Multiple Roles on ELI and the bigger copyright extortion fight

[Matthew Chan]

I wanted to throw this out as food for thought.

We all contribute in different ways.  See if some of these titles fit you.  Perhaps you have other titles that I have not listed.

Advocate, Activist, Defender, Strategist, Figurehead, Community Leader, Community Follower, Reporter, Investigator, Broadcaster, Blogger, Advisor, Consultant, Informant, Financial Contributor.

Most of these are roles Oscar and I have assumed at one point or another during the last 4 years.  Clearly, Robert has taken on many of these roles over time in the last year. 

I will tell you I am shifting away from some of these roles but increasing other roles. The same could be said of other members within our community.

Why don't all of you think about how you fit in the big picture?  Everyone of you do fit somewhere. You also get to determine how little or how far you ultimately go.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

I agree 100% we all have our place, and I'll throw in a couple of other titles that were not mentioned...I even have my own list of candidates for these titles, or least I associate certain forum members as the goto people for certain aspects

Cult Leader - M. Chan
Resident Expert - Oscar
Technical Guru - Lucia
Voice of Reason - McFilms
Legal Researcher - SG
Troll - Glen Carner ( just had to throw him in here)

I think it's safe to say that the rest of the regulars all have the titles of:
Advocate, Activist, Defender,Community Follower

[lucia]

Speaking of which....
As you know, picscout is a bot of sorts.  I'm finally set up to start explaining steps people can take to control bots.  When I got my getty letter I could see that all image scraping bots were absolutely raping my site on a daily basis.  I thought I'd be able to control things quickly, but the more I did, the more I realized that if you try to focus on image bots only, you will fail. You have to block things much more broadly. Otherwise, you leave big holes because any bot can change IP ranges or user agents.  ( I also realize that if you have a copyright violation on your site, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it from being found. But it's still good to avoid permitting numerous bots to race through every image in your wp-contents/upload directory loading an image a second on a blog that's been posting more than 10 images a week for 4 years!  And then returning an hour later to start right over!! Ouch!)

Anyway, I've got an outline up. I will be more-or-less following that outline, sometimes skipping sections. Early next week, I'm going to discuss setting up the dynamic robots.txt and then using it with ZBblock. 

I know everyone here will want to jump to "images" right away. But unfortunately, I don't think you can properly protect images until you have other things going first. 

And remember: You cannot fully protect publicly displayed images from a copyright right bot or human employed by a copyright agency. And really, that shouldn't be anyone's goal.  Ethics and the law say you should respect copyright.  But you can do things to slow down copyright and other bots-- and you should. Because letting them rip through your site costs you more in hosting costs-- and it can also make it more difficult to identify dangerous bots trying to hack into your site. (And bots are trying to hack into your site. I guarantee.)

[Matthew Chan]

Lucia,

If you decide to prepare a "guideline" or "outline" of instructions of how to block Picscout bots and their ilk, I will be happy to spotlight it and add it to the ELI Blog side of things where it is more prominent. You would, of course, be given public credit for it. I am happy to give credit where credit is fully due in these important topics as the core ELI team cannot be and do everything.

No one seems to have a "definitive" set of instructions or guidelines to lock out Picscout bots, etc.  It sounds just like the thing ELI Community can take on. It seems you and Robert have done a lot of work on this front. I know Robert has implemented many previously discussed techniques.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

Nothing I have done can compare to what Lucia is doing technically...I've simply blocked every israel IP range at the firewall / server level..most users cannot do this for several reason, and some users like Lucia have a worldwide audience..blocking by IP range is effective, but has it's downside. IF piscout were to move the the US I'd be starting all over, but I also don't see that happening, they would then have to play by our rules in some respects.

[lucia]

Thanks! Any publicity is good. 
No one seems to have a "definitive" set of instructions or guidelines to lock out Picscout bots, etc.
There is no definitive set of instructions to lock out Picscout bots. Such a thing will never exist. As long as someone makes a file publicly accessible in some way, a bot can get to it. 

What I am trying to do is broader.  But I do block many avenues that would image bots cause big problems for blogs.  But for those willing to go through the outline will be able to dramatically reduce the amount of scraping-- and that will interfere with Picscout tine eye etc.  But it's not going to be a short outline. It's a systems of a lot of simple things -- many of which are useful to do anyway-- all implemented together. And then a few "biggies" that no one does that draw everything together.

Nothing I have done can compare to what Lucia is doing technically...

Part of what I've been doing is collecting information. I am now collecting "kill" logs from 9 domains-- only 2 controlled by me.  (Initially, I only collected mine. Now, I hunt for the public killed_log.txt files and suck in data.)
 
That means I'm starting to be able to search to find patterns. Robert-- have a look at

http://bannasties.com/BanNastiesScripts/ShowDetailsWhy.php?Why=image&Days=90
That's a whole bunch of "things" --- probably mostly bots-- who asked for images in ways that the web admins thought was "suspicious". Many are from my sites-- because I am very suspicious of lots of stuff and created lots of special blocking "rules" for things that look like image scraping. Most of the other guys run forums and have no images but run ZB Block with with the default rules only (or rules that they need for their site.) So any search with Why=image in it is going to find more reports from me than anyone else.

I'm actually hoping I can get people to start using ZBblock   publish their killed_log.txt somewhere public so I can collect more data.   There are lots of ways to block. But someways of blocking help us build collective intelligence. Other ways don't.

(If anyone wants to install ZB block somewhere I'd be happy to help out. I'd ask them to also put their killed_log.txt somewhere readable so I could have my script collect data.  I'd love, love, love if Matt started using ZB block. But there is a somewhat steep learning curve-- and you need your audience to understand what's going on while you are implementing it. I don't think he'd be happy with the program if he just loaded it up and didn't have someone used to the product there to know to figure out what to do if someone does get blocked.  Some times the author can't anticipate which "rules" will be incompatible with certain software-- though relatively few boo-boos happen. )


and some users like Lucia have a worldwide audience
Yep. I have a worldwide traffic-- and quite a bit. So I am reluctant to just block Israel. I also so see scraping from other countries.  It's a blog which automatically build decent self-linking structure and "pings", so it attracts lots of "stuff".  And I have a lot of internal links (Google page ran 6) so  a lot of services end up pointed at me. I may be ideally positioned to detect patterns, new bot user agents, new IP ranges and so on.  So, I'm really trying to get this collective intelligence goings.


On getting my info out:
I got the new domain so that I can co-locates all the stuff I have learned and organize the information in a systematic way. If you visit the link to the "outline" now, you'll see one of the items in the outline is now a hyperlink. See the 'blue' here: http://blog.bannasties.com/controlling-exploitative-bots-aka-nasties/

My server logs show it is being crawled... (This is going to get crawled. Lots of people search on the really boring looking stuff on some of the articles I robo-post.)

I'm going to be filling in the "how to" parts first and the "why" articles will be posted later. 

[Matthew Chan]

Lucia,

Allow me to publicly commend you for your efforts. I don't know if it is coincidence or not but there are a whole bunch of little ELI-offspring projects taking root by all of you in the community. I personally think it is awesome many of you are taking the initiative to do these things and pursuing avenues of fighting copyright extortionists that Oscar and I have never thought of.

As far as I am concerned, I believe my job is to build up and facilitate a platform for people's "mini-projects".  What that means is whatever your efforts might be, it becomes magnified and communicated large scale to hundreds and thousands of people worldwide.

These posts do get read.  Sometimes not immediately but they do get read.  The content that Oscar and I created 4 years ago still get read today.  Thanks to Google, important relevant content will continue to live on even after your work and writings are completed.  Never forget that.

Robert has been doing a good job keeping me in the loop. I do my best to directly monitor all the posts and forums but it is difficult for me nowadays with my non-ELI business responsibilities.

Things continue to change and evolve.  I have mixed feelings about going "International".  I get concerned that when you try to serve too many people, no one is well-served.

[lucia]

As far as I am concerned, I believe my job is to build up and facilitate a platform for people's "mini-projects".  What that means is whatever your efforts might be, it becomes magnified and communicated large scale to hundreds and thousands of people worldwide.

That's what I see it as too!

Things continue to change and evolve.  I have mixed feelings about going "International".  I get concerned that when you try to serve too many people, no one is well-served.

I think I just expressed a similar thought on another thread.

But I don't think Robert's comment about my site being international was meant to suggest you ought think about providing international support.
What Robert meant by my having an international audience is that I have a blog that's read by people in a lot of countries. In contrast, he mostly creates business oriented web sites whose market is the US. What that means is that we have different options when limiting bot traffic.  For many small businesses (say a Vet marketing services in Iowa) if you blocked IP outside the US, your business would not suffer even a tiny bit. Other businesses could limit to "everyone in the English speaking world".  In contrast, I really truly have visitors from all over on any given day.  So the path of blocking "Israel" is not  attractive to me. But it could be a very good way for someone running a US based very local small business. 

Oddly enough, if ELI were going full bore on bot blocking you would fall in my camp: your audience in international even if you, Matt, are focusing on US advice. So no matter what bot/picscout etc. issues you had, you would not want to block all IPs in particular countries to solve the problem.  But some of our visitors might-- and possibly should do so.

[April Brown (AuctionApril)]

Aside from being a great audience for this forum - I intend to focus on the media at whatever capacity time, my job and life permits. The Beware Don't Share message is important and prevents others from innocently playing into the extortion scheme and is here to stay. Over time, I expect the ELI forum to be known as the David that slew the Getty Giant. Linda Ellis? She is already a melting witch. She may be over sooner than we think. John Jolin? There aint enough Viagra to set him upright. More will come and with ELI they too will be done.

[Greg Troy (KeepFighting)]

April,

If you're starting up your interviews again when you are talking to the producers and making arrangements please feel free to let them know if they would like to speak to a Getty victim firsthand I would be more than happy to come on and share my experiences dealing with Getty and my good Getty penpal Douglas Bieker. Who knows maybe we could even do some together and tagteam team Linda and Getty.

Aside from being a great audience for this forum - I intend to focus on the media at whatever capacity time, my job and life permits. The Beware Don't Share message is important and prevents others from innocently playing into the extortion scheme and is here to stay. Over time, I expect the ELI forum to be known as the David that slew the Getty Giant. Linda Ellis? She is already a melting witch. She may be over sooner than we think. John Jolin? There aint enough Viagra to set him upright. More will come and with ELI they too will be done.

[Oscar Michelen]

The goal of this site and forum was to educate folks about what was going on to let people know that they did not have to fold and pay Getty. It has now grown to be a great community of energetic, vibrant, witty and intelligent people all willing to work collectively to fight these trolls. I agree with Matt that expanding internationally may be too much right now, but I also think that as the team has grown, we have been able to expand into other topics and that is the future of the ELI site - a go-to place to learn how to fight copyright trolling! 

[Greg Troy (KeepFighting)]

I couldn't agree with you more Oscar. 

The goal of this site and forum was to educate folks about what was going on to let people know that they did not have to fold and pay Getty. It has now grown to be a great community of energetic, vibrant, witty and intelligent people all willing to work collectively to fight these trolls. I agree with Matt that expanding internationally may be too much right now, but I also think that as the team has grown, we have been able to expand into other topics and that is the future of the ELI site - a go-to place to learn how to fight copyright trolling!