couldn't simply write off MSM any more. I'm glad I did it, I learned a lot!

Speaking of which, the BBC is weird. But at least they are working on it.

I'm not sure if it was NIH syndrome that stung them so much as just the dinosaur nature of these monolithic companies. They adapt slowly to any new tech, even if they did invent it.

Re: Google Image Search Now Indexing Blogger

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:21:23 -0000

Recliners: That's the nature of search engines. They are the tools we use to detect content theft and the target of spam operations. They're double-edged swords.

Used Vans Girl: Unlikely. Blogger has attempted to in the past but Google's reliability in the spam blog fight is dubious at best. Since they profit from the spam blogs on their own service, since they usually run their Adsense program, their motivation and response has been less than awe-inspiring.

Re: Update: Trackback/Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:22:22 -0000

Which one, reCAPTCHA or Akismet?

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Getting Started

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:42:48 -0000

Vickie: Thanks for stopping by and for the clarifications! I'm glad you like the linkblog feature.

The shifting of the burden of proof on the fair use issue is not a surprise. That would seem to bring it more in line with other case law I have read. It has always been my understanding that fair use is an affirmative defense, one that has to be proved.

Still, given Perfect 10's recent history in the courts, I am stunned to see them win, well, anything. Still, it is an interesting case and one well worth following for bloggers. After all, any fair use issue directly applies to posting works on the Web.

Re: Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 35 - Digital IQ

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:48:04 -0000

Mr. J: You kind of have to look at it in relation to the music industry. If we go back to the original napster, the downloading of single tracks over the Web has been reliably available for about ten years. They were selling albums and later tapes, CDs for the better part of a century.

Time is relative to the person experiencing it would seem.

Re: Google Image Search Now Indexing Blogger

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:30:19 -0000

RS: I don't know if it is so much a matter of the cop being the criminal as it is the cop being the target. Though I'm no fan of Google, by all accounts, Google indexing Blogspot images is a good thing and long overdue. It just also opens up a new door for spammers and I doubt there is much that Google could have done under these conditions.

An analogy would be if a bank decided to accept wire transfers from a strange country. On one hand, legitimate users in that country could now send and receive money. On the other, scammers could use the bank to do illegal things.

So it's a combination of being aware that you can now send money to that country and being cautious of any requests from there. The same as always.

It remains to be seen how much this changes the game.

Re: MyFreeCopyright: Free Copyright Verification

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:14:18 -0000

Matt: I look forward to it as well and you are welcome for the write-up. You have a great service and it deserves the attention.

Thank you for addressing those bugs. I know I brought the other caveats to your attention before the article went up but those were discovered literally as I was writing the article. They needed mentioning but I didn't see them as major problems and, quite obviously, they were easily fixed.

Let me know if there is anything I can do for you!

Re: Is Trademark the New Copyright?

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:40:03 -0000

Tiesto: I don't think that stronger trademark protection will hurt open source per se, as I said I think it is a good move and a good business decision, but that how open source views trademark is a strange contrast to how it views and uses copyright.

I think open source is wise to use trademark to its benefit, but it is easy to forget that trademark's two siblings are copyright and patent.

Re: Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:42:10 -0000

Tiesto: Indeed that is the nature of the battle. Hopefully the defenses will hold for at least a little while...

Re: Protecting Content by Using Static Pages

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:01:06 -0000

RS: I've been in the trenches for a while. That just counts plagiarists of my own work through my various sites. Not the work I've done for others here.

You're very welcome for the site but I feel that I should be thanking you for your comments and thoughts, they are always appreciated.

Re: MyFreeCopyright: Free Copyright Verification

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:54:03 -0000

Recliners: I'm glad to hear that you're thinking about making the leap to blogging! Let me know if I can help in any way and thank you for the high praise!

Re: Lawrence Lessig’s Presentation at Google

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:04:35 -0000

RS: Not presumptuous at all, I love good questions and these are two great ones. I was actually going to touch on the first in a future article, and may still, but I'll go over some of it right now.

Why am I opposed to copyright registration?

I have a laundry list of reasons, I'll go over the five I pull out of my hat right now.

1. It punishes the ignorant: People who don't understand copyright law obtain no protection through it. However, one's understanding of copyright law is no indicator of the value of work they produce. Since most people are self-publishing these days on the Web, there are no record labels or publishing firms to walk them through the process or explain what needs to be done.

2. It is not practical on the Web: Think of the millions of blog posts going up every day or the millions of images being posted online. They would all have to be registered. Either almost nothing would be registered or the system would be overwhelmed instantly. Look at my recent article on the new USCO registration system for insight on that.

3. Copyright is an either/or Game: If we had registration as a requirement for obtaining copyright protection, I wouldn't lose some of my rights, but rather, all of them. Anyone could do anything they wanted with my work, plagiarize it, sell it, etc.

4. Copyright Registration Favors the Rich: We have to assume that any registration system will require a fee. The current one is $45. No major issue for record labels or publishers, but a huge problem for individual artists trying to eek out a living.

5. Copyright is for the Artist: Copyright is supposed to protect the work and creativity of the artist. Though, here, we have a tendency to use it to validate the interests of publishers, it isn't supposed to be that way. However, a mandatory registration system further supports the commercial establishment by taking rights away from artists who don't register and ensure that they have a need of traditional distribution channels that can afford such protections easily. This is counter to the ideals of the Internet.

Just some of my thoughts. My complete list is actually much longer.

Why did Prof. Lessig resign?

Well, he resigned as chairman but not as CEO of Creative Commons and has left his traditional copyright work behind. The reason he gave was to battle corruption, a "bigger fish to fry" situation.

He is involved somewhat, just not nearly as much. But he wanted to fight a different fight, one he sees as more important. I can't fault him for that even though I miss him.

Hope that helps!

Re: Flickr Misses an Opportunity

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:12:08 -0000

Cybele: First off, that's a neat idea about BlogPulse. I'd been experimenting with it as a way to track news I was interested in, a possible substitute for Techndorati, but it never occurred to me that it could be used like that.

Neat idea.

As far as the idea of clickthroughs go, it is a neat one, but there are some pretty big flaws in relying on it.

First, clickthru rates on even large visual elements overs in the low single digits. Sure, someone will likely click through at some point, but how long will it take?

Second, having used Flick in the past, I know firsthand there is zero enforcement of that linking policy. None. I used a plugin gallery for another site I formerly ran and the plugin author, without me realizing it, never followed those terms. I never heard, about it, even after over a hundred images, and only discovered it by accident when I tried to go to my original Flickr page.

Fortunately, that site is now defunct.

Finally, it doesn't tell you much about how many people are viewing your image elsewhere. When trying to decide what sites to check first and what kind of enforcement to seek, that is pretty handy knowledge.

Indeed, the hyperlinking rule does soften the blow a good deal, but it still leaves a very sizable chunk of data missing. Much of it we probably won't ever get back.

Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions!

Re: Flickr Misses an Opportunity

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:41:46 -0000

True, we both are discussing a feature that is brand new. I don't think anyone knows exactly what the heck it is going to do. Everyone's just guessing, me included, perhaps even especially since I don't use Flickr anymore.

I also have to agree that, for an initial release, it is pretty neat and still more than any other photo sharing site. However, that begs an interesting question in its own right. Hey, Photobucket, Divshare, Boxtr, etc. Any of you reading this? Hint. Hint.

It's good to know that enforcement is pretty swift on their end. I've heard talk that since the Yahoo! merger that has been one of the things that has slid. What is your take on that?

It still seems strange that they don't have a system for sniffing out misuse and violation of the linking rules. It would be pretty easy to do I would think. However, I doubt that automated enforcement of that rule is worth the reward of the link.

Glad to hear that there's a lot of good feedback on the Flickr forums about this, do you have a link so I can check it out?

Re: Flickr Misses an Opportunity

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:08:21 -0000

Cybele: Thanks for the links, I'm going to go through them in just a few minutes.

For the record. Your Flickr account is easily the most hunger-inducing. You'll have to forgive me if I don't go there for the next two months. I'm on a diet and I know your blog or your Flickr would break me a bit too easily.

Re: Lawrence Lessig’s Presentation at Google

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:58:46 -0000

RS: I think the second answer leaves everyone unsatisfied. Unfortunately, only one person knows the full truth and that's Prof. Lessig. I can only repeat what he's told others.

It was a sad day for a lot of us, including myself.

Sorry I couldn't answer the second one better but I'm glad the first one hit the mark!

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Slower Week

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:05:30 -0000

RS: It is impossible to say but I'm pretty sure if I shook my Magic Eight Ball it'd say "Signs Point to Yes".

This whole thing reeks of an overzealous attorney trying to justify his existence at the company and sending out cease and desist letters that are neither necessary nor proper.

Sadly, that's the nature of corporate law. You hire a bunch of attorneys and they scramble to earn their keep any way they can. If they get into a bit of downtime, which one would expect this time of year, they often get into some trouble.

I would tell the guy to work for an insurance company, their lawyers are never bored.

With that being said, you had a corporation hire a retired colonel to handle "internal security"? That seems a bit extreme to me. To find out he was handling IP matters, that just seems clinically insane.

I won't ask what company you were working for, but I have to ask if they were in a line of business that justified this...

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:19:51 -0000

Ardamis: That's a very interesting hack you have there and it is indeed what I was talking about. MIght I ask how it has worked for you?

I know that reCAPTCHA, which is what I use right now, uses a form of a handshake but one based upon the CAPTCHA. I've seen others that worked on hidden fields but I could see how the timestamp method would be much more reliable and difficult for a bot to duplicate.

I have to say I like what I've read.

The only thing I don't like is that every time I update WP I'd have to reapply the hack. Is there any way to make this a plugin?

I'd like to hear more about this...

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Slower Week

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:26:40 -0000

Jeremy: I had read that and on the Copyright 2.0 Show I talked about exactly that. My working theory is that the kid tried to access a false bittorrent tracker. that grabbed his information from there. I don't see any practical way that NBC could have gotten his "packet history" as even a modest one would have been over fifteen gigs in size for the month.

The guy fell for a trap me thinks. It's that simple.

Re: Analysis on The Lane Hartwell “Bubble” Controversy

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:40:20 -0000

Cybele: I have to agree with you that attribution is on the run. A lot of times it is hard to tell where an image or a story came from first and, as you pointed out, they just credit whoever is first in Google. Even I'm not perfect with that as I can't always trace back the original. I run into this a LOT with the podcast and my show notes.

I have to say, i feel a bit guilty now. I've really enjoyed the Consumerist in the past. I'm stunned to hear you've had issues with them. Have you had any luck in resolving them?

As far as your policy goes about leaving smaller bloggers alone, I go back and forth on that myself. I agree that the larger the blog A) They greater responsibility they have to know better and B) The worse the damage to you can be, but you don't know who is going to be big tomorrow.

How many people really foresaw the rise of the Lolcats?

Still, if there is a time issue, definitely prioritize the larger cases first.

Hopefully thought issues like these will draw attention to attribution on the Web and help motivate bloggers to be a little better behaved themselves.

Maybe then I'll be able to track down the original story from time to time...

Thank you for your insight! It's actually VERY helpful and, as you said, very relevant.

Hillary: I'm glad that you found the post on target. I was unsure about writing it but decided I had to say/do something as it was only growing in intensity. I, like you, hope some of the lessons get taken to heart by others.

Let's both keep our fingers crossed!

Various Trolls: This post has gotten some legs and has attracted attention of a few of the Anti-Hartwell troll crowd. If you want to participate, by all means comment, but I will not tolerate fowl language or personal insults. This is for serious discussion only.

I don't care what you think of her personally, let's try to make something positive come out of this mess...

Re: Analysis on The Lane Hartwell “Bubble” Controversy

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:51:48 -0000

Cybele: I'm glad that the situation with the consumerist was resolved though it definitely looks as if things got very heated there for a bit. I've always enjoyed that blog when I've stumbled upon it, I have to say that this is a pretty sad day for me.

However, I think the problem with CC is one part people not taking the time to learn it and one part the CC organization not being clear.

Riddle me this. What chance does the Consumerist have in properly providing attribution when I had been screwing it up myself for over a year. Some of the terms are little-known and rather unclear. Granted, I was providing attribution and my mistake was a technicality, but an error nonetheless.

Some people think that Prof. Lessig is anti-copyright when he is nothing of the sort. If you watch his lectures and read his writings, he is against piracy and strongly believed in the importance of copyright, but hates the copyright war he sees going on around him, especially when it chills new art forms. The Hartwell case being an excellent example.

I think the CC organization needs to focus more on its pro-copyright elements and work to clarify the misconceptions people have about it. It's cool to be anti-RIAA and pro copyright reform, but uncool to admit that the big "C" still has a place.

As far as the joke goes, I remember reading that, or a variation of it, many years ago in college and talking with my roommate about replicating the experiment. We never did. Still, that means all hope for finding the original is likely lost.

That and the M&Ms; are safe... for now.

Recliners: Glad you liked the article and, yes, I have been a bit nostalgic too.

Just to be totally cruel and intellectual about it, here is the Wikipedia entry on the topic completely with notations for every reference in the song:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_th...

Re: Update: Bubble Video Reposted

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:02:57 -0000

Blogcosm: THe reason for my optimism has little to do with Hartwell's reaction, but what I've noticed in the debate that's going on around it and how it is different from the past 6 years. When I first started dealing with copyright issues on the Web in 2001 the anti-RIAA sentiment dominated the entire debate.

There were two camps, The "pro-RIAA and gung-ho about copyright" crowd and the "copyright is dead" types. You were one or the other. Creative Commons had just come onto the scene and the DMCA notice and takedown provisions, though passed in 1998, were just then being widely used.

Defending your copyright then was messy, even if you were just targeting plagiarists. I was frequently attacked for being "old fashioned" just for wanting attribution. Crazy, but true.

If something like this had happened then, there would have been no debate. She would have been trounced, spammed, hacked, email bombed and a dozen other things until she was all but run off the Web.

Today, in late 2007, there's an actual conversation going on and, apart from a few trolls and idiots, it is a productive one. Yes, I agree Hartwell is doing something stupid. Ok, very stupid. But the issue is larger than one person's action and most people see that.

Would I have preferred her to bow out and fade away, sure, but a lot of good has and will come of this. The trouncing she is taking for "doubling down" proves that she is going beyond what most on the Web call acceptable.

I don't think that's a bad thing and I don't think it is going to hurt other artists, not too much at least.

I guess we'll see though.

Re: Protecting Content by Using Static Pages

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:14:38 -0000

Jeremy: Sounds good. First, we have to start registering all of our sites with the USCO and then pay lots of money to big pricey attorneys to file suit and then have to pay more attorneys to find them in their home countries and states.

Any bloggers not bankrupt by the start of the trial would be eligible to collect the huge winnings, which would be negated when the spammer was declared indigent.

And yes, I am kidding too...

Still, I like my earlier idea of using Grokster to stop scraping...

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/07/28/using...

Re: Update: Bubble Video Reposted

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:22:17 -0000

Welcome! Just realized how much that explanation sounded like an old man talking to his grandchildren about when he was their age.

I hope I'm not getting that old that fast...

Re: Update: Bubble Video Reposted

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:55:57 -0000

RS:

"Let a genuine old man join in."

Ok, but only if you insist... :)

Anyway, I think you hit the nail on the head there. If this had been a montage on your nightly news and not a Web viral video, the debate would have taken much the same spin.

The only difference is that your nightly use has a whole staff of people to clear rights for things like that and lawyers that vet everything that airs.

It seems unlikely that we'll ever see this kind of incident with the traditional media, so long as they remain as cautious, but I have to agree that it would lead to a very similar debate.

How did we argue about things before we had the Internet?

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:43:52 -0000

Aaron:

That's the goal! I'm glad this one hit the mark. However, I'm definitely going to be keeping an ear to the ground for a good file host. I've got a working solution, but this article exposed a few flaws in my current scheme.

Ian:

Nope, not the only one. Definitely not a freak. I actually know a lot of bloggers that do it. Truth be told, I'm kind of late to this party...

Melissa:

It really doesn't take that much longer, in fact, I find PhotoBucket to be faster than using the WP upload feature as I can add multiple photos at once.

However, since I use MarsEdit to write my blog here, it makes even more sense. I just wish the app integrated with PhotoBucket as well as it does with Flickr.

Just give it a try and see what happens. If you want to play around with the fastest method I know, go to tinypic.com. You can't beat that for speed...

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:32:33 -0000

David:

Welcome for the overview. There are a lot of reasons to consider it through and I only really named a few here.

Still, I'm glad that you like the advice. Hopefully nothing will happen at all but, if it does, it will help protect you.

"Why can’t people be more useful and less problematic?"

Easy, because then I wouldn't have a job. ;)

Then again, I don't mind being one of the millions actively working to put themselves out of business...

Re: Update: Bubble Video Reposted

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:08:26 -0000

RS:

Suddenly, I stopped pining for the "Good ol' Days". Then again, I'm not one of the attorneys that stood to make a mint off of it.

As far as "riding the tiger" goes, I've already planned my departure. When I get sick of it I'll throw all technology out the window, drive to Key West, sell my car and live as a bum on the beach there.

Poor, no technology, but I'll be happy.

You can get off the tiger, you just have to shoot it first. Remember, the front end has teeth...

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:11:20 -0000

RS:

Masterpiece? Now you're just making stuff up...

I'm glad that you liked the piece, though I wouldn't call yourself an ignoramus. Save that for those truly deserving. I have a list handy if you need suggestions...

Very welcome for the post!

Re: Five Media Hosts for Easy Offloading

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:07:05 -0000

RS: I think the reason I'd be hesitant to push the idea too hard is the same reason that Divshare is struggling. The idea itself is an easy sell, but it doesn't scale very well.

It not only requires a lot of hardware and bandwidth up front, but it has to be ready to grow and fast. Eventually you reach a point where you make enough on subscriptions to keep throwing logs on the fire, but hitting that point is no small feat.

Think of it like this. How long would YouTube have lasted without a Google buyout? Probably not long.

What would be ideal is for a company with the equipment and resources in place already to get involved in this field. The ideal targets, in my opinion, would be the large domain hosts such as Dreamhost, Midphase, GoDaddy, etc.

They have the servers, bandwidth and tech expertise to make it happen. They just haven't pounced.

I think it could work as a business very easily, one would just need a head start, either in the form of a few million dollars or a huge infrastructure in place.

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:27:15 -0000

Jon,

First off, thank you for the suggestion and the idea.

As much as I like Amazon S3, it really is an inelegant solution to the problem. Though reliable and reasonably cheap, it is far from user-friendly.

Simply put, S3 was never designed to be an image/mp3 host for a blog. It was instead designed to be the type of service that an image/mp3 host would be built upon. It can take some work dumb it down so that it can work as a fast and easy "drop and share" system.

That being said, the way that one is charged for S3 can hurt too. It chargers per GB in storage, uploaded, downloaded and a set amount per request. For most it is a very cheap service, however, I had one friend who was hit with a nearly 100 dollar bill for one month usage.

If he had gone with another service, it would have been only a tiny fraction of that.

It's a good idea, but I think someone is going to have to build off of it before it really works for your average blogger...

Re: Five Media Hosts for Easy Offloading

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:59:28 -0000

RS: Very welcome. I did some "back of the envelope" calculations. I hae 1 TB of bandwdith per month and the host I will be switching to soon has 6. That's great but, if you host MP3s and movies, you would probably need 100 times that just for a small host.

By my rough calculation, that would only give 10,000 subscribers 200 downloads per month if they each had an average of 100 5 mb files. Videos, of course, are much larger.

That, in turn, just looks at bandwidth, not storage or server power. I figure one would be looking at a dedicated rack of at least five servers with their own OC3 connection. You then have to worry about backups and redundancy.

Basically, this is simply beyond my reach.

Like I said though, some companies could do it, I'll have to write some people and pitch the idea.

Thank you for the suggestion though and getting me to think on this!

Re: Episode 38 - Backspaceware

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 15:00:47 -0000

Beux: Happy Christmas to you as well!

Re: Episode 38 - Backspaceware

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 01:35:59 -0000

Melantrys:

Merry Christmas to you as well!

Re: Episode 38 - Backspaceware

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:35:04 -0000

Lori: Thanks for the suggestion. I've considered adding such a feature but this site has been the subject of several Diggs/Slashdots/Farks in the past and not on what I, or most others, would consider the best articles.

For example, the "What Porn Can Teach Us About Piracy" article would undoubtedly be considered the most popular:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=386

But it is something of a niche article at best. It just happened to get dugg. The same hold true for the DMCA on social news sites:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/05/01/the-d...

If I were going to give a real starting point, it would be the "Stopping Internet Plagiarism" section of the site, linked in the navigation portion. It is static content, but provides a much better primer on everything this site is about than any content in the feed.

If you have anything specific that you need, feel free to email me or do a search. I've upgraded my WP search engine so it should be more useful than the default engine.

Let me know what I can do to help!

Re: The Strange Truth About the FBI Logo

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:03:12 -0000

Francisco:

I wouldn't say that this post was written in anger, no more so than many of my other punditry pieces. The only thing odd about it was that it was written originally two weeks ago and has kept being pushed back and rewritten as other items have come up. If anything, it is a victim of over-editing.

As far as focusing on U.S. law goes. There are two reasons for that. First is that I am based in the U.S., New Orleans to be more precise, and U.S. law is what I know. Second is that over half of all Web sites and all of the major search engines are based in the U.S. Thus, for better or worse, U.S. law is the law most commonly applied on the Web.

I have talked some about EU and Canadian law on this site, I also write for the European Journalism Centre, where I focus a bit more on European matters, but until the Internet becomes more geographically diverse in terms of hosting and entrepreneurship, U.S. is going to remain the focus.

Forrest:

Well put. The FBI logo isn't the problem, but it would be nice if our government at least pretended to care about us in this matter...

Will:

Considering that the FBI has been so generous in ensuring that we've "benefited" from their other programs, it is kind of odd that they'd keep this to themselves.

In all seriousness though, you are completely right. If our taxes, in part, paid for the logo, we should be able to use it.

That simple.

Thanks for the support!

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:16:59 -0000

Forrest:

A topic for another day then! Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Video: Jason Calacanis on Internet Pollution

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:49:50 -0000

Forrest:

It is funny how virtually every pressing issue comes down to hurting the immediate bottom line. Describes about four other news items doesn't it?

Is some grasping at straws allowed? I'll begrudgingly allow the usenet analogy if we just focus on the rise of spam and don't blame the spam for the death of Usenet. It is one thing to say how spam started to overrun Usenet and then compare that to the Web, which seems much more valid, than to outright blame spam for the death of Usenet.

Just my thoughts on it.

Beau:

Agreed. Especially not the extreme he pushed it.

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:19:05 -0000

Forrest: Always taking suggestions. Feel free to comment or email them to me at any time.

The situation you describe is still sadly common but not as common as it was, say, five or ten years ago. Most people seem to have figured out that things are copyrighted once you create them. That's a slight improvement.

A lot of that is actually owed to the efforts by the RIAA and MPAA. They've demonstrated with little doubt that copyright does apply to the Web. However, they've also turned a lot of public opinion against that.

The Web isn't quite the wild west it was, though there still seems to be some lawless corners. Let's hope that those areas get straightened out soon.

Much to think about, thank you for the suggestion!

Re: Analysis on The Lane Hartwell “Bubble” Controversy

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:50:57 -0000

Beux: Glad that you found it useful!

Re: Why I Embed My Images

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:06:08 -0000

Forrest:

Well, the good news is that adverse possession only deals with physical property. It literally can not happen with copyright. Otherwise, one can only imagine how much of a spike we would see in DRM with everyone rushing to protect their content lest they lose their copyright interest in it.

That being said, you make a good point. Those of us in the second tier certainly have a great deal to worry about. However, I also think I might have been a bit simplistic when I wrote earlier that the RIAA has educated the world about copyright, it is also worth nothing that more people than ever are creating and posting their works to the Web. As such, they understand the importance of these protections and, in many cases, are u sing the levers available to protect their works.

As frustrating as it is, the mere act of trying to protect your rights does a better job than doing nothing. It's not a matter of being "secure" but being more secure.

The boulder is not either at the top of the hill or the bottom, it can be somewhere in between on this issue.

Beux:

Glad that you liked it!

Re: The Strange Truth About the FBI Logo

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:07:53 -0000

Beux:

I hate to say it, but lucky you. Of course, the EU is no copyright picnic either, but at least you don't have to put up with this.

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Wrapping Up

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:32:56 -0000

Sue:

Well, it is a little bit less funny considering that you can actually copyright architectural works. There is a great deal of debate about how far that copyright extends, but buildings can receive a certain amount of protection.

Of course, in the case of the pyramids, any copyright holders have had their rights expire some 5000 years ago. Though I doubt the lighthouse is that old, it seems likely that any rights to it will have long since expired as well.

Besides, that's typically something you see the big architecture firms do, not non-profits.

Oh, and anything created by the Federal Government is in the public domain anyway. No idea who built the lighthouse...

Thank you for the comment and it is definitely worth the chuckle. However, it seems to me to be just too surreal to really laugh at...

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Wrapping Up

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:42:18 -0000

Sue:

There is actually a great deal of debate as to how far that copyright protection over an architectural work goes. I've heard of many cases where it has been used to prevent photographers from taking pictures of buildings. This is an especially large problem in NYC. One photographer, a loose acquaintance of mine, was even treated roughly over such an incident.

I don't think the law supports that (my personal opinion) and I hope that notion gets a serious test. But it goes to show that, though the fear might not have much grounding in law.

You are correct about the Federal works being in the public domain. I should have clarified that it has to be by a Federal employee for the purpose of their job. Obviously, the usual work for hire issues survive.

Thought the architect of the lighthouse is almost certainly dead and the copyright is expired, the last of the Egyptian pyramids was built just before 1800 BC. The first U.S. lighthouse was built in about 1716 AD. That makes for a difference of about 3500 years.

So, while I agree that the copyright has probably expired given the nature of the work, but stating that the lighthouse was created at the same time as the pyramids seems to be a bit of a stretch.

http://www.lighthousedepot.com/lighthousefacts.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids#...

Re: Saturday Linkroll: Wrapping Up

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:55:08 -0000

Sue: Now, you see, THAT's cheating. You mentioned Maine in your first post and got me all confused.

Yes, that is plenty old :) Strange though how something 2300 years old is far from the oldest wonder in Egypt. Makes U.S. history feel rather pathetic.

Re: 2007: A Year in Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:15:01 -0000

RS:

Eh, makes the disclaimer too wordy :P

However, I don't think I need any further reminders of my fallibility, I am married after all...

Re: 1. How to Find Plagiarism - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:16:54 -0000

San:

It depends on the type of software you are looking for. Are you looking to compare two or more documents against one another on a local machine or check something for plagiarism against the Web or other sources.

The latter is not a program that you are going to be able to download, but rather, will be a Web-based service you pay to use.

I can try to give you some links but you have to be more specific about your goal.

Re: The DMCA on 7 Photo Sharing Sites

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:10:06 -0000

Sandi:

First this is first, beautiful artwork. I would love sometime to talk with you about your art and perhaps introduce you to my wife. Though your works are very different in style, it seems you two share a common thread in subject matter and interest.

That being said, there are three problems I see with this situation.

First, the DMCA requires that OSPs ban repeat infringers. However, it is not clear about how this ban should be performed. I can ban a user account easily, but that doesn't mean squat if the person can just create another account.

Second, the DMCA does not protect the host if they profit directly from the infringement. The DMCA protects them if they merely host the image, but once they start selling it and making money off of it, that law does not theoretically apply.

Finally, Photobucket and other image sharing services have not had the copyright pressure put on them of YouTube and various audio sharing sites. To my knowledge, they have no technology that detects infringing images as they are being uploaded and filters them out. This technology does exist, I have seen it, but its use is not widespread.

It is unclear exactly what is going on right now. It could be several things.

First, we could be dealing with morons who are uploading these images for use on their own site and not thinking twice about the "buy prints" feature. That feature of PB seems to actually be little used and the vast majority of images don't sell at all.

The other option is that it could be someone uploading a bunch of art into PB so that they can have prints made for them to resell. This could be someone at a flea market or a county fair type stand.

Given the spammy nature of the username, it is unlikely that this person uplaoded it with the intent of getting revenue from strangers printing the images. I doubt that could ever be a viable option without serious promotion.

Looking at the images and the fact I was unable to find any of them linked elsewhere on the Web, the second seems likely. The good news is that 500 x 500 is far too small for a good print. You need at least three times that for even a 3 x 5 photo.

Considering that all of the images in the gallery are low-res, that calls into question my theory. It could, after all, be that the images are in a private forum the search engines can't reach.

As far as plan of attack goes, there are several things I would say.

First, no matter what, register your works with the Copyright Office immediately, if you haven't already done so. This will provide you better protection of your work and expand your options.

Second, keep up with the DMCA notices. Be a thorn in PhotoBucket's side if needed. Get them to realize how repeated this is. If you keep this up, they might realize what is going on and take steps to stop it.

One technique I used with Google is to collect as many links as possible and drop them in one notices. It tends to get people's attention.

Third, consider watermarking your photos. I know, it isn't preferred but it can help. If you want, I know some great invisible watermarking solutions we can talk about over email.

Fourth, consider contacting an attorney. You need to know if they actually sold any copies of the photo before you can consider taking any action legally. An attorney can help with that. If you need, I can also help you with that process.

Finally, keep on top of the situation. Don't get frustrated that PhotoBucket isn't doing more to help and stop taking action. There are further steps to take, but it is important to keep up the pressure in the meantime.

Please, send me an email when you get a chance and we can discuss some more detailed ways of getting on top of this and resolving this.

I have little doubt that, by working together, we can put the breaks on much of this.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Re: 2007: A Year in Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:15:07 -0000

RS: Probably not. Last time I checked suing is rarely fatal. Besides, I'm not as sue-happy as people think I am.

Re: 1. How to Find Plagiarism - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:35:05 -0000

San:

Sorry for the delay if you're comparing anything to the Web, you're going to need a Web-based solution.

iThenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com) is probably the best-known solution in this area. They, along with MyDropBox (http://www.mydropbox.com) provide services to academics and businesses and search through the largest amount of content including the Web, journals, magazines, newspapers and other sources.

For quick checks against the Web, you can use Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) pretty trivially to check for content. You might have to register for a premium account but that is only five dollars.

A company in testing right now, Bitscan (http://www.bitscan.com/), also has some promise in this area and offers the ability to paste text for free.

Another alternative, of course, is to just take key phrases and run them through Google as you would any other query. It can sometimes tell you all that you need.

There are more, but one of those five should give you what you need.

Hope that helps!

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:48:37 -0000

Sue:

Thank you for the excellent tip on Advanced Search. I am so loathe to use Google (and pass my search traffic on to them) that I am going to download it and set it up this afternoon.

I'll check out the In Series one too. However, from what you said, it sounds like my Relates Posts plugin might be doing much of that already. Still worth checking into.

And thanks for the feedback on the theme, it's the kind of encouragement I need to get off my rear and fix this thing!

Re: Reverse Content Theft: Reflections on Scoble-gate

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 12:07:58 -0000

Cybele:

I hadn't seen that article, looks like I'm even more late to this party than I thought.

However, you have a very good point. Even though some sites and services are better than others, none are perfect. It is a situation where, without 100% portability, it isn't much better.

Of course, there is always some element of lock in. If you move to a new service, you lose your URL and your identity there, that can not be helped, unless you use paid hosting, but there is a swath of incomplete solutions in this area that don't provide much more comfort for someone seeking to move.

This is an interesting problem.

Marilyn:

Glad you enjoyed it!

Blue:

That is a very frustrating limitation with LJ. I didn't realize that it was so bad. I'm going to have to update this article later.

Given that there are at least a dozen services based upon the LJ backend, insanejournal, greatestjournal, deadjournal, etc., portability was almost a given. Too bad that is not the case.

It seems rather strange to me that WP offers the ability to reimport LJ when its sister sites do not. Seems to me to be a gaping hole.

Also, good point on backing up content. Though it doesn't directly apply to this column, I was running an Ezboard years ago (let me emphasize the "years ago" part there) and they suffered a severe crash and lost a great deal of our data.

We recovered, slowly, but we had no chance to back up and restore our own data. It is a pity. I have WP doing nightly backups of my database here and emailing them to me (Gmail hates me) so I should be relatively ready for any disaster that should strike (knock on wood).

Hopefully that won't be a problem but you are right, I wish I could do that with my other services as well...

Re: Housekeeping: Site Improvements

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:16:54 -0000

Sue:

I'll probably try the new search plugin in just a bit. The related posts plugin seems to work decently for me, but then again, I'm pretty dull with titles. Most sites aren't quite as predictable as PT in that area.

Definitely let me know what you think of that serial plugin though, sounds interesting. I could use it on a few of my serials.

I think I've got the theme and I'm getting ready to launch the beta later today. I've already shot it out over my Twitter some. However, my problem wasn't that I had too many good themes to choose from. Quite the opposite really.

It seems, to me, there are a handful of very good theme designers and hundreds of people who just want easy backlinks.

I almost paid for a professional theme.

Do let me know what you think of the beta when it goes live!

Re: Guest Post: Don’t Fight Remixing, Encourage It

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:35:22 -0000

RS:

Though it isn't my article and I'm really not in a position to offer any defense or clarification, I did find this link that related to the topic:

http://www.socialmedia.biz/2007/03/remix_stephe...

That was the best reference I could find following a quick search.

(Note: RS's comment was accidentally trapped in spam filters and just posted yesterday)

MBT:

I have to agree that it isn't right for every artist or every business model. I "give away" my writings here because I make my living through consulting and paid blogging at other sites. However, the nature of my business makes my expertise more valuable than my writing.

However, if I went back to my days as a short story author/poet, things change. I never made any money off of my sites in that area. I gave away my works, but it was never with the intent of making a profit, I lost a lot of money never could have made anything from it. A print book did modestly well, but never recouped what I spent.

If I were going to be serious about making money from poetry, I would have to transition to another business model and move some of my work away from CC.

I personally try not to paint licensing with a broad brush and let people make their own decisions. What is right in one case is not right in another.

However, your point about most people who are recommending giving their works away are not making their living from their work is true. However, that's the case largely because very few people are making their living from their work.

Lane Hartwell is the exception, not the rule.

Some people have done very well giving away their works, most do not. Then again, most people fail trying to sell it the traditional way as well.

I just tell people to do what is right for them and help them enforce the rights they do keep. It's the best way for me to work.

Re: Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:54:03 -0000

Ian: I realized after your post that I might have shot myself in the foot by using such a poor graphic for the main post. I've restructured the data some on the home page, though I've kept the layout the same, and used a stronger graphic. Can you give it another look and see if it is easier to view?

RS: I'm glad that you liked the new template and find it more appealing? Was it reasonably easy to use and follow?

As far as why fix what isn't broke, a lot of it has to do with the direction PT is heading in. the current template does not offer a great deal of flexibility and prevents me from featuring content that often needs to be higher up. I love the blog layout for its simplicity, but that very simple nature is also very restrictive.

Besides, I am hoping that with a new theme and a different look, PT might stand out more and appear more professional.

Re: A Dirty Spam Trick

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:56:15 -0000

RS: Very welcome for the info. This really caught me by surprise and I'm very glad I didn't plan to actually embed the code. It is just a sleazy thing to do.

Hopefully others will learn from this and not fall into the trap...

Re: Guest Post: Don’t Fight Remixing, Encourage It

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:21:44 -0000

MBT:

"And why do you suppose that few people are making their living from their work?"

As I said, it is because very few people make a living from their work under any business model. I have not yet found a business model for artists that works consistently for fails every time.

The failure rate for a small business is about 75%. I'd wager that rate is much higher for artists. That's been true for centuries. The term "starving artist" predates the remix culture by hundreds of years.

That being said, the hypocrisy you point to is clear and something I've noticed. I can name a few sites that openly praise the remix culture but don't participate in it. However, I won't because there's little to be gained from pointing out the obvious.

My criticism of Hartwell stemmed less from the fact that she didn't want to join the remix culture, but more to the fact that she ignored fair use issues with the video and the distinct possibility that the use of the image was not an infringement. She was right to demand attribution, but I feel she overplayed her hand.

However, I have to agree that emotions got far too heated during that whole exchange. If there is one thing that I can definitely agree with Prof. Lessig on, it is that war achieves nothing.

The kind of dialog that was being hurled by both sides was uncalled for and added nothing to the debate. There is no argument from me on that point either.

Re: Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:16:47 -0000

Aaron: Done and done. Thank you very much for the specific and pointed suggestions, I agree with them both and have made the changes (though the most popular section is just a placeholder right now).

Let me know what you think!

Sue: Thanks for the feedback, the archives are gone and buried. I hadn't yet gone through and done all of my editing for the sidebar and there is still more to do, but I went ahead and took that step.

Once again, let me know what you think!

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:08:06 -0000

Aaron: Which font are you referring to? The one the articles are written in? It is smaller than the current PT font but then again I'm not running an extremely high resolution.

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:09:23 -0000

Aaron: Check out the font size now. I increased it by about ten percent and it made a big difference. Let me know if that's big enough in your mind, I agree it looks better.

On my screen, which is a measly 1280 x 1024 (thank you for making me feel completely inferior) it looks about on par with the current site in the default font.

Thank you again for all of your suggestions and help! I think your ideas have drastically improved the site!

Re: Bitscan Seeks Testers

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:22:55 -0000

Cybele: That is strange. Do you know if Copyscape does that as well? I have to wonder if there is something about your site that is limiting Bitscan's ability to grab the content. However, I have no idea what that would be.

I'm going to forward this to their staff and see what they have to say about.

Let's hope it is something they can address.

Sue:

Another strike. Too bad. Like I said, I haven't done any serious testing of it at the request of those behind the site. But I'm not as enthused as I once was.

Once again though, I'm hoping that this is something they can iron out...

Re: A Dirty Spam Trick

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:30:44 -0000

Sue: That's definitely a different site. This one works from your home page and not the RSS feed. Of course, for some reason, I can't get yours to work, it is hung up with seven people in front of me and is just spinning.

Rather frustrating I must say but it does look very neat.

Re: Guest Post: Don’t Fight Remixing, Encourage It

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:53:41 -0000

MBT: If you revisit my original commentary on the topic, I originally found fault on both sides. The Richter Scaled definitely share some, if not much of the blame. I really took and continue to take a "there are no heroes here" approach to the matter.

I really didn't take sides, and still don't have any desire to as I don't see that as productive, but once the video was removed, attribution was offered for everything and the photo was removed, Hartwell pressed on, demanding payment for the original video.

I think the situation offers lessons for both copyright holders and those seeking to use content. What I would like to see is less hostility on the issue and more learning and understanding.

As far as emailing me goes, please feel free. I'd love to discuss anything with you that tripped your radar. My email address is in the sidebar. Just drop me a line any time and thank you for the discussion as well!

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:00:31 -0000

Aaron: Ok, just because you've been so right up to this point, the h3s have been darkened and enlarged by about ten percent.

I don't know if you've looked at the CSS on this particular theme but the designations of H3 and H2 are almost meaningless due to the fact that everything uses relative fonts. The only way to really make adjustments is to change the font size.

That's probably the most frustrating problem I've had in working with this theme.

Anyway, let me know what you think. The color makes them stand out a lot more but I can barely tell the font size difference...

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:12:11 -0000

RS: Qualitative comments are both helpful and appreciated so please keep them coming!

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:13:05 -0000

Aaron: Glad you approve. I think they are bigger but the size diff is about 5% (just rechecked my math) so I doubt either of us would notice it.

Is there anything else you see that needs tweaking because I'm getting some final feedback and looking to push it live in a few days.

Re: Bitscan Seeks Testers

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:35:59 -0000

Mark: Thank you very much for stopping by and answering the comments, I know it is greatly appreciated. Please let me know what, if any, improvements you are able to make!

Cybele: Hm, I don't know what to tell you. I know that Copyscape uses the Google API so it could be a limitation of Google. If that is the case, keep your eyes open as some services are coming up that don't depend on Google in any way at all. They might break the deadlock...

Re: Second Beta of the New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:07:39 -0000

Aaron: Fixed. The theme designer used a SPAN where a DIV was much more appropriate. Should not mortally break now. Thanks for the catch on that one!

Re: 1. How to Find Plagiarism - PlagiarismToday

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:57:45 -0000

UD:

Take a look at the fourth part of this series here:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-interne...

The host in this case is Blogspot, which is owned by Google. The email address is amac at google.com. However, you're going to want to read this column about how to submit a notice to Google first.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/06/02/googl...

It should be a pretty easy submission once you know that. I've got the DMCA stock letter here:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stock-letters/

With those items, you should have no trouble resolving it. Email me if you have any questions!

Re: Plagiarism Today Headed to the UK

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:18:06 -0000

Mike:

Funny! I re-wrote the sentence to be just a little more clear though...

That's what I get for writing as I rush out the door to an appt...

Re: Google, The DMCA and You

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:55:02 -0000

Ujjwal: If you read the article, there's a way to file the notice via email. You just have to have OpenOffice or another word processor that can make PDFs.

Take a look at the "Working With Google" for the steps.

You can do it without spending any money and it does result in resolution.

Hope this helps!

Re: The Public Domain Trend

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:08:26 -0000

RS: With your first observation, clearly the editor of the site and author of the work would be the one responsible for pushing it through. It is their rights and if they intend to never enforce them then it is completely safe for others to infringe them at will.

The point though isn't so much to say that there is a danger in using the content as it is to show that the dedication to the public domain is not and can not be complete. It also means that they have an "out" in case they change their mind.

As far as your second observation goes, I don't think that is the sentiment. Reading the articles they truly believe that they are doing what is in the best interest of their readers. I feel that they are mistaken and have some experience with that, but I believe that is the angle they are coming from.

Then again, I could be wrong and they could be hiding their true motives, I have no way of knowing.

Re: Plagiarism Today Headed to the UK

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:27:24 -0000

Mr. J: Thanks for the congrats! I don't know how much time I'll have for sightseeing but I hope to sneak in at least some fun.

Mike: The original was funnier and, in a strange way, more accurate. After all, most of the conference centers on plagiarism detection. I don't know how many plagiarism fighters there will be.

Re: A Dirty Spam Trick

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:49:44 -0000

Sue: Still not working for me, still hung up at seven. Something like this is usually because the service isn't very fault tolerant. I'll wager it has something to do with incorrectly formatted feeds or something to the like.

Still, I am curious...

Re: Plagiarism Today Headed to the UK

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:17:15 -0000

Patrick: Thanks for the congrats!

RS: Thanks for the congrats as well. I'm very excited about this and I can't wait.

Of course, I'm a bit intimidated after last night. I looked long and hard at my fellow speakers and realized that I'm the only one without the word Dr. before his or her name.

I think all of the other speakers I've at least heard of and several I've read and admired. There aren't any legal minds per se but some great regulators and technologists.

I must say, this is a very intimidating crowd to be speaking in front of but a huge honor and a very exciting chance. I literally can not wait.

Re: Third Beta of New PT Layout

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:31:51 -0000

Mr. J: Glad you like it, the new version is now live! Let me know if you have any problems with it!

Re: The Public Domain Trend

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:05:20 -0000

Jana: Though I have no doubt that there is room for improvement with Zen Habits, as with everything else in the world,

in my experience it has been that people do as little as possible when using other people's work. Will some work to rewrite and improve the text? Probably as it is a novelty at the moment.

However, most people who copy the work will have no interest in improving the work or doing any work of their own. I've allowed derivatives of PT articles for as long as I can remember right now but nearly all reused copies, legit or otherwise, are verbatim.

Though there is a lot of talk about mashups and remixing, it seems few people are actually doing it, especially with text. Most copying is verbatim and much of it is plagiarized.

Perhaps I don't share their faith in humanity, but I've seen too much evidence to the contrary.

Thank you for the addition! I greatly appreciate the comment!

Re: Why Your Copyright Protection is Second Rate

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:32:43 -0000

Bobby: Thank you for your compliments! They are greatly appreciated. I do feel that it is a reflection of the U.S. way, especially considering that, once again, we pretty much stand alone in the world.

Whatever: Though I normally don't allow anonymous comments (those without a valid email) I did want to take a moment and address this.

First, moral rights can only poison the public domain if they are perpetual. In some countries they are, in some they aren't. I would rather them not be for much this reason. In many countries the moral rights on a work expire at the same time as the copyright. I don't see that as a terrible slight considering that the author has been dead for seventy years (at least in the U.S.)

The problem with free licenses can be dealt with by simply requiring the person to license their work to waive their right to enforce their moral rights. Though you can not surrender your right, you can waive your option to enforce them. That is a standard element of some contracts signed in the EU and other countries.

Finally, you don't say how it interferes with contracts but, as I said, since you can waive your enforcement rights, though not the rights themselves, there is little way moral rights can interfere with contracts. A "standard" contract might require a new clause or two, but so long as we don't make moral rights retroactive, there should be no problem.

After all, every other Western nation in the world has had moral rights for decades and has gotten along just fine. We literally have dozens of nations we can use as models for this.

I do, however, agree that there is a greater need for clarity and consistency in the area of moral rights and enforcement, this is something that would have to come from an international push.

Re: Why Your Copyright Protection is Second Rate

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:22:50 -0000

Lloyd: I have to agree with your professor that law is a poor enforcer of morality. Look at the war on drugs and prostitution for that. One could even claim file sharing falls under that umbrella.

Of course, the problem is that attribution really is not what I consider a purely moral issue. It is a moral issue in the legal sense, meaning that it is a social norm not enforced by law, but it is not a moral in that there is an injured party.

For example, one might consider me immoral if I drink on weekends at home. However, there is no victim. If I drive and put people's lives in risk or injure someone, then there is a victim and the law steps in. The classic adage of the government being there to protect us from others, not ourselves, comes into play.

On the flip side, if someone copies my work but fails to attribute it, that injures me by depriving me the reputation benefit and the readership. In that way, I kind of regard moral rights as a misnomer. Yes, they are moral rights in that following them is the moral thing to do, but stealing cars is immoral too.

Anyway, you'll have to let me know how the dialog continues, I'll be interested to hear. Thank you again for posting!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:31:20 -0000

Stephen: Thank you for stopping by!

Eldris: I think a lot of this might have to do with short-sightedness. A lot of companies create features with a combination profit/service motive and don't realize how it can be abused. Let's hope that is the case.

Dorothy: The idea has worked well before, let us hope it can work out here!

Meredith: I can understand completely. Please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

Marcus: I have to first correct you and say that you can not defeat solid fingerprinting through trivial editing. This depends on the quality of the software, but many apps are not fooled by cropping, rotation, resizing, etc.

Regarding your "pain point" idea, I have agree that is a good point but I am not really sure how well that works with the PB system. YouTube has managed to create one by limiting the uploads on non director accounts, but even director accounts are still free, it is just a matter of surrendering more personal information.

This is something PB is going to have to work on in addition to these issues.

However, if there is one thing that this whole ordeal has taught me it is that, while some people do suck, most people don't.

I do have faith that the good guys still outnumber the bad.

DeathNoteGurl: Thank you for stopping by! Please let me know if I can help in any way!

Kara: I agree completely. Hopefully with this much momentum behind us, we can push PB to rethink their policies.

Danni: Lol. Things picked up pretty quick shortly after this post went up. So many artists have really taken this issue to heart and have started to get the word out. I am completely floored by this response.

I'm going to update the article, but it is already at 550.

Everyone: Thank you so much for your support and your help! I greatly appreciate all that you have done on this matter. I can not express how overwhelming this response has been.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:10:11 -0000

Kara: That seems inevitable now. I plan to send the petition to PB formally first when it hits a thousand and update at intervals of 500. Hopefully, with this big of a push, we can institute some real change in this area.

Antonia: Thank you very much for stopping by!

Aimee: The layout problem with PB is a growing one and it is heightened by the fact that PB is designed from the ground up to be a sharing site. That isn't bad in and of itself, but most sharing sites let you embed your own images and place at least some restrictions on embedding other people's images. Most people think that, if there is a link to embed it, then it is ok.

In some cases that is actually true. If you encourage people to embed your images, you'd be a fool to complain about it later. But the problem is that so much of PBs images are infringing in and of themselves that the embedding is just another infringement.

Strangely, though I don't agree with all of their policies, I think Yahoo! Flickr has a good handle on this situation. You can only embed your own photos (correct me if I'm wrong here) and those image shave to reciprocate back to Flickr. They also prohibit the use of Flickr images in a layout.

It is much better than PB in this area.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Re: Attributor Dubs Megan Fox Hottest on the Web

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:24:40 -0000

Forrest: I think a lot of photographers and artists have been waiting for this for years. I know my wife has as a painter and photographer.

I can't answer the question about how Attributor has done this, I honestly don't know and the conversation is over my head anyway, but they seem confident that the system they have not only can be done effectively without too much computational power to be feasible, but also that it can resist minor modifications such as cropping, brightening, scaling, etc. How it works I don't know.

This is an area I leave to those who know better, but the results will speak for themselves. We'll know for certain when the product is made public.

I know I can't wait though...

Re: A Dirty Spam Trick

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:32:07 -0000

Forrest: I doubt there is any major security issue with just giving a site your URL. The reason is you give out your URL every time you post an entry to the pinging services. Also, a URL wouldn't contain information about the backend of your site. That would have to be scanned for through other means and it would be faster to get that information via other methods than waiting for people to try a silly test.

I don't trust these guys as far as I can throw them, but I think their evil nature is more focused on spamming and link building rather than hacking. Hackers have scanning tools to find flaws and don't need to use a survey or test.

I wouldn't worry too much about that, though it is an interesting question.

Re: Is Your Work an Orphan? (Part Two)

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:34:22 -0000

M: The best thing you can do in those situations is make sure to embed EXIF data into the image and include an invisible watermark in the image if at all possible. It is much harder to protect a non-watermarked image from becoming an orphan, but it is not impossible, especially with digital works.

You do have a good point though and this is something the law needs to address.

Re: Myspace: A Place for Plagiarism (Part Two)

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:37:53 -0000

M: That is a good point and another issue that needs to be addressed on Myspace. Thank you for your thoughts!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:52:36 -0000

Sandi: None of this would have been possible without you so thank YOU for all that you have done in this area. You have no idea how much it means.

JW: I really don't have anything that I can add to what you said other than to encourage others to read it. I agree that there is a need to "humanize" this problem more and that is something we should look at in future rounds. I think that is an idea we can definitely work with!

Bob: Sadly, I don't even have a FaceBook account. If anyone wants to create a group for that purpose, I will gladly link to it here.

Diana: This is just a first step, there are other acts to follow. We're playing nice and trying to work together right now, if PB doesn't want that, then we will look at all other options. However, I'm putting my faith that PB is a good site run by good people and that they will want to do the right thing.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:43:41 -0000

Mary-T: I can understand your fear. However, there are ways to protect your content. I definitely encourage you to use watermarking and other tools to help reduce the amount of theft and ensure that your works always point back to you. It may seem a pain, but if done right it can work out very well.

Rynnay: Thank you very much for your encouragement and for stopping by! If there is anything I can do to help with a specific case, please let me know!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:21:35 -0000

Jeipi: Thank you very much for your comment. I think you're probably being far too hard on your work thought. There really is no pattern to which works get taken and which done, all that has to happen is that someone, the wrong person that is, likes it enough to do so. That can happen to quite literally anyone, whether you have one fan or millions.

Elizabeth: Definitely keep an eye out. This is a very growing area of concern on the Web.

Rae: We are doing our best, we sent the petition on to PB this morning so we will see what happens!

Val: Thank you very much for your support. I agree that this is pretty ridiculous, but I am holding out hope that it is an innocent mistake and can be corrected peacefully.

AJ: Thank you for your support as well. Hopefully we can get this matter addressed and then start to push on other fronts to make the Web a better place over all!

Re: Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:45:31 -0000

E. Geiss: I'm unsure what you mean about the free and paid versions of WP. I am only familiar with the WordPress.org version which is completely free. Are you talking about WordPress.com, which is the hosted solution, and WordPress.org, which is the software itself?

If that is the case, then WordPress.com can not run plugins so it would not work on it. Your best bet there is to use FeedBurner and add the information in that way.

Regarding the spam blog giving misattribution, it can happen where there are two bylines to a story. Where that happens, the search engine can still become confused but you would much rather have the link there then not. It won't work every time in those cases, but it can work in some.

In that regard, imperfect protection is better than none.

Hope that this helps and thank you for your comment!

Re: Update: PhotoBucket Petition Takes Off

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:12:32 -0000

RS: I really can't take too much of the credit. Sandi Baker brought it to my attention, all I've done is draft the letters and work as a contact. The response has been literally overwhelming and the art community has responded in spades to it.

It will be interesting to see what PB does, I sent them the petition this morning, now we just wait for the response while watching the signature count tick up.

I hope they answer soon.

Re: RightsAgent: Total Rights Management

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:12:24 -0000

Rudy: Sorry for the confusion. The thing that threw me off though was the $5 processing fee for redeeming credits on checks. I thought it applied to Paypal transactions as well. Correcting the article now.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:09:31 -0000

Church: You are very welcome for the effort, however, try to take some heart as technology is starting to catch up to this issue. I expect some big changes within the next year!

Mandie: Thank you for your support! We already have over 2300 signatories and the list keeps growing!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:19:20 -0000

Brett: Thank you for signing the petition!

Tikurrui: Thank you for your support. I think you might be surprised though. Many people underestimate both themselves as artists and the desire for others to copy. I would be careful.

Rei: Thank you for your support and I would greatly appreciate any help you can provide in spreading the word!

Zaza: First off, thank you for your work in general in this area. To speak about the issue with the buildings, there is a lot of debate in that area. If a building is historical, it is probably in the public domain no matter what, but newer buildings have been the subject of much debate. Some believe they can be copyright protected, others don't.

I know that, from a privacy standpoint, anything you shoot from a public street or sidewalk is fair, but that does not necessary mean it is clear from a copyright one.

On that note, definitely keep the account private. The truth of the matter is that you never know. Besides, it's probably best for your purpose as you likely don't want to the world knowing everything you share.

Thank you again for everything!

Re: WordPress and Comment Spam

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:26:06 -0000

Jeff: Thanks for the tip. I'm downloading it now and will give it a try!

Re: Weekend Linkroll - Backfire

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:26:41 -0000

Valerie: Let me assure you that you were not the only one saying that...

Re: Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:24:42 -0000

Valerie: Very welcome! Glad you found it useful!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:35:49 -0000

Livion: Thank you very much for the suggestion!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:28:40 -0000

Zaza: I see what you're saying. Is it tacky in some cases? Yes. I saw plenty of this when I was in Key West. Of course, a lot of businesses work very hard to make their establishment something that others would want to photograph and be photographed with, could be just the price of doing business in that way.

Kara: I doubt such a law would ever fly. The reason is that when you are in public it is assumed that the acts you are doing are, well, public. First amendment rights would likely trump privacy rights here since there i no expectation of privacy in a public place.

Still, it isn't the strangest argument I've heard. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Daz: The one flaw is that, in this day and age, copies can be as good as originals and this doesn't help areas such as photography where all originals are really copies, unless you sell the negatives.

Just something to ponder.

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:58:57 -0000

Voyagerfan: I have to be honest and say that, the first time I ran across your site, I had assumed it was spam. I quickly learned otherwise and haven't questioned it since, but the use of blogspot did make me nervous.

For the record, it was your writing that convinced me it wasn't spam. That is something I should had probably added to this piece but, then again, most people really don't have that much control over their writing style.

Good idea to not mention the domains, though I doubt there are too many domain prospectors on this site.

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:13:10 -0000

Steve: I'm glad that you found the information useful. They are just some broad pointers but do seem to work most of the time, especially when you look at the spam blog above that scraped this post out of sheer stupidity.

However, your problem with finding original articles is really indicative of the whole problem. The one suggestion I would make is, if you find an article that is suspect, take a quote from it and do a quick Google search, limit yourself to news results if possible. That's how I track down stories for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Over all though, I think you have the right idea. You're being careful about it and not intentionally linking to spam sites, that is more than what many do!

Ian: WordPress is definitely not immune to spam but, compared to Blogspot, has a much higher ration of ham to spam. The team there has been much more effective at stopping spam blogs and their policies don't attract as many bad guys.

Thank you for doing your part though with the spam blog wave. It seems to have died down there, I suspect the sploggers are now using dedicated servers they set up. It is a much more reliable system for them.

Thank you again for all that you've done!

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:57:28 -0000

Voyagerfan: I really have no clue how Blogspot handles that kind of transfer. I am probably the worst person in the world to ask. My guess would be yes but I can't make any promises.

However, your bounce rate isn't that unusual for a blog. Most blogs I know have a very high bounce rate as people come, read the article they want and leave. I don't know what PTs is off the top of my head but I know it is well over 50%. I've taken steps to reduce it but it is the nature of the Web.

RS: Good luck launching your site. However, as I said, don't be too worried about your bounce rate. An extremely high one might be an indication of a larger problem but, let's face it, how many sites do you and I click more than one page on?

Good luck with your new site, definitely send me an email when it goes live as I'm going to want to subscribe.

Re: Weekend Linkroll - Backfire

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:20:22 -0000

RS: My non-professional opinion of Scientology is one of great concern. Looking over the history of scientology and how they've hurt people, both members and detractors, bled people dry financially and even been responsible for at least a pair of deaths, I genuinely worry about the faith and those who are in it.

Poking fun as Scientology is both deserved and fun, but there are a lot of people that are very seriously hurt by this organization.

I guess, in a strange way, I hope that by making fun of and belittling the organization we can prevent good people from getting caught up in it and help people. It is a strange situation where humor might save lives.

Strange thought isn't it?

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:28:08 -0000

Kara: No reply from PB yet, but with the holiday weekend it isn't surprising. I am going to resend the petition tomorrow to all of their addresses.

Tracye: Thank you very much for your support and I'm sorry to hear that you found so many of your images on PB. Please let me know if you need any help getting them taken down as I'll gladly do what I can!

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:21:34 -0000

Cybele: Thanks for the information. However, that is very oldskool. I can remember when Blogger didn't have comments, but I certainly wasn't using it or any other blog platform then.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:38:31 -0000

Izzy: As do we all. It seems to be what most of PB is these days for some reason.

Lillian: I stopped using PB too but I can't say it was because of this. If you have a Mac and want to use a more responsible service, I highly recommend Skitch.com. It's a great program and a great service.

Jennifer: Thank you for your support. Hopefully, with enough people like yourself, we can force real change.

Laina: I do indeed disagree with you and would love to discuss this in more detail later, but this is not the time nor the place. Right now what is important is that artists work together on this issue. I am glad that you support it. Thank you.

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:42:12 -0000

Karl: I kind of file that under the "other defaults" heading. If you can't at least create real categories, don't bother creating a blog. I've at least replaced uncategorized with "Articles" as my default.

But yes, an excellent point. categories are crucial. You can't have just one (the default) and you can't have eighteen million either. I've seen both and both are clearly spammy in nature...

Re: Video: How to Use Google Alerts

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:40:47 -0000

Justin: Though I'm glad to hear that no one seems to have plagiarized your work yet, I have to wonder how and why you posted them to Youtube? Seems to be an odd medium for poetry.

To answer your questions. I find it useful to save emails. It makes it easy for me to search cases that I've handled and see if a site has come up before. Though you have to use title or URL, it works well for that purpose. Also, you can search for all of the cases of a particular work if you wanted, so long as you know the phrase you used.

Also, I do still write poetry, though not as often as I once did. I haven't been putting them online though as my writing has been taking strange turns lately.

As far as messaging me on Twitter, depends on the client that you're using. If you're using the Web site, just go to my profile and click "Message Plagiarismtoday"

Hope that helps!

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:47:02 -0000

Lee: No, not oblivious. Actually LJ has done a very good job keeping the spam blogs at bay so the fact you haven't seen anything spammy on the service is actually a good sign. Very welcome for all of the info though, let me know if I can help in any way!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:15:04 -0000

Haru-chans: Watermarking everything is a good idea in general. As long as you do that, your work is probably safe for the most part. However, definitely keep your eyes open, you never know what you might find.

Traci: The whole matter is very frustrating but I am grateful for people like yourself supporting this!

Re: 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:18:15 -0000

Voyagerfan: If you follow WPs import instructions, it can grab your comments. I noticed that when I was doing my research on data portability a while back.

Re: Weekend Linkroll - Backfire

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:21:01 -0000

RS: Operation Clambake is the site was going to recommend but you beat me to it. For those who are reading this but haven't seen the site, it is http://www.xenu.net/. I found the tale of Lisa McPherson especially damming.

Re: Video: How to Use Google Alerts

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:23:32 -0000

Voyagerfan: Give me a week or two and I should have them up. Those things take a lot longer to make than it seems!

Justin: That is an interesting strategy, has it worked for you? I also doubt that putting your poetry into Youtube increases the risk, since there is no easy copy/paste, people are less likely to reuse it. However, they are also not searchable. It's a give and take deal.

Re: The Public Domain Trend

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:30:51 -0000

Trent: I owe you a deep apology. Defensio ate your comment and I was in my spam folder today cleaning out some things when I saw it. This is my fault for not checking that folder regularly.

I know I'm too late with this but I wanted to say that, while I understand the desire to help and remove as many restrictions as possible, I also do that here with PT, though not to the same degree, by allowing and even encouraging plagiarism, you open the door for scam artists to shams to build a false reputation on your work and use that reputation to defraud others. Your desire to help people might have put them in danger of being lied to and deceived.

I don't see attribution as being that great of a requirement. There is no burden, that I see, when being asked to state where something is from. That knowledge enables readers to not only reward the original author, but research that person and perhaps discover even more works that can help them.

Knowledge is power, I agree with that. But sometimes, to a reader, the knowledge of who wrote a work is as important as what is contained inside.

That is just my experience, I still respect your decision and wish you the best of luck with it.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:41:49 -0000

Lunah: Thank you for your support, but don't think that your art may not some day be stolen, if it hasn't already. As artists, we are always hardest on our own creations...

Re: Video: How to Use Google Alerts

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:46:06 -0000

Justin: I doubt in this day of copy and paste you're going to find many who will jot down a poem and, if you mark your videos as being from you, as I do with my into screens, I doubt many will have the desire to manipulate them. It can be done, but it is easier to move on and find something else that you can just select and paste.

Noel: No, I haven't, I'm bookmarking the site now. It's an interesting idea but one of the perks of email is the ability to tag and file it (not that I'm actually doing any of that) I'm not sure how well that would work here.

Still, a very neat site and a very cool idea.

RS: I try to keep my literature separate from my writing here for a lot of reasons, would it be acceptable if I emailed you a link?

Re: Google Domain Parking, Spam and Adsense

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:49:10 -0000

RS: Thank you very much for the compliments, this ended up being something I ran across and couldn't stop myself from writing about. I felt it was too important.

It really is a dastardly thing Google is doing...

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:01:30 -0000

John: I'm glad that I waited a few days to respond to your comment. I only wish I had known this morning, before I recorded my podcast, what I knew now.

First, this is not your case and the ruling does not apply, in any way, to the case discussed above. The matter to which you are referring is completely unrelated other than having some similar facts.

Second, the could did NOT rule that the posting of a cease and desist letter was an infringement. All that was ruled is that there was prima facie evidence of a potential infringement, which was all that was needed to obtain a subpoena. That, in turn, was established by the sole act of obtaining a USCO registration, something you yourself admit is a "rubber stamp" process.

Let us be clear here. There was no infringement ruled, no damages were awarded and all that was obtained was a subpeona to get an IP address (as well as any other information) of the person who posted the cease and desist letter

I have to say that I was suspicious when your announcement contained a truncated version of the decision. At eight pages it wasn't particularly long and judges decisions are generally in the public domain as a work of the Federal government.

You can read the full decision, along with much better analysis of it, here:

http://www.joegratz.net/archives/2008/01/26/fed...

And yes, Mr. Gratz is an attorney.

It is also worth noting that the decision was a split verdict. They obtained the right to obtain information about the individual who posted the letter, but not the intended target, the person posting the allegedly defamatory information. This ruling was not lopsided by any stretch and could easily be viewed as a defeat.

Finally, you'll note that I said above that I have "little doubt" that a cease and desist letter is protected, something I stand by, but what is much more debatable is whether or not posting it is an infringement. I think a strong fair use argument can be made, but such an argument was NOT available in this case.

There are still many unanswered questions in this case and on this topic. The hardest questions remain.

As I see it, this issue is no more resolved now than it was before the decision was filed. Others seem to agree.

Thank you very much for your comment.

Re: DreamHost Talks DMCA

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:42:18 -0000

Patric: If you don't mind, can you forward me the details of your case to my email address? I am jonathan at plagiarismtoday.com Dreamhost does handle DMCA notices very well but is particular about how they are submitted. Perhaps I can help find out what the issue is.

Re: Video: How to Use Google Alerts

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:48:00 -0000

RS: I sent the letter a few moments ago, let me know if you have any thoughts!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:37:15 -0000

Nichole: Thank you very much for your support!

Re: Using Reverse IP to Track Spammers

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:18:01 -0000

Sue: Glad you found it useful! Just out of curiosity, what other uses do you have in mind? I can think of a few but I'd love to hear more.

Re: Using Reverse IP to Track Spammers

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:19:14 -0000

Sue: The tool has been working fine for me, though it is under some heavy load as I did learn about it on the social news sites. If it continues to be buggy, give it a few days.

You can also try this site as a backup:

http://whois.webhosting.info/

Two very good suggestions on how to use the tool. I like the idea about a check for overselling space but I can't do that with MT as I'm on a grid server. If it were one computer we would be WAAAAY oversold, but as it is right now we're ok.

However, I'll use that before I switch to any host. Very neat idea.

As far as my ideas go, one thing I've done in the past is, when finding that a friend's site is down, use it to look up other domains on the server and test those. That way, I can write them if the problem is exclusive to their site. If it is a host issue, I don't worry about it too much as there isn't much I can do.

That was my thought since it can be difficult to find other sites on the same host to check against.

Thanks for the ideas!

Re: Using Reverse IP to Track Spammers

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:07:57 -0000

Bob: To do that you would need a class C network reverse domain lookup. That would find all of the domains in an IP range. However, I can't find such a tool, probably because it would be so problematic to host and run. One search would require 254 times the effort or a regular reverse IP domain search.

If you know two domains are likely connected, you can use a Class C lookup to see if they are likely on the same host here:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/class-c-checker/

However, I can't find any tools that perform that kind of search off the shelf.

Great site for more tools! Thank you for sharing.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:08:37 -0000

Steff: Thank you for your support and I have to agree with you. It is sick how deep it goes sometimes.

Re: Allpoetry.com - Still Great

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:22:12 -0000

Mike: First off, thank you very much for stopping by. I stand by this article very strongly even today and have had nothing but positive experiences with the helpers at AP. You guys truly are a model for how other community sites, especially poetry sites, should handle these issues.

Thank you for all that you do.

Re: Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:24:46 -0000

Michael: I don't say this often, especially here. But I think the correct response is "Dammit".

It had such promise but it is back to the drawing board, at least in this case. Was your site in the supplemental already by some chance?

Just wondering because it might be harder to break out.

Hope that you're doing well and let me know if you want any help dealing with the scraper!

Re: Using Reverse IP to Track Spammers

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:29:04 -0000

Forrest: Agreed. If you look up PT you'll see about 300 or so other domains on the same IP. That isn't a huge surprise given that I'm on a grid host where multiple servers can share the same IP.

That being said, if you start out with a spam blog, odds are that they aren't going to be sharing space with legitimate sites. Some do, but it isn't economical to pay 5 dollars a month for each domain when you can pay 100 and host as many as you think up. Few spam blogs mingle with legitimate sites.

Still, it can happen and it is well worth reiterating the danger here. Excellent point.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:22:25 -0000

Brian: Thank you for your support, hopefully they'll see that and correct the system.

Re: Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:31:44 -0000

TN: I read the entry. I don't think that many doubted that cease and desist letters could be copyright protected, the question is whether or not it is an infringement to post them. I've seen some VERY creative C&Ds; in my time so it doesn't shock me that they have all that is required to be protected by copyright.

He says its not fair use, other attorneys, including those not affiliated with the groups he lists, feel otherwise. That's the nature of the beast. I say something is fair use, someone else disagrees, we go to court and it gets fought out. Until a court actually rules on the infringement element of posting such letters, we won't really know.

Even then, every case will have to be decided on a per use basis. Howevever, the Streisand effect basically makes it so that, if a company is attacked by lies, trying to bury them with C&Ds; is a bad idea. The only way to counter a lie is with truth.

That's my experience at least and that seems to be what Mr. Dozier is yet to figure out. The law and legal threats are not the cure for all business ills.

Re: Update: PhotoBucket Responds

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:44:01 -0000

RS: It is classic non-speak. I can tell it was written by the PR firm, not the people that actually run the site. It seems plausible to me that they didn't even receive the information.

Sandi: It is hard to say really. I spoke first with a media rep from Fox and then with a PR rep that works with PhotoBucket then they emailed me the statement after confirming my email address. My wager, if I am entitled to bet on this, is that it went straight from Fox to their PR firm and bypassed the actual higher ups.

That's just a guess though.

I have to agree completely that we need to get the word out about this. I'm hoping that my article at the BH was a good start in that and it seems to be a popular piece, one of my better read ones on that site.

There's more coming on this though, once things calm down for me a bit after Mardi Gras, there will be more on this issue!

Meredith: Agreed, totally. My hope is that this is a screw up in the chain of commands as Sandi put it, but I have to admit that excuse is wearing thin quickly.

I do have some backup plans though and will be writing more soon!

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:04:03 -0000

Laura: Thank you for the information. For the record, the site is omgimages. net, not .com. It's an interesting site but I personally would favor Flickr or Webshots. Since I work largely with screengrabs, I work with Skitch.com the most.

As far as tips go, the watermark is best if you are comfortable with it. Also, keep your images lower resolution if possible. The higher the resolution, the bigger they can be printed.

Also, be sure to edit your EXIF data in your image to include your personal information. It may or may not make the image more searchable, but it can definitely help you prove ownership if needed.

Hope that helps!

Re: Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:07:16 -0000

Michael: I understand your frustration. If you want to start a fistfight at an SEO conference, just walk idly into the room and ask aloud "Is there a penalty for duplicate content?" and walk away before the first blows are thrown.

No one seems to be able to agree on some of the most fundamental aspects of SEO and when you even have Matt Cutts giving out advice that seems to fail as often as it works, you know there are problems.

In the end, filing the DMCA notice was likely your best move. Outside of targeting the host as well, there isn't much that you can do in this case.

I hope that you're doing well and it looks as if it is back to the drawing board as they say.

Re: WordPress Podcast - Episode 33

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:46:42 -0000

Joshnunn: A neat idea, but I doubt the version numbers would work with us. If there are no additional security releases between now and March, the next version will be 2.5. That right there would mess up the ordering system.

Besides, we cover more than new versions of WP, we talk about plugins, changes to wordpress.com and other things.

It would be cool to have it mach up, but I think Charles is going to want to keep it as it is and I don't know how practical it would be to change.

Neat idea though!

Re: iStockPhoto Comes Under Fire

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:58:32 -0000

Kelly: First off, thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I attempted to send an email to kara yesterday. However, sent the email as I was leaving to go across the river and did not get a chance to verify if it had sent. I've been having trouble with my ISPs servers so it is entirely probably it didn't send. I am sorry.

Thank you for the update on the status of the image and on your policy. However, I have to ask, what is the exact procedure for reporting a copyright violation on iStock apart from the policy described? Is there an email address one can contact?

Thank you very much for your feedback and I will be emailing you in a moment with further questions and be updating this article.

Thank you again.

Re: Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:12:20 -0000

Shannon: No worries about the rambling and thank you for your thoughts. I have to agree completely that PB is inviting greater disaster down the road. Searches for Harry Potter, Disney and other known staunchly protected copyrights turn up a large number of results. How long is it until one of them discover the situation and take action.

I wouldn't want to be in PBs shoes when that happens.

Thank you for your thoughts!

Re: Update: PhotoBucket Responds

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:21:37 -0000

Pariah: I don't think the response is a surprise to anyone. Disappointing, but not surprising. I have to agree with you for the most part, but I think that enough bad publicity can start to seriously hurt a company's bottom line. Let's hope that starts to happen here and that they notice.

Re: OpenDiary.com: Nobody’s Home

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:29:51 -0000

Everyone: I won't spend long on this but it appears that OpenDiary has been down for a few days and that many of its members have been gravitating here since this entry still ranks high in the search results for the site.

Let me be clear on this. I had nothing to do with the current outage. My issues with OpenDiary were resolved over two years ago. You can read the update here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/01/04/updat...

The diary master responded, removed the site from the Villains list and have had no interaction with the site since there.

I am sorry. You are free to discuss here but I am not the cause of this in any way.

Re: My Disappointment With Creative Commons

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:52:15 -0000

Sue: You are correct. You can, as I do on this site actually, have both a Creative Commons License and use the copyright symbol. That's not a duplicity at all in and of itself.

The problem with the image is the "All Rights Reserved". If you use a CC license, you are surrendering some rights to the work so "All Rights Reserved" is not technically accurate. Most people who use CC use the tag line "Some Rights Reserved" instead.

I think a lot of people are just now really starting to deal with copyright in a meaningful way. Before the Web, it really was not something Joe Citizen messed with that much but now with the Web and file sharing, it is bumping into the lives of everyday people more and more often. That's where the education and the need for more education is coming from.

Very welcome for the site and thank you for the compliments!

Re: My Disappointment With Creative Commons

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:53:39 -0000

Sue: Just noticed, when I captured the image I put the circle in the wrong place. Changing it out now...

Re: My Disappointment With Creative Commons

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:22:20 -0000

Sue: Thanks for pointing out the error in my circle, I'm glad it is more clear now. My wife is the artist in the family, I can't even draw a circle...

I think you did tell me but I appreciate it greatly! I'm trying to include more visuals including images and video. It's been a lot of fun and I think it's made the site not just easier on the eyes, but more effective.

That's just me though. I know of a few that will disagree...

Re: My Disappointment With Creative Commons

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:33:09 -0000

Dawn: I understand and agree that, in a way, CC may have further muddled the copyright issue on the Web in its entirety. There are some who do think that everything on the Web is CC, which I suppose is a step above public domain at least, and treat the content accordingly.

That's yet another area where the education and public outreach by CC has been lacking and yet another space for improvement.

However, I'm not ready to criticize anyone who licenses work under CC. Not only would it be hypocritical, but I encourage everyone to make their own decisions about such things. Does a wide body of CC licensed work make it harder to sell work to others? I'm dubious about that. CC licensed work seems to be used mostly by people who can't afford to pay for work. I use it occasionally for images on this site and doubt that I would be in a position to pay for images regularly, save maybe dollar stock photos.

The second problem is that companies that use content from others are typically concerned about covering all legal bases and pay for a work, with a contract in hand, rather than just trust a CC license found on the Web.

Is it probably that it is having a negative effect? Yes. But I'd guess the effect is not as strong as thought, after all, as my own experience shows, CC work isn't being used that much anyway.

Liz: Thank you for the compliments, they are greatly appreciated. I'm glad that the article helped clear up some issues but definitely feel free to ask if there are any questions that I can answer.

I will gladly do what I can!

Re: Update: PhotoBucket Responds

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:44:07 -0000

Dawn: Why are we bothering with a petition? There are many reasons, the first is that it was something simple we could right then and there, but it also serves as a touchstone. Though it would be nice if it swayed PB to change, if it doesn't, we have the information and mandate needed to launch better-coordinated plans in the future. It was a first step to test people's interest in this matter and get them into tone place. From there, we can things far beyond the petition itself and in a much more coordinated manner than if we had just started a secondary campaign from the beginning.

Noel: I agree that you should read the TOS and that users who sign up for PB without setting their accounts to private are probably without recourse. However, I sharply disagree with the idea that PB is in the clear from third party artists.

The problem is that the TOS is an agreement between PB and the person who registers the account. A third party artist that is not a member is not a party to that agreement. Their arrangement with PB is governed by the law at large. The DMCA gives hosts safe harbor but one of the exceptions is if they profit directly from the infringement, as they do here.

If PB were found liable for the infringement, they could then pursue the uploader for violating their TOS and work to reclaim those damages, but that would be a separate case.

Simply put, an artist that has not signed up with PB can not be held accountable to their terms of service and the law is pretty clear about the liability of hosts in these cases.

Standard caveats apply.