Messages

391

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty and Picscout

« on: July 12, 2012, 03:57:15 PM »

They sent me a webcaption of picscout date june 2011, were we see half of the picture they claimed that are theirs.  Problem is : I never use this picture... anyone had the same problem?

I haven't heard of cases where they claimed an image appeared but it never did. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen! Does your site run ads? Might the image be contained in an ad?    Do tell them you do not believe that image ran at your site and ask them to provide you the uri for the image.  If it's an image running inside a googlead, in the US, you'd be all clear.

I suspect the same will hold in Canada, but our court rulings don't hold there. So you'll have to discover what Canadian law says.

Also, i wonder, if they take a step ahead, will they have me fight this in quebec or will i have to go in US.  surely dont have the money for that.

Oscar would know-- but I think the answer is somewhere in Canada.  My impression (and I hope others will correct me if I'm wrong) is that because I am in the US, they would have to sue me in federal court where I reside. They can't just pick whichever court they prefer-- those courts don't have jurisdiction. 

If this is true, I would imagine no US copyright court has jurisdiction and they would have to sue in Canada.  That means you need to learn Canadian law about this issue. 


But also: If it turns out the image was in a banner ad and you never hosted it, you will be a ok in the US too. Hotlinking is not copying under US copyright law. We can tell you more about this if it matters. (Maybe the mere fact that US copyright law doesn't give US copyright holders this protection would make Canadian courts recognize that the right doesn't magically come into being if the person hotlinking is in Canada? Anyway-- if it turned out you hotlinked, you'll want to look into that.)

392

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Masterfile Drops Case Against Photographer/Graphic Artist

« on: July 11, 2012, 07:06:02 PM »

As far as I can tell, once Masterfile figured out that if they sued, they would lose in court and the photographer knew this was so and had lined up an attorney who knew how to present the proper legal argument in court, they dropped the case.   There is nothing particularly gracious about their ultimately dropping the case. They dropped it because they had no case and they also knew that the person they were threatening to sue knew they had no case.

I'll pseculate it was only when they heard the name of the attorney (or even learned an attorney was lined up) that anyone bothered to look at the details of the case. 

393

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Another copyright bot: 80 legs.

« on: July 08, 2012, 08:02:52 PM »

Greg--
If you have a blog with DYI tips, the tips really are good and you are hoping for links, you might want to limit to english speaking countries.  It's a balance. 

Or you could say block the countries that create the most hack/spam attempts and so on.  There are lots from the US-- but you aren't going to block the US. But you could get a list and go down:
Do you need anyone from the People's Republic of China visiting? No? Block.
Ukraine?
Thailand?
Israel?


I'd guess you might want to permit England, Canada, the US, Australia etc. Others: Block as you notice problems.

At cloudflare, I moderate China... and believe it or not, Brazil! Agents faking google bot with Brazilian IPS hammer my blog. I don't know why, but they do!

To some extent, you have to watch your logs.  But this is doable!

394

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Another copyright bot: 80 legs.

« on: July 08, 2012, 05:01:56 PM »

That is awesome that Zaphod is including your custom signatures in his next update! You should be very proud! And I want you to know that we appreciate what you do here and in sharing your knowledge with us.

Only in rare instances did he learn these from me. He's been finding user agents and adding. So, he's finding some I found-- and more.  It's very rare that I find one before he does.

The forum over there is  not motivated by copyright issues. But they are motivated to prevent hacking and also save people bandwidth.    So lots of things get blocked merely because there is no benefit to a website owner to permit the bot.

For example: Think about 80 legs. It  might be visiting your site 10 times a second to find a copyright violation. It might be visiting because one of your competitors wants to learn something about your site -- to his advantage. It might be visiting because it lets people use it for free and someone who doesn't like you might decide to set it on you just to pester you. And so on.  So... why do you want to let this thing crawl?

Their blog suggests stupid things like: Maybe you are a blogger and you want advertisers to be able to serve your visitors better ads. Uhmm....My blog doesn't even have ads anyway. But suppose I did. If I had an account running banner ads with a particular ad agency, maybe that ad agency could tell me what spider he uses and I could let that spider visit.   Why should I want to let 80 legs crawl on the hypothetical theory that some ad agency somewhere in the world could make the ads I might deliver more responsive to my visitors?! 

There are all sorts of bots like that around. Plus-- the fact is-- no matter what they say they are doing, you don't really know what they are doing. But they are sucking your bandwidth. 

I'm at the point where if I can't figure out what a bot is, it's banned.  If they leave a link to a non-existant web page? Banned. Web page is impossible to understand? Banned.  We page says 'seo', 'reputation' etc? Banned.  Email to contact them? Banned until they answer the email. 

I have nothing against seo-- but lots of those bots are just voracious! 

But for an individual: When blocking, do think about what your business is. For lots of businesses, it might sometimes be useful to just block entire countries. For example: My hairdresser has a web site for convenience of customers. She could block everything outside the USA without harming herself at all!  On the other hand, as a blogger, I don't want to block everything outside the US. 

395

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Another copyright bot: 80 legs.

« on: July 08, 2012, 04:02:35 PM »

Greg--
There will never be a "definitive list".  These guys move around. As you can see, 80 legs changed it's user agent string name. They aren't the only one to do that. Also, the best method to block will depend on how your site is hosted. ( Shared hosting? Dedicated server? )  It will also depend on other features.

I've come to the conclusion that you can't just try to block copyright bots. If you want to control bots, you have to think about broadening your goals, and figuring out tradeoffs based on what sort of web site you are operating.  For example: If you are a vetranarian running a web page for the convenience of customers in a small town just outside of Omaha  Nebraska, your first step might be to block traffic from everything outside the US! This automatically catches Bezequint in Israel.  After that, you could start worrying about crawlers etc.   When you are worrying about crawlers, you can do a pretty thorough job. But even so, you could never be sure that Picscout won't come by since companies will take out accounts on a variety of IPs.

My main solution has been to use ZBblock on my site hosted at Dreamhost. This writes IP's it's blocked to a file, and I then have a script that reads the block list created on ZBblock  and bans lots of nasties at cloudflare (a free service which I now use for content delivery.)

But really-- if you use PHP, one of the best things you can do is get ZBblock (http://www.spambotsecurity.com) and install that.  This is-- after all-- my custome additions to the zillions of things Zaphod has designed his script to block.  Once you have ZBblock going, you still have to monitor your logs to notice suspicious things. BTW: He is adding many of the items in my custom signatures in his next update. He is very vigilant about finding new user agents-- and people report them to him.  Even if you can't use his script, downloading it and reading the signatures.inc file can provide you lots of information on what to block.

I do need to get my plugin working-- but it's only for Wordpress. It's mostly going to be useful for people on shared hosting who use php.  (The main difficulty is writing it so it's easy for people to install and use. But I'm blocking all sorts of stuff.

396

Getty Images Letter Forum / Another copyright bot: 80 legs.

« on: July 08, 2012, 07:50:59 AM »

I've been blocking 80 legs for a long time because they crawl too aggressively. I read it's blog -- it too is doing some copyright snooping (for fonts.)

http://blog.80legs.com/2010/08/10/case-study-monotype-imaging

Their user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; 008/0.83; http://www.80legs.com/webcrawler.html) Gecko/2008032620

You can try robots.txt first.  They claim to obey it.  (I can't say. I now have a dynamic robots.txt and just ban anything I would forbid.)
This is a distributed agent using a wide range of IPs. So you must block by user agent.

397

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Pinterest blocks Getty's Picscout infringement bot?

« on: July 05, 2012, 03:46:41 PM »

SG--
I don't flatter myself in thinking Picscout, idee or others haven't already thought of ideas I can think of. I suspect that unless google images keeps them off, one of the things they is send their bot to google images.  That's what I'd do.

Since I avoid copyright violations, that's ok by me.  If they go to google images and look at thumbnails google has cached, they aren't burning my cpu.

That said, some people who don't think they are going to get traffic from google images anyway might want to block the google image bot from their site. This is separate from the ordinary google bot. (Consult an SEO specialist before blocking anything google though!)

398

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Pinterest blocks Getty's Picscout infringement bot?

« on: July 05, 2012, 12:30:32 PM »

Moe--
Picscout does auto troll. But ImageExchange, the browser add-on made by Picscout, does not 'auto-troll'.  Bear in mind: Whatever ImageExchange finds is reported back to Picscout. So, Picscout has two ways to "troll":

1) Motivated humans install tool and visit sites. Given the way ImageExchange functions, these people's browsers report back to Picscout and presumably Picscout and do whatever it wants with the information.
2) Picscout sends out its auto-bot. 

If you want to block Picscout from your site, you need to both
a) block ImageExchange from working (this is easy) and
b) block the Picscout auto-bot. (This is harder.)

399

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Pinterest blocks Getty's Picscout infringement bot?

« on: July 05, 2012, 12:11:12 PM »

ImageExchange doesn't auto-troll. I think those photographers are hoping to do this:
1) Installing the add-on to their browser.
2) Browsing pinterest peronsally.
3) waiting to see if image show up as registered.
4) Maybe manually leaving an obnoxious comment and/or reporting the images to whoever does license those images.

This is very labor intensive.  But I guess those photographers are motivated to do it.

Unfortunately for them, evidently add-on isn't reporting which images are managed at Pinterest.  It's very easy to block the add-on by IP, hostname or by the fact that it leaves no user agent.  I checked by right clicking and that still brings something with the same IP, host name and lack of user agent.

Pinterest may be blocking those sorts of connections. It's very easy to do. (And if the photographers are leaving obnoxious comments, they may be motivated to block for that reason.)

400

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Pinterest blocks Getty's Picscout infringement bot?

« on: July 04, 2012, 10:33:55 PM »

The image exchange tools still uses IPs near values like "72.26.211.132" and they continue to leave a blank referrer and user agent. All Pinterest has to do is block connections from that IP range and/or those that leave no user agent.

401

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Carreon's Butthurt proves to be too much as he drops suit.

« on: July 04, 2012, 12:21:40 PM »

Rule #eleventy-zeventy about intimidating lawsuits: If the plaintiff can raise $20,000 for charity in 1 hour,  he will not be intimidated by your lawsuit and some big law firm will volunteer to defend him pro-bono.

402

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Recieved a demand letter today.. What do you think of my response?

« on: June 30, 2012, 02:52:07 PM »

Yep. I saw my site crash repeatedly right around the time I write my second letter.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/bezeqint-net-is-this-an-attack/
I now block java agents. I block besquint. I moderate Israel at Cloudflare.

403

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Copyright Troll Insurance ... from iStockphoto?

« on: June 29, 2012, 01:11:54 PM »

If Getty, the PARENT COMPANY of iStockphoto, hits ME with a copyright insurance claim, I'm supposed to believe iStockphoto is going to do their best to defend ME? They're trying to limit their liability in the first place! Strike Two.

If they didn't, your later suit to make iStockphoto cover your loses based could be pretty funny.

I don't see how iStockphoto offering a 'guarantee' would necessarily shield them from a suit that alleges their product caused you harm by not being fit for the purpose it was sold for. The entire purpose of the license is to prevent you from being found guilty of copyright infringement. If child company sells you a license and then their parent company  sues you for a flawed license... that looks really, really bad for those two companies.   That would start to look an awful lot like some sort of 'scheme'.

404

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Recieved a demand letter today.. What do you think of my response?

« on: June 29, 2012, 12:29:03 PM »

I'm happy to accept compliment. But my main purpose in showing that is to show anankin what to expect. What is going to happen is this:

1) S/he writes telling Getty that the image is not hosted her 'not hosted on her server'. The words s/he uses might be 'hotlinked' or 'in an iframe' or something. But the main point is 'not hosted on her server'.  S/he says for that reason, the display is not copying as defined by us copyright law (according the 9th circuit ruling. There is no ruling from other circuit courts or higher.)

2) Getty will write back bringing up some point that is likely irrelevant. In my case, they brought up the notion that I might not be protected under DMCA while google and amazon might have been. This is utterly irrelevant.

3) At that point, it can be worth engaging their point in some details.  But the fact is: according to the perfect 10, hotlinking is not a violation under the US copyright act.  None of the rest of the details in that case matter. 

In anakin's case or that of anyone else, at step 2, Getty might bring up something other than DMCA. But don't let that rattle you.  If you hotlinked whatever they brought up will be irrelevant.

405

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Copyright Troll Insurance ... from iStockphoto?

« on: June 29, 2012, 12:17:06 PM »

I think the plan looks reasonable in some ways. Consider car insurance.  If someone claims you are at fault in an accident, your insurance will pay if you are at fault. But they will dispute the claim if they think you are not at fault.  I suspect if Getty sends you a letter and you have something from IPhoto, IPhoto will request stuff from Getty just as anyone should. This puts a buffer between an inexperienced photo user and Getty.   Getty knows it can't win much beyond actual damages and minimum statutory damages from an inexperience photo user who bought a license that turned out to be flawed.  No one in the world could consider any subsequent copyright violation "willful".

I'd leave it to Oscar to explain what would happen if you bought a license from IPhoto, and Getty sued and won damages from you. Maybe you could sue IPhoto for your damages even if they didn't provide this guarantee? I'm not going to speculate.