Messages

316

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Images and scented trees update.

« on: May 25, 2012, 10:26:30 PM »

... as well as the mechanical patent for the ridges on the edge of the their flying disc design, which cause the air disturbance known as the "Bernoulli effect" ...

No. No! The ridges don't cause the Bernoulli effect. Like dimples on a golf ball they trip transition to turbulence and delays prevents flow separation. (Flow separation is often bad.  See http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/q0215.shtml for golf balls. Separation also causes stalling of airfoils and a number of other things.)

Ok... You may now go back to legal issues.

Lucia, you must be a player! Freestyler? Ultimate? I love anything that has to do with chasing the bee. I can make a frisbee fly much more accurately than a golf ball, that's for sure! In fact, I should sell my clubs and switch to Frisbee golf.

Thanks for the physics lesson, what do I know anyway? I got the wrong impression from reading stuff like this: http://web.mit.edu/womens-ult/www/smite/frisbee_physics.pdf

Anyway, Lucia, getting back to our core topic, I'd like to personally thank you for all the knowledge you've shared with the forum about protecting our server from bad bots. I've set up the trap and have been snagging one every couple of days, at least. The other day I realized I had blocked Copyscape when I tried to use their service to see if a client's site had duplicate content issues. I guess their crawler doesn't have good manners, so they're red-carded unless I need to use the service, at which time I can take down the IP block.

The one thing I'm still doing that's a little primitive is handling the IP blocking manually. I want to check each bot before I block it to make sure I'm not excluding a bot I need. For example, some SEO services like Alexa use crawlers to keep statistics on a server, but usually the ethical vendors warn you about the visits and ask you to whitelist them so they can do their work. That's pretty much asking for permission and I'm good with that.

I'm building up a fairly extensive list of IP numbers. I've been ignoring the user agents because they lie about those all the time anyway. The other day I caught a very rude comment spammer pretending to be a generic IE browser. So rude.

To all new members, search on that Google bar up there for IP blocking or simply for Lucia's posts. There's a great wealth of knowledge. You don't have to let the bandwidth hogs crash into your server — there's a lot you can do to mitigate that problem and in my humble opinion it's worth the time and effort.

P.S. Buddhapi, you're funny. Respect the mighty Frisbee®, it's the ONLY ONE that works!

317

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: A Man of Principal and Not Interest

« on: May 25, 2012, 03:50:48 AM »

Then he wrote a letter to the editor in 2009 to further champion campaign finance reform:

Let Big Island voters have public funding

Hawaii has a history of people who have access to lots of money taking advantage of those who don't have access to lots of money. Fair elections helps level the playing field.

Now we have the chance to allow Big Island candidates to spend less time raising money and more time listening to the people.

Given the economic situation, the responsible thing to do would be to enact Act 244 so that people start using the public funding program again. When taxpayers see that the public funding program is working, they will be more willing to donate $3 to the election fund again. Delaying the Fair Elections Act is fiscally irresponsible right now.

Glen Carner

Captain Cook, Hawaii


http://archives.starbulletin.com/content/20090311_Letters_to_the_editor

318

Getty Images Letter Forum / A Man of Principal and Not Interest

« on: May 25, 2012, 03:38:40 AM »

Glen Carner actively lobbied for Clean Money in Hawaii in 2007! He wants his POLITICIANS to be ETHICAL!

BahahahaHA!

http://records.co.hawaii.hi.us/WebLink8/0/doc/34445/Page1.aspx

319

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Images and scented trees update.

« on: May 25, 2012, 01:19:49 AM »

Oscar moved his excellent comment about the scented trees from the Tejas Research thread to this topic, so I'll move my question over too...

Does this mean any image Getty sells that may have a copyrighted item in it anywhere could be trolled by the copyright owners? For example, a picture of a Barbie® or a picture of a man playing with a Frisbee®?

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/female-doll-dressed-as-beauty-queen-high-res-stock-photography/BA16947

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/hand-of-free-style-frisbee-player-royalty-free-image/124360264

I believe Wham-O owns the registered trademark for the brand name "Frisbee®", which Getty uses with a lowercase F in the description, as well as the mechanical patent for the ridges on the edge of the their flying disc design, which cause the air disturbance known as the "Bernoulli effect" which is exactly why a real Frisbee® flies so righteously while all the wannabee flying discs totally suck.

320

Hawaiian Letters & Lawsuits Forum / Re: Aloha Plastic Surgery Submits Counterclaim

« on: May 25, 2012, 01:07:23 AM »

Perhaps Aloha has been following ELI's posts on HAN/VKT's dubious practices. Particularly Mr. Glen Carner's. In case the Aloha folks missed it before, here's a link to some baitpaper Mr. Carner has failed to remove from Brothersoft.com:

http://publisher.brothersoft.com/glen-carner.html

Many of ELI's member have posted about HAN/VKT. I have a pretty good amount of research on one of their images which does not make them look good. As an exercise, I tried a similar research methodology with another one of VKT's images and got very similar results. There are very strong patterns out there that at the very least suggest very poor stewardship of his copyrighted work, and when seen in combination with Carner's wallpaper websites and wallpaper freeware, may be even more suggestive than that.

I certainly hope Aloha reads ELI, and if so, I want them to know I will gladly hand them all my research in digital format if they think it can help them in any way.

321

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Tejas Research, LLC v. Getty Images

« on: May 25, 2012, 12:33:01 AM »

Here's an update on the Car Freshener v. Getty lawsuit. Getty's initial motion to dismiss was denied in 2011. Car Freshener's lawyers have written the court complaining that Getty has refuse to provide initial discovery that would let them know if they have the right entities or if others have to be brought in. They also allege that Getty has been difficult in revealing the exact relationship they have with their photographers. They are also objecting to certain documents they want that Getty wants to label confidential. The court has authorized them to file a motion if they cannot work these issues out with Getty. Getty responded to that filing by of course denying they were being difficult and stating that CF's lawyers are asking for  burdensome information which they cannot retrieve (like they want every image that has the tree, a portion of the tree, an obscured view of the tree, etc etc) They said they are willing to continue to try and resolve these issues with CF's lawyers. They are also fighting over where to take the deposition of Getty personnel.  Getty wants it done in Seattle and the plaintiffs want it done in  NY.  Both sides agreed that having a settlement conference in front of a federal magistrate would be helpful.  One of the sticking points it appears in the settlement talks is that Getty wants to be able to continue to sell the images. The terms of this proposed on-going business agreement appear to be what's holding up the settlement. The court set August 21, 2012 at 3PM as the time for the next court conference. The documents can be viewed on PACER. The case is pending in the Northern District of NY under Index No. 09 cv 01252.

So any image Getty sells that may have a copyrighted item in it anywhere could be trolled by the copyright owners? For example, a picture of a Barbie® or a picture of a man playing with a Frisbee®?

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/female-doll-dressed-as-beauty-queen-high-res-stock-photography/BA16947

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/hand-of-free-style-frisbee-player-royalty-free-image/124360264

I believe Wham-O owns the registered trademark for the brand name "Frisbee®", which Getty uses with a lowercase F in the description, as well as the mechanical patent for the ridges on the edge of the their flying disc design, which cause the air disturbance known as the "Bernoulli effect" which is exactly why a real Frisbee® flies so righteously while all the wannabee flying discs totally suck.

322

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Tejas Research, LLC v. Getty Images

« on: May 25, 2012, 12:18:03 AM »

Thanks for the idea, McFilms... lol...

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/8227/catsvsdogswarofthetroll.jpg

S.G.

There you go! LOLtrolls!

323

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: A win for the bad guys

« on: May 25, 2012, 12:15:41 AM »

In reply to Moe Hacken, here's a link to my recent blog post on the IP address case which I think could have far reaching application

http://www.courtroomstrategy.com/2012/05/courts-denounce-copyright-lawsuits-based-solely-on-ip-address/

Thanks for the link, Oscar. I believe that's where I had read about it first, sorry I didn't remember it was your article. I'm happy to see a sane and objective precedent being set on this issue. Your article is much more cogent than the one I quoted. I picked up on that one because it's a relatively recent report.

Along the same lines as the fallacy of using an IP address as a form of identification, at some point the practice of using spybots to suck up a server's bandwidth seeking evidence against its operators is likely to be called into question in one of these cases, if it hasn't already. This topic has been discussed here before many times and there have been some excellent insights into the technical aspects of copyright trolling.

After following Lucia's excellent advice (which she has shared on several posts in this forum), I set up a "bad-bot trap" and almost immediately started catching poorly behaved spybots. Since then I've been snagging at least one every couple days.

They're coming from the strangest places all over the planet and some are almost impossible to identify as the IP addresses are privately registered or registered abroad in foreign languages. Among them, however, there's been at least one that's traceable to an "IP protection" company offshore, and by serendipity I realized I had also blocked Copyscape's IP address!

Copyscape is a web-based service to help people identify duplicate content on the web. You can use it to find if people are scraping your site for content, or to find your copyrighted text, or to find if you have duplicate content issues you're unaware of that could affect your site's search engine rankings. There are ethical uses, but it could also be used for copyright trolling. Their bot ignored my robots.txt file once, so that's it for me. They're permanently eighty-sixed from all my server hosts.

Some of the bots are just SEO spy tools checking websites for their backlink portfolio and whatever other intelligence they can gather for their competitors. Even that doesn't pass the smell test as far as I'm concerned, if I don't know they're accessing my blocked directories.

One of the negative effects for the webmaster and SEO tech is that these visits distort the traffic statistics, particularly in low-traffic websites as they can actually outnumber human visitors. More often than not, "bad-bots" try to fake the user-agent information to pretend being a humble web browser — albeit an incredibly voracious one that rips through all your data as fast as it can. Some people in tech forums claim PicScout has actually crashed their servers because the bot uses bandwidth so aggressively. Very rude.

There are many drawbacks for the server's operator in having to deal with the swarm of bad-bots hitting them, and absolutely NO BENEFITS unless it's a service the webmaster actually WANTS, like having Alexa crawl the entire site for SEO stat purposes.

It's my layman opinion that busting into someone's server looking for evidence of criminal activity should require a court order or warrant in the same exact way as it does to be able to tap a phone line. Without it, it should be considered inadmissible evidence. Maybe I'm tripping about that. Oscar or anyone, please feel free to deflate my armchair lawyer balloon. I can handle the truth.

If the trolls have to file for court orders or warrants to search for the evidence, they'd have to come up with some kind of LEGALLY obtained probable cause. That's not nearly as easy as sending PicScout to stick its snout in your server and hog your bandwidth.

It would have a similar effect as forcing the porn trolls to pay the $350 for every John Doe instead of paying $350 to file against scores of them at once. The gill nets would taken away and they'd have to go back to fish hooks.

324

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: A win for the bad guys

« on: May 22, 2012, 03:45:54 PM »

U.S. copyright law was never intended to deal with issues of copyright related to “file sharing” on the Internet.  That’s why the law is open to fairly wide interpretation (and therefore varying) determinations by different judges.  To make a formal argument of whether or not the law is “constitutional” would be quite a long and expensive affair, and sometimes that’s an answer in itself.  That is, is anything to be gained for the effort of challenging it overall? ...

The “law” protects “works”, but ironically it can also protect innocents from the likes of corporations such as Getty and their ilk, who make a frequent habit of falsely accusing people of infringement.  So, the law is the best “test” that we have, but the law will always lag behind technology and new issues no matter how hard people make efforts to remedy it.

While “file sharing” is a bit off topic in this section of the forum, it’s probably of interest to some people to know how the methodology of a “defense” differs between infringements of “images” vs. that of “multimedia” files.  The main defense that’s effective against claims of copyright infringements of images is that (with very few exceptions) the “plaintiff” doesn’t own or is not an “exclusive” agent for the image/artist in question.  For multimedia content such as movies and music, you can bet that the copyright is registered and ownership is clear.  However, the defense in such cases is often built around whether or not there’s proof that the accused party actually committed the act of “infringement”.  IP addresses are widely known to be completely unreliable, and therefore the burden of proof must also come from other sources such as logs from the Internet service providers.  However, the service provider can be circumvented from releasing such info on the grounds of privacy.  If incriminating logs were released, one could simply argue that his/her “router was hacked”.  It’s easy to come up with logical defenses that will probably fly, however it often comes down to whom has the most resources, can make the most convincing argument, and ultimately who has the most resolve.  So, the “fight” is very different between the two types of content.

Ironically, the use of “content” outside of what the owners/producers/artists intended (some may call these “infringements”) actually drives sales to some extent.  If channels such as YouTube and others didn’t allow infringing content to some extent, the buying public wouldn’t be exposed to content that they might opt to buy.  That is, people don’t normally buy music that they’re never heard before.  It can be advertized on TV, but that costs a lot of money.  Radio’s a good choice, but it’s only one media channel of many.  In the case of Getty and their images, this is why Getty’s CEO says that they have sophisticated systems to detect infringements along with legal counsel, but encourages people to “play” with Getty’s images and even post them on social media sites such as Pinterest.  Getty's allowing and encouraging infringements to occur in certain situations which is technically "free advertizing", but it also feeds the misconception that people have about the content being "public domain".  This drives Getty's copyright trolling revenue.

S.G.

I agree with Matthew and Soylent Green that this is not exactly a reversal for the cause. This is more like a tug in the ear from a magistrate who is actually providing guidance as to the proper way to seek relief in the case. The judge is simply saying the constitutional argument is the wrong way to look at it, and suggesting that relief be sought in other venues that have the authority to deal with the proportionality of the fines.

Soylent Green raises a very important similarity with these cases, and it regards the methods for collecting evidence against the defendants. Using IP numbers as a manner of identifying physical persons as criminals is taking some very serious legal blows, as this article explains:

http://www.dailytech.com/Another+Judge+Rules+IP+Addresses+Cant+be+Used+to+Identify+People/article24614.htm

If the IP address is completely deprecated as a manner of identifying criminal activity by individuals, their cases will lose a lot of weight. I think there could also be something to think about along these lines concerning the legality of PicScout and other crawlers doing the equivalent of tapping your phone without a court order. It would be good to set a precedent that any "evidence" acquired by such means is inadmissible in any court.

It's much more important to protect the privacy and civil rights of all Americans than the copyrights of the very few, especially those who specialize in trolling for extortion material.

325

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Photo Attorney Carolyn E. Wright $35K Settlement Demand Letter

« on: May 16, 2012, 11:28:34 PM »

Looks like a mocha water and vinegar.

326

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: My Position on State Bar & Attorney General Complaints Against Lawyers

« on: May 16, 2012, 06:50:02 PM »

There also this:

http://www.bbb.org/hawaii/business-reviews/art-galleries-dealers-and-consultants/hawaiian-art-network-in-honolulu-hi-27000881

Did you see that? An A PLUS! They must be doing something right, huh?

Also, a quote I stumbled upon during one of my Google vagaries:

Under US Code Title 18 §1951: “(a)Whoever in any way…affects commerce…by robbery or extortion…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both. (b) As used in this section– (2) the term “extortion means the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by…fear, or under color of official right.”

I'm not a lawyer but that sounds at least as serious as cropping out a copyright notice from someone else's copyrighted photograph. Just saying.

327

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Need some advise!!!

« on: May 13, 2012, 11:05:40 AM »

concerned_man,

None of these companies care how the image ended up under your company name. All they want is a paycheck. If you plead your case that a web designer put it there, they will say fine... pay us then sue them for your damages.

If it is a single, two, three or even up to maybe 6 images, almost none of these extortionist have actually followed-up on their threats to take you to court. However, as it will always be said here, there are no guarantees.

You can pay them and go on your way and not look back.

You can pay Matt a small fee to have a condensed session of what about a good week of reading this forum and the SCRIBD site will teach you.

You can also pay Oscar to begin a Letter Campaign on your behalf.

Or... you can take this bull by the horns yourself, and begin your own campaign of writing letters challenging their position. That is what a good number of members are doing, if you can handle the up to 3 year Statute of Limitations ride.

Never the less, the choice is ALL your and ONLY your to make.

Get Help With Your Extortion Letter! is a Sticky item on the main section. This is THE very best place to start your education and decision process.

There it is, in a nutshell. Short and sweet.

328

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Need some advise!!!

« on: May 13, 2012, 11:02:02 AM »

Hey Simpson, you virtually wrote the FAQ for newbies right there! Nice work!

329

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Copyright Notice from Youtube

« on: May 13, 2012, 11:00:33 AM »

Very interesting development, Buddhapi. Please keep us updated on this. I've always been extra careful with YouTube.

330

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: ELI Currently Exists Based On Annual Agreement Between Matthew & Oscar

« on: May 13, 2012, 10:57:12 AM »

Matthew, I wasn't suggesting YOU should do the FAQ. I think a volunteer effort could do that. The idea would be to create a single point of newbie info to help buffer the panic calls and emails. I certainly don't believe you need any more work on your plate!

I do appreciate all that you and Oscar and the members have done. It seems like you've put a massive amount of effort into this cause.