Messages

466

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

« on: May 25, 2012, 09:58:17 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.

467

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

« on: May 16, 2012, 05:10:16 PM »

Did someone complain because Matthew suggested that if an attorney writes a letter that goes over board people can consider writing a letter to the state bar association?  Seems to me Matt's suggestion is perfectly valid.  On the one hand it's true that one shouldn't waste time writing frivolous letters. But if the attorney is acting outrageously or just participating in a borderline activity, why should someone who is threatened not write the state bar association? 

Is an argument explaining why writing a letter is inappropriate online somewhere?

468

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Image in question is a modified image hosted by a 3rd party

« on: May 09, 2012, 05:29:10 PM »

Soylent--
When I first started looking at how to block, I thought it would be easy. But I kept watching my logs.... and the number of image bots is rather amazing. Also, as I blocked things, other seemingly 'adaptive' behavior became evident.  For example, after I began banning lots of obvious image bots, suddenly, I see images being loaded by something with the user agent "TraumaCadX". Someone is browsing with a user agent designed to read Xrays? Really?  After blocking that, suddenly people are visiting my images with Playstations.  Really?  Then I start seeing visits with user agents indicating that the visits are from a server that is optimized to save images. Do I believe that's a human visiting my blog? No. I do not.

To screen image stuff, I'm mostly using ZB Block but with a tweak to get most image scrapers diverted into php. (This tweak is required because images are static and ZB Block only applies to php. I'm not really sure how I'm going to explain it to people so that it's easy to use without screwing up your blog!  )

If you use ZBblock, I'd be glad to discuss which custom sigs seem especially useful for image stripping. 

The "image" or "suspected" things I am blocking has expanded . Below, I'll show some of the lines of code-- but with the useragent bolded for the first few so you get the idea what's important to block.
# bandwith sucking pictures/copyright  bots
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"psbot","; psbot ua Images. INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"picsearch","; picsearch ua Images.. INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"playstation","; playstation ua : images   INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"pixray","; Pixray ua image bot  INSTA-BAN. ")); //   Pixray-Seeker/1 (Pixray-Seeker; http://www.pixray.com/pixraybot; [email protected])
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"phantom.js bot","; Phantom.js Images Scraper:   INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"upictoBot","; Presumed Image Scraper(?): upictoBot.  INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"TraumaCadX","; TraumaCadX is in your user agent. image.  INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"Copyright","; iCopyright Conductor 1.0 Nasty. INSTA-BAN.")); #
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"getty","; Image UA:getty.   INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (lmatch($useragent,"Extreme Picture Finder","; Extreme Picture Finder Scraper UA. images.  INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"BPImageWalker","; BPImageWalker. INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"cydral","; cydral Image .  INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"doubanbot","; doubanbot Image Scraper.   INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"CoverScout","; Album Cover Searching. images. INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"ImageProHD","; ImageProHD: not a browser (3)  INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"WikioImagesBot","; WikioImagesBot: unknown untraceable bot.  INSTA-BAN."));
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"tineye","; tineye Image ua  INSTA-BAN. ")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"wesee.com","; wesee.com images. I approve of filtering for adult content, but I also don't trust you. Go away. Nasty. ")); //68c '   http://www.wesee.com/en/support/bot/
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"digimarc","; Copyright bot Digimarc. images. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"bitvo","; bitvo.com Image scraper. images. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"NSPlayer","; NSPlayer Images  (?) ua. images.  INSTA-BAN.")); #  This is always just scraping and switches user agent back and forth to vlc/. (Sometimes playstation.)
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"nsplayer","; NSPlayer Images  (?) ua. images. INSTA-BAN.")); #  This is always just scraping and switches user agent back and forth to vlc/. (Sometimes playstation.)

$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"vlc/","; vlc/ Images scraper (?) ua. images.. INSTA-BAN.")); #   This is always just scraping and switches user agent back and forth to NSPlayer.
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"webcollage","; webcollage images.  INSTA-BAN.")); //http://www.webcollage.com/ there is no reason to let *someone else* use webcollage on my server.
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"Mozilla 3.01 PBWF (Win95)","; imagelock: now defunct. Shouldn't be visiting. Nasty. INSTA-BAN.  ")); #'
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"Corp_Device_User","; Corp_Device_User. Nasty. images.?")); # I have no idea what this bot is doing. It looked like the GAP looking at images.
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"mShots","; mShots. images.")); # this is a plugin that takes screenshots of your page over and over.

$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"getty","; getty: Image host. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"picscout","; picscout: Image host. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"tineye","; tineye: Image host INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"prioritycolo.com","; prioritycolo.com Image host INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"bezeqint","; bezeqint: Home of picscout.  Bad all around.  INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"istockphoto","; istockphoto: Image host.  INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"pingdom.com","; pingdom.com: Image host. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,".ethz.ch","; .ethz.ch: Might be image host(?) INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"copyscape","; copyscape: Copyright service.  Nasty. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"googlealert","; googlealert: Copyright service; <i>is not</i> google.  Nasty. INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"pixray","; pixray:  Image host.  INSTA-BAN.")); //
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($hoster,"baidu","; baidu:  either real or spoofed.  INSTA-BAN.")); //

$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"portalimage","; bad ua 5 Nasty. images. ")); // http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4398144.htm
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($useragent,"SUSE",";image stripping linux browser. INSTA-BAN. ")); // look for SUSE here http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Firefox/
$ax = $ax + (inmatch($lcuseragent,"superlumin",";image video proxy. INSTA-BAN. ")); // http://www.superlumin.com/nemesis.php http://www.superlumin.com/video.php

But there are all sorts of other bots, crawlers spiders etc I don't trust.   But depending on how you run your site, you need:
1) A way to block IPs, useragents and hosts.
2) A way to block these things for *images*. (.htaccess, ZBblock if tweaked, firewall, whatever.)
3) Lists of user agents, IPs and hosts to block.

In my code above, you can see user agents to block and/or hosts to block if you know how to read the command. 
 

469

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Exclusive: Publisher sues Tumblr over porn pics

« on: May 08, 2012, 04:22:22 PM »

My only real point here is that people should NOT pay up in the face of "questionable standing"...
that is when an extortion letter victim thinks that "they MIGHT have some proof... I better pay just in case".

Oh. I agree with that.  Obviously, just because someone approaches you  and claims you violated their copyright that doesn't mean you have to fork over money without having them show you they have a copyright, verifying that you violated and so on.

Therefore, "my jimmies remain unrustled" as the meme says.
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m365ir39fR1ruzcgto1_400.jpg

In any case... not much if anything on Tumblr is original content.
So, Tumblr is another site much like Pinterest that aggregates content of questionable ownership/sourcing.

S.G.

Sure. To some extent, Tumblr is a site whose business model depends on copyright violation. It's not even incidental. Where as one does find copyright violation on youtube, huge number of youtube videos are by content creators who post videos they created themselves.   Similarly, Wordpress, blogger etc contain many blogs with content posted by their creators.   Tumblr and Pinterest... not so much.   

I actually blocked Tumblr from my blog. If a Tumblr blogger wants to copy from me they can do it the oldfashioned way.    Cut and paste, load to their blog.

470

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Exclusive: Publisher sues Tumblr over porn pics

« on: May 08, 2012, 02:42:45 PM »

Buddhapi--
Or Perfect 10 may have started to include url's in the takedown notice. 

I think it's fair for the judge to tell Perfect 10 they have to send the darn urls where the violations supposedly exist. It's ridiculous for Perfect 10 to just inform a groups like (Tumblr/Facebook/Wordpress ) etc. that someone, somewhere on their site is hosting a picture and expect them to take it down.

Soylent--
Thanks for the link. Of course lack of copyright would make a suit fall apart. But notwithstanding whatever it is that bothers you, I would be very surprised if the reason Perfect 10 loses turns out to be they don't have copyright.  Of course the burden of proof for showing they have copyright falls on Perfect 10-- but I anticipate they will have that in place. 

If it bothers you that I anticipate it is highly likely this particular plaintiff who has in the past had copyrights in place, who hires their own photographers to take pictures, who pays the models and publishes their own photos will, in fact, have taken the step to copyright their material in this case so be it.  But my anticipating this is not by any stretch of the imagination suggestion they will not have to prove it in court. Obviously, they will have to prove it. And if they don't prove it, they will lose their case.

They may also lose the case for other reasons-- as they have lost cases in the past for other reasons. But this particular plaintiff seems to be in the habit of filing copyrights. And, moreover, I'm much more sympathetic to their position than that of Gettys. In fact, I'm not sure I even consider Perfect 10 a "troll".  I don't consider merely attempting to enforce copyright an act that turns someone or a business into a copyright troll. (I don't generally consider people who try to enforce patents trolls -- though some are.)

471

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Exclusive: Publisher sues Tumblr over porn pics

« on: May 07, 2012, 10:57:05 PM »

Additionally, I don't feel that anyone should assume that another party holds the copyrights to anything, especially in the face of trolling, or a lawsuit.
We can check those facts, and we need not assume anything.
Indeed, a porn company recently attempted to extort/troll/sue people whom allegedly downloaded a video.
Turns out that they didn't even copyright their own material.

The courts aren't going to assume anything about copyrights and I don't either.

But this isn't Getty.  Perfect 10 is pretty well known and has pursued cases before. They lost Perfect 10 v. Amazon but not because they didn't hold valid copyrights. They had valid copyrights in that case and I anticipate they will have put copyrights in place this time too. (Wikipedia's article on Perfect 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10_%28magazine%29 ). Of course when sued Tumbler will try to dispute the copyrights and if this gets to court we'll learn more.

Don't assume just because Getty doesn't always have their copyright house in order that no one does.  Some publishers do take care to copyright the photo's the publish in their periodicals.  I'm guessing Perfect 10 does systematically copyright their photos.

porn company recently attempted to extort/troll/sue people whom allegedly downloaded a video

I'm not familiar with this. I'm familiar with the bit torrent cases. My impression is some of those fell apart for reasons other than the porn company not owing the copyrights. Do you have a particular case in mind?

472

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Exclusive: Publisher sues Tumblr over porn pics

« on: May 07, 2012, 05:55:46 PM »

Being a porn company that makes money from images, I suspect Perfect 10 will have all their copyrights in place for images of their stars. This isn't going to be like Getty trying to mass copyright various garden variety stock photos of things like sprinkler heads.

If it's true Tumbler failed to failed to take down copyrighted material when asked by the copyright owner and uploaded it themselves, Perfect 10 will likely win this one.

473

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: On a related topic, a bad bot hits my server

« on: May 06, 2012, 11:00:19 PM »

I block everything with "baidu" in the user agent. It's either
a) really baidu-- which provides me no value and uses up bandwidth, cpu and memory or
b) spoofing baidu which is worse than providing me no value.

There is a whole list of copyright bots out there that should be blocked.

474

Getty Images Letter Forum / Image stripping image browser and feature.

« on: May 05, 2012, 12:09:54 PM »

Hi all.
I know some of you thought I was gone.  But I'm just doing what I do-- which is not legal, or business. It's watching server logs and banning things.

There are automated image services you are likely to want to ban.   Many uses will be harmless, but they can be used by anyone. Anyone means-- of course-- trolls seeking images.

The first user agent to block:

WordPress.com mShots; http://support.wordpress.com/contact/

If you goolge on 'mShots' you will see it's a fun convenient sounding feature for bloggers. But there is a publicly available plugin that anyone can use to automatically take screen shots of any web page.   I think the incoming IP will be Automatic-- which is wordpress. But the screenshot is sent to "whomever".  (In reality, very few visitors run screen shots of blogs in their sidebar. So, likely all the visits by 'mShots' to my blog are what I would call "dubious".)

 The second user agent to bloc: Anything containing SUSE. For example:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 SUSE/3.6.10-0.3.1 Firefox/3.6.10

Browsers containing "Linux" are often run by servers.  Servers are very handy things to run imagescraping scripts (which generally you want to discourage at your site.) However, depending on your audience, you don't want to block everything running Linux. (Many of my blog visitors browse the web from workstations running linux.)  But SUSE/3.6 is a bitmap feature. Being optimized for bitmaps is very handy for image scrapers. For others: not so much (it makes the browser slow for humans.)  This particular UA was left by http://www.shrinktheweb.com/reqstatus?status=1&hash=ece31cfcdf89736101398c3e1fb645ad  (It was also blocked by my auto-blocking software, but not because of the user agent.)

So: I advise blocking anything with 'SUSE' or 'mshots' in the user agent.

475

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Image in question is a modified image hosted by a 3rd party

« on: May 04, 2012, 10:33:44 AM »

BTW: I recommend people block:
1) all requests for images that show a blank user agent and blank referrer.
2) all requests for images with IPs in and around 72.26.211.xxx.

(2) may be overly broad, but it's safe for now.  (1) is actually conservative. I block all requests for *anything* that comes in with a blank user agent whether or not it has a referrer. There is very little reason for things to arrive with a blank user agent.   I also block lost of image requests with "stooopid" referrers but my method for diagnosing "stoopid" is too difficult to explain in a forum post.

There are many ways to block-- .htaccess, cloudflare, at a firewall etc. So, I'm not going to give specific directions because some people will want to do things one way, others another way. (Which methods are possible can depend on your hosting and degree of control of your server. I have access to .htaccess and also route things through cloudflare.)

476

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Image in question is a modified image hosted by a 3rd party

« on: May 04, 2012, 10:19:48 AM »

Oh... I figure I can wait to send the letter.

I'd rather spend my time getting my plugin working. If I work things right and get sizable numbers of people to use it, we may be able interfere with the picscout browser add-on from working as well as getty might like and reduce a lot of image scraping generally. That would be more fun than exchanging letters.

(Speaking of which, I need to fire up the getty ad on and see if it still leaves no user agent and no referrer. I assume that picscout will tweak what they do over time.)

477

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Image in question is a modified image hosted by a 3rd party

« on: May 03, 2012, 08:50:07 PM »

I'm sure you don't all remember exactly where we left off. I had responded-- explaining that the fact that DMAC might have protected Amazon and Ebay was both undecided by Perfect 10 and irrelevant to Perfect 10, and then, I got another letter in the mail. I emailed that-- copying both "Same" and the more generic group that emailed the letter.  Very quickly, I received this email:

Lucia,
 
It would appear our recently-received letter was sent in error as your December 20, 2011 e-mail (received) is still under review in our department. I apologize for any confusion our recent mailing may have caused.
Regards,
SAM BROWN
Copyright Compliance Specialist
Getty Images License Compliance
[email protected]
www.stockphotorights.com
Copyright 101

That was January 30.  I have not heard from Getty since.  So, they haven't told me the case is closed, but I have heard nothing.

Meanwhile, I have been writing a plugin that will at least help the cause should it get adopted. And once I roll that out, I'll be posting advice on how to reduce the ease with which Picscout crawls your site.  I want the thing to be easy to implement-- so it's taking a bit of time. But I'm pretty sure picscout no longer races through my blogs.  (Cross fingers.)

478

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty Image in question is a modified image hosted by a 3rd party

« on: May 02, 2012, 08:37:58 PM »

Tyler--
Welcome to the "got getty letter for hotlinked image" club!

To document the image appeared elsewhere, use http://webcitation.org/archive .  I would advise documenting the page where your supplier showed the image and also documenting the image.  This will give you 3rd party documentation. Save that. Don't send to getty.

Write back. Cite Perfect 10.  They'll pretty much ignore that and comment on something else. (Possibly suggesting that you should realize DMAC doesn't cover you but would have covered Google or Amazon. This is a red herring. Amazon and Google did not win because of DMAC and it's not clear it would have covered them. What the 9th circuit ruled is hot linking is not a copyright violation.) Cite Perfect 10 again.  I think my email responses are on line-- but if you need them, I can dig them up.  You'll want to rework in your own language, but basically, keep repeating stuff from Perfect 10.

Because the 9th circuit is a circuit and not SCOTUS, do also keep your files of any evidence just incase Getty does go insane and decide that of all possible cases, they are going to try to convince the US Supreme Court to rule hot linking is a copyright violation (in a case that would surely have Google writing your briefs for you!)  So, do use webcite for any and all evidence of other images. Do, look for similar images-- keep a file. But don't volunteer all that to Getty. They don't need to see that in addition to it being a hotlinking case, they probably have a crummy case.

Oh. Do ask them to send you proof of copyright. You might as well.

479

Hawaiian Letters & Lawsuits Forum / Re: HAN v Moku'Aina Properties LLC

« on: April 14, 2012, 09:21:47 PM »

What does it mean?

480

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Paul Sciarra, Pinterest Cofounder, Allegedly Leaving the Company

« on: April 03, 2012, 07:33:37 PM »

Oddly, this is one of those situations where a business entity like Pinterest should use a service like picscout/tineye/pixray to compare uploaded pictures against company troves and block the upload if the image is copyrighted and the user does not have a license.

Of course, this would likely cut into the popularity of Pinterest!  But really, I don't see any reason why large social media companies whose business model is to let huge numbers of users upload whatever the heck they want shouldn't do a little bit of pro-active screening in addition to responding to take down notices.  The practice might actually reduce revenues to copyright trolls because fewer people would just "find" apparently "free" photos at google which merely picks them up from other sites.