Messages

481

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Screengrabs lack of credibility??

« on: April 03, 2012, 07:19:44 PM »

I would find it remarkable if GI DIDN'T copy the HTML source code behind the page at the same time they documented the image on the page. But who knows? The way they go about these things seems to be so reckless and half-assed that nothing should surprise me.

Not doing so would be half-assed. By the same token, they went after me for hot-linking.  So, either a) they either don't have the html or don't look at it , b) they are not aware of the existing court rulings or c) they don't care and figure, "What the heck? maybe we can scare the money out of her anyway."

But I'm with SG, Lettered, et al: Other defenses like lack of standing and possibly amount of demand is a better focus of time and resources. That is unless you really were hot-linking the image.

I agree with this. "You have no evidence I hosted the image" is useful only if in addition the defendant is denying the claim and can truthfully answer "No I didn't host that image".

482

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Got My Getty Letter - Thank You For This Site

« on: April 02, 2012, 02:45:48 PM »

I concur with Matt-- don't call.  If nothing else, the people who answer calls have a lot of practice dealing with letter recipients, and you will be much less in control of the conversation. 

Also, I would suggest volunteering as little as possible. 

483

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Screengrabs lack of credibility??

« on: April 01, 2012, 03:50:50 PM »

. . . Otherwise they can't demonstrate the image was hosted by the person they are suing . . .

I think that this would be easily accomplished by asking that person under oath (deposition or trial). In most cases where infringing pictures were used in a website design, anyway.  You might have a few that honestly don't know, but  even then, I think an "I don't know" answer would raise a few eyebrows to say the least.  If it was indeed hotlinked and you know it, thats another story . . . in which case I think it would become important that Getty could not prove otherwise.

Lettered--
I don't disagree with you.  I think the issue of whether Getty has sufficient evidence that the person they are suing hosted the image only becomes relevant if the person sued denies hosting the images and would deny hosting the image under oath.  But 3rd party evidence in favor of ones position is always useful.

If someone was sued, said the person sued when questioned under oath answered they did not host the image  and Getty has no archived html to contradict the defendants testimony, Getty has no case. If beyond that the person being sued has 3rd party evidence showing the image was not hosted-- Getty's case is in the toilet.  (I can't image they'd sue in such a case. But if it's brought up as a hypothetical, I think if they did, they would lose. As they should. )

484

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: It’s High Time to throw someone under the bus…

« on: March 31, 2012, 11:13:20 PM »

Technion is a good school.

485

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Screengrabs lack of credibility??

« on: March 31, 2012, 11:11:31 PM »

Joe then turns on his lap top and surfs to archive.org and shows the court page X of his website in March of 2011 and image Y is not there.

Does this constitute reasonable doubt that the image was ever on Joe's website at all?

If a third party archive not under Joe's control had archived Joe's  and their archive shows the image is not on the pages of Joe's site at the time Getty claims it was there I would think a judge would rule generally rule against Getty.  But your going to have to show the html does not have a link to an image that currently is not appearing because it happens to have been yanked.  The wayback archives html-- so that's what matters.

In court, Getty is going to have to show html anyway. Otherwise they can't demonstrate the image was hosted by the person they are suing.  Rulings in the US have deemed hotlinking not copyright violations. (This could change because the rulings aren't at the Supreme Court-- but the 9th court ruling says hotlinking is not a copyright violation.  So, Getty is going to have to make a case the image was hosted-- and that requires showing html. The screenshot is insufficient.)

486

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Screengrabs lack of credibility??

« on: March 30, 2012, 07:23:38 PM »

I think the fact that screenshots are easily faked is a good reason why people who receive getty letters should avoid volunteering information to Getty. By the same token, going forward it would be unwise to strongly rely on the assumption that all getty has is a screenshot. Getty may have used a third party archive (e.t. webcitens) to archive the page.  Even if they didn't get an archive like wecitens to archive in the past, they may now. 

487

Getty Images Letter Forum / Image Exchange: Volunteers to find IPs

« on: March 08, 2012, 07:18:31 PM »

I've set up a page that is useful for detecting the full range of IPs used by Picscouts Image Exchange. I'd like to invite people to
a) Install the Image Exchange add one to their browser http://www.picscout.com/
b) visit my page.

I don't want to post the url in public. So please PM me for the uri.  After you are done you can uninstall the Image Exchange add on. 

This will help us block some picscout IPs.

488

UK Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty in the UK

« on: March 06, 2012, 04:57:17 PM »

Rock--
I don't think the Advernet case involved any dispute over whether the images were displayed.  I think the Matt's recommendations mesh well with advernet. In that case, the images were displayed. There was no dispute over whether they were displayed. The dispute was over whether the plaintiff had copyright's in place and whether they had exclusive licenses.

I tend to agree with Matt that if the images were displayed, Getty has an image showing they displayed, you need to recognize that in court someone is going to ask you flat out if the images were displayed. If you don't plan to perjure yourself (and risk jail by doing so),  your defense is going to have to be based on the other factors. So it's wiser better to admit the images were displayed and then focus your discussion on the other factors. 

This isn't the same as saying you need to volunteer any information in your initial letters to Getty. But if the image was displayed and you know it was displayed, you'd darn well better plan on a defense that concedes they were displayed.

489

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 03, 2012, 03:32:54 PM »

I have a blog with visitors from all over. So I don't want to block whole countries. I am currently requiring China and Israel to use a captcha at cloudflare. I needed to stop the incessant hammering while getting my scripts tweaked.  I'm going to lift that soon.  I can still catch Bezequint and have many of the Chinese spiders under control.

490

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 03, 2012, 11:21:09 AM »

The caselaw is far from settled in this area, and some commentators argue that technical means to block the use are more appropriate than legal action.
The main thing is technical means have the potential to work immediately. If used widely, they will also raise the cost of operation for the trolls.

Legal means are costly, difficult and time consuming.  Running software to collect data to prove trespass in court would be no easier than blocking.  (In fact, to detect trespass in real time one would likely just add a module to the exact same software that blocks. Why not block while you are at it.)

That the law is unsettled makes the idea of using legal means unrealistic for a small time blogger or small time business owner who is running a blog or web site.

This is not to say that one should rule out legal action. But for most of us it may not be a convenient option relative to blocking.

491

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 03, 2012, 11:05:31 AM »

Budhappi--
As I mentioned, my method is complicated. But, now write every access to .php file (i.e. Wordpress) to a a 15 minute log file. At the end of 15 minutes, I runs a cron job that looks at the logs and bans every IP with these things in it:

$bannedSpiders=array("brandwatch.net","huaweisymantec","Ahrefs","SiteBot","baidu","yandex","CydralSpider","Cydral Image","Aghaven/Nutch","/Nutch-1.2 ","aghaven.com","linkdex.com","bazqux.com","getty","googlealerts","  spider ","http://intensedebate.com/","gettywan","CoverScout","tineye","cmsworldmap.com","web-sniffer.net","(IBM EVV/3.0/EAK01AG9/LE)","Windows NT;","Windows 3","Windows 95","webinator","thunderstone","t-h-u-n-d-e-r-s-t-o-n-e","proximic","picsearch","java","Extreme Picture Finder","BPImageWalker","doubanbot","curl","reverseget.com","RGAnalytics","CoverScout","wikio","python-urllib","Powermarks","KeywordSearchTool","Chilkat","ahrefs.com","panscient","liperhey","Webster","sosoimagespider","bpimagewalker","CCBot/1.0","Daylife","xrumer","xpymep","mail.ru","mozilla/picgrabber","psbot","NSPlayer","vlc/","TraumaCadX","upictoBot","PHP/5.2.10","http://mattters.com/","commoncrawl","pixmatch","Copyright","abot","aipbot","image","pics","pict","SNAPSHOT","naver","sogou","soso","magpie","Netseer","Mozilla/0","Bitvo","pipl.com","www.80legs.com","benderthewebrobot","Semrush","WordPress/3.4-alpha","Wget","Pixray","mlbot","MJ12bot","www.accelobot.com");

I think you can see that quite a few are obviously image bots.  Heck if it's got "pics" or "pict" in it, it's out of here! "pix" onl y gets caught in pixmatch and pixray.   Note also things containing 'getty', tineye,  (Note some bans are redundant. I've done little to make this particularly efficient.)

Some are things that showed up when I started banning picscout-- and which turn out to be particularly effective at processing images. These include ""NSPlayer","vlc/","TraumaCadX","

I'm tempted to ban anything with "alpha" in it. (That Wordpress/3.4-alpha thing was really going to town asking for the same post thousands of times at a rate of... on... more than 1 per second. Banned!)  The code also bans anything that give NO useragent. (This bans IPs for the imageExchange add on.) 

Some of the banned agents are SEO bots. They can be voracious; example: brandwatch.

Some are generic copyright bots: googlealerts (which is copyscape, not google). 

I also have bans for certain referrers. 

I also have a real time module.... And some bans in .htaccess!  But the list above is a good start for things to block by useragent. 

492

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 03, 2012, 10:53:05 AM »

Budhappi-
I will be.  I now run access to my blog through cloudflare-- so I block there.  The delay in releasing my "methods" is that I keep adding little tweaks to my module based on what I see. I also know I need to add a module to *unblock* somethings because I end up blocking both hack attempts and images scraping attempts. The hack attempts change IPs, the image scraping tends to be pretty static.

But there are lots of ways to block:
1) Use ZBblock and add something to the custom sigs.
2) Use htaccess.  But that's flexible, so it's sometimes difficult to tell someone precisely what to do.
3) If you run through cloudflare, block there. That's sort of like blocking in .htaccess, but you don't even see the server load.

I do all 3!! (But if you use cloudflare, you often can't block by IP in .htacesss.)

Since the method will vary depending on how you run your blog, I'm now just saying *what* to block.   If you want to know .htaccess commands to block something in particular, I can give those. But I'm not an .htaccess guru. And I know enough to know that there are considerations in .htaccess that one needs to be aware of-- so I'll ask if you are running a WP blog in a subdomain and other questions.

493

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 02, 2012, 02:44:48 PM »

At least for the time being I seem to have gotten the bots that were racing through all my images on a daily basis to go away.   This one visited robots.txt.  I guess it's worth checking who visits that!

494

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New image bot Pixray

« on: March 02, 2012, 01:52:57 PM »

More on pixray
http://www.pixray.com/products
"The PIXRAY Seeker™ helps image copyright holders and brand managers to track their assets on the web." This seems to be the bot that stopped by.  I'm banning it for a variety of reasons with which ELI members will sympathize, but also because I don't want to spend my money to provide computer resources to let others crawl for their own business purposes.

On the other hand "The PIXRAY Filter™ helps web site operators to retain control of image content uploaded by their users." seems to be a very useful product that anyone who lets users upload images should look into.

495

Getty Images Letter Forum / New image bot Pixray

« on: March 02, 2012, 01:42:21 PM »

New image bot
Pixray-Seeker/1.1 (Pixray-Seeker; http://www.pixray.com/pixraybot; [email protected])
IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/176.9.31.202

node-176-9-31-202.cluster.eu.webcrawler.pixray.com
I'm going to block "Pixray-Seeker"  by user agent the this entire webcrawler in various ways.