Messages

541

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: How many infringements is that?

« on: February 02, 2012, 04:05:53 PM »

annalise--
INAL, but I suspect your hypothetical has insufficient information to be given an answer.  If they (possibly getty) sue, you'll know who they sued and how many images they sued for when you read the suit. But otherwise, given your hypothetical, you are omitting things like who owns the domains, whether there was a DMAC, whether blogs hosted images or hotlined etc.  If the domain was http://wordpress.com/ and the subdomains blog1.wordpress.com and blog2.wordpress.com, someone like getty would probably send a DMAC request to wordpress.com first. Whether 'they' might have a valid suit against wordpress.com, blog1 or blog 2 would depend on a lot of circumstances.

542

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Getty, Corbis & Superstock being sued...a MUST read!

« on: February 02, 2012, 02:20:50 PM »

My sister is a legal librarian; cases sometimes touch on IP.  She said the guys working on IP stuff (licensing?) for the "the bean" (aka Cloudgate) in Chicago had to think pretty broadly on about rights associated with the sculpture.  Obviously, any rights holder wants to be able to make money on whatever they legally can make money on. (Paper weights? Postcards? Calendars? )  Meanwhile, the sculpture is just sitting out there in the park where visitors are going to want to take pictures of themselves reflected in the thing.   I have a fuzzy memory about the conversation and my sister isn't an attorney. But photos of "the bean" might have a complication while the dinosaur ones look like straightforward garden variety copying to non-lawyer me!

'The bean' is reflective and photos generally include people and the surrounding park, I suspect one can frequently argue there is at least some element of transformative nature in photos. But it's very difficult to see any transformative nature in the images of dinosaur eggs put on the front of text books. It seems to me the images were used on the cover of the book precisely because the photographer did nothing transformative.

543

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: TinEye.com

« on: February 02, 2012, 01:54:44 PM »

JPicker--
I used to think your question would be easy to answer, but actually, it turns out to be more difficult.  I learned this by monitoring my image visits a lot.

I've started doing something much more complicated than htaccess alone  Part of the reason is that I'm trying to deal with both image scraping and a lot of obvious malicious hacking attempts (which have exploded at blogs btw. It's not just me.)   But the other reason is that I developed the impression that after blocking bezeqint (rumored host for picscout) I started seeing things like huge number of downloads of images from IPs that correspond to 'hotspots' (say in airports) with UA's that look like mobile devices (or oddly, that TraumaCAD ua. ) The referrers tended to be my feed.

(This was odder than you can imagine because a) my feed had no link to these images so the referrer didn't make sense, b) a connection using TraumaCAD from a hotspot and downloading a zillions images?  What am I to make of this. Some physician sitting in an airport decided to download thousands of images including things like histograms of temperatures in VaxJoe Sweden posted in 2007? As if.)

I've gotten this weird behavior reduced using a combination of .htacess, running my site connection through cloudflare and writing a php script to monitor requests for most my images and banning IPs that make ridiculous requests. 

544

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: TinEye.com

« on: February 02, 2012, 11:29:10 AM »

Dreamhost may have experienced a DDOS attack. See
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2012/01/30/connectivity-issues-in-one-datacenter/

But I don't think that explains user agents like TraumaCAD and other obvious image specific agents appearing in my user logs.

And if you got your letter do they think you're stupid enough to put back whatever they're angry about?

No. In a case that Getty took to court (and was not awarded money) it's clear Getty had initially found a few images. Later, as the proceeded toward court, they found additional images.  So, I suspect what they may do is:
1) Send the picscout out rather generally using some sort of algorithm to decide what sites to interrogate. The algorithm has nothing to do with me personally. It could be trying to target domains in a certain country, finding domains that host lots of images etc.  (I'm in the US. I post frequently. My posts often contain images. Usually graphs of global temperature series, or illustrations of ENSO etc. But still, ".png" and ".jpg". 

2) The algorithm might be set to look at a site more intensively after it thinks it's found an infraction.

3) The bot might be badly programmed and not respond properly to "403" and "404" responses.  (Responding properly means going away.) So, when it sees a 403 or 404 it just keeps hammering away over and over and over.

4) The algorithm might be set to instruct the 'bot revisit the page where it believes the infraction was found. (And repeat until such time as a human tells the bot to stop visiting.)

None of this would imply any human thinks that anyone is stupid enough to take something down and put it back in place. It would merely mean that at some point, a human thought through a crawl proceedure they thought would be useful for monitoring and collecting data for files. Crawling is very cheap for them but missing information could be costly in court. So sending out the bot too often would ordinarily be in their interest. 
However, I now hold a grudge against their bots and I'm monitoring what the heck is going on with images. I'm seeing "weird" things. I've consulted with an IT friend and he agrees it's "weird". As in "not what normal, human blog visitors do" weird.  To me that means it's safe to block it.  I'm not blocking people.  I don't know for sure I'm blocking image-copyright-troll-bots, but I'm blocking something weird.

545

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: "Cease Communications" request

« on: February 02, 2012, 11:09:35 AM »

I can't seem to submit an avatar. Do we need to be deemed worthy before we can do that?

546

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Providing Proof of Infringement

« on: February 02, 2012, 11:06:59 AM »

annalise--
Asking for registration is not making any admission against your interest. So, it's not the sort of thing Oscar is suggesting you omit from your emails, phone conversations or letters.  Material to omit are statements like

• "Yes. I own that web site".
• Yes. I personally copied the image and hosted it on my web server from day X to day Y and I've now taken it down.
• I hired joe blow and he put it on my server and site.

All these things my be true and you might be required to reveal them during discover if Getty ever gets around to suing you, but it is better to make Getty collect their own evidence or wait until discover to get information they need to fully make their case.   Instead of saying things like "I did host the image from x to y", you could try to figure out the most uninformative way of letting Getty know the image has been taken down while not actually admitting anything that is contrary to your interest should you end up in court.    Depending on what points you think are ok to confirm or reveal, this could take a bit of doing because you a) must not lie and b) you don't want to say something so ridiculous sounding third parties will really think you are being too cute for words.

If, for example, they sent the letter to you, but really, it belongs to someone else who you know (husband? Club?), you could write your friend, ask them to take down the image, and respond:

"Dear Getty,

I received your letter about image X at site.  I've examined the site in question.  The image no longer appears at the site.

Sincerely,
Joe Blow "

This fails to inform Getty who owns the site. Heck, it's not even an admission the image every appears!  If they sent the letter to the wrong person, you didn't let them know that fact. They can't win a suit against the wrong party, so if they don't know who to sue, they have to figure that out.  In contrast, if you wrote them and said "I don't own the site. Party X owns it", you've done some research for them. 

On the other hand, if you own the site, you know that ownership information is trivial to discover, the letter came to the correct place and so on, then you might just say "I edited the site and the image no longer appears".   This statement is an admission that you have some control over the content-- after all-- you can edit.  But don't tell them them any more than the fact that you've edited the content in a way that made the image vanish. It's not an admission that you were in control when it appeared! (Heh!)  As far as you've admitted, the image might have been hotlinked-- which the 9th circuit court ruled not copying under the US copyright act -- etc.   You might not have full control of the site. You might not own it. The image might have been hosted on your server or someone else's.  Getty might be able to find out, but the point is, they need to do the work.

The fact is: You don't even need to present all evidence in your favor in your first letter (or 2nd or 3rd.)  Notice they don't send you complete evidence in favor of their case. They don't admit the obvious or possible flaws in their case.

When writing them remember: They are not the judge.  They are unlikely to write by "Oh. You're right."  They are much more likely to be crafting stock defenses for every possible defense they think will come in, and sending them out. They will continue to send out letters at a cost of $0.37 + cost of paper, employee costs for envelop stuffing and printer ink.   

In restrospect, had I read this site further, I my first letter would have been more vague. I would have in parallel done some research and collected more evidence for my file.    (My case is one of hotlinking-- so I think getty would lose in court if they sued me.  But I don't think I even needed to spare their time by explaining the hotlinking and sending them evidence that I was only hotlinking in my first letter.  I still wish I would have been more vague and strung them out and presented my evidence that I wasn't infringing until later. But that's water under the bridge.  But knowing Oscar's advice now, my first letter would be more vague.)

547

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Copyright + Licensing Agreement with other company

« on: February 02, 2012, 10:18:28 AM »

It might be better to argue that Getty was not doing enough to protect its copyright in the images by allowing this and therefore cannot come into court claiming they were seriously infringed. 

Oscar consistently demonstrates why if I do get sued, I'm hiring an attorney.

548

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: FUTURE DEMANDS - Getty Outrageous prices

« on: January 30, 2012, 10:49:50 PM »

Are the new prices for the same license?

549

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: TinEye.com

« on: January 30, 2012, 03:04:32 PM »

Soylent--
Also: are you sure no one is looking at your images? I blocked picscout and bezeq. But looking at my server logs I could see that certain things were downloading every image in my wp-content/uploads files (where images are stored) on a regular basis.   This is an image intensive blog and I mean image back to 2007.

 The referrers were either a) blogname/feed or b) blogname.  But neither of those referrers has links to the images that were being downloaded.  When I would block one type of user agent, others would start downloading the images.  I only got it to stop by modifying .htaccess to forward image requests to a php file, logging the referrers and only supplying the image if the referrer is actually, literally correct.  This is relatively cpu intensive, but I also joined cloudflare and now that I can detect, I can ban agents.  In the meantime, I've discovered a vast number of user agents which seem to visit and only look at images. Did you know that playstations can be used as browsers?  Also, I saw useragents that point to software used by doctors to read x-rays (http://www.voyanthealth.com/traumacad.jsp) . Once again: these things somehow only want to look at images-- trying to race through lots of them. Go figure?  Oh. And besides that, some of these started coming from IPs that are used by wireless agents.  So, there I have something visiting my server trying to download thousands of images (and nothing else) supposedly using TraumaCad coming in from an IP range that specializes in wireless agents in airports. 

You tell me what was going on. Because I think someone wanted to race through my images!

550

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: TinEye.com

« on: January 30, 2012, 02:55:29 PM »

Soylent Green--
I think it's impossible to back out motivation from what I see in server logs.  But I think it's much more likely that lots of these scrapers are pre-programmed and just prowling. The main reasons I think this are that

a) businesses want to keep costs low. Having simple bots that just prowl is the cheapest thing for picscout/getty etc.    Whatever 'bot was arriving was just trying to load and reload the same page over and over and over and over. This sort of behavior suggests a bot that wasn't even programmed very well as otherwise it should have known to give up. (Google bots don't reload pages that send them 403's or 404's.  Only stoooooopid bots do.)  So, I image that someone just programmed a bot to do something and keep trying. They didn't even think to program in a graceful exist. That's cost saving for them-- blog crashing for me.  And the bot came from bezeqint.

b) generally, bombarding a bloggers site causes no intimidation because the blogger has no idea why their blog is crashing. They just know it's crashing but they don't know why. They are likely to be angry with their host rather than imagining it might be the person who sent them a letter about copyright.   

So, all in all, I think mostly, the bots are programmed to get information as cheaply as possible for picscout/getty whomever. They operate by sucking up bandwidth/memory/cpu on the people they are either 'spying on' or 'investigating' (take your pick.)  I suspect there is very little more to it.

551

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: TinEye.com

« on: January 30, 2012, 10:38:16 AM »

You want some 'bots to come by.  In particular, you probably want the google bot to come by because google runs a real search engine and you do want people who might be readers or customers to find your site. 

What you  generally want to discourage is 'bots who are either

• sucking utterly excessive amounts of bandwidth, cpu or memory doing entirely unreasonable searches to detect "copyright" violations.
• sucking utterly excessive amounts of bandwidth, cpu or memory so they can create their own data base to sell SEO services
• sucking utterly excessive amounts of bandwidth, cpu or memory because they just don't want to spend money programming a bot that doesn't misbehave.
• shows any evidence of doing something dangerous that might look like it's trying to crack into your server, steal email addresses, leave malware etc.

The copyright issue comes up here, but it's really not the main reason to try to control bots.  Also, controlling bots can't protect you from a copyright owner suing you if you really are abusing copyright.  What it can do is give you limited protection by making it more difficult for something like the picscout bot to  race quickly  through your site downloading hundreds of pages at little expense to itself-- but significant to you.  If you selectively block these bots, you can at least make it so that getty or picscout have to spend their human time or energy searching your site.

To tell you how bad it can get: Shortly before I got my getty letter, I noticed my blog was crashing a lot. I don't know if this had anything to do with picscout-- but I could see spikes. After I got my 2nd getty letter, I noticed that an agent hosted on bezeqint hammered my blog and caused it to crash. Oddly, they were not served pages. Zbblock was denying them pages, but the bot just kept requesting over and over and over and over and.... you get the picture.

My blog has a decent readership with quite a few people who work in IT. I got a great deal of advice, and decided that on shared hosting, the solution would be to a) host on cloudflare and b) write some code to auto-ban IPs that do certain things. The system seems to be working quite well, and I have greatly reduced image scraping, crack attempts, visits from bandwidth sucking referrer loggers etc.   

I have no illusion that someone looking for copyright violations can't visit my site-- but it is now somewhat more difficult for them to do race through quickly using automated tools. This means it is more expensive for something like picscout to run a scraper. 

But returning to the issue with google: I don't block google.  I let them visit, cache, surf whatever it likes. It's a mostly well behaved bot and google has actually created a service that benefits me. I'm willing to let them use all the bandwidth they use.

For what it's worth: if picscouts method of looking for images ends up being writing a tool that does one bajillion searches at google and afterwards visit the blog post where they think a violation exist, that's fine with me. If they do it that way, they mostly be sucking up google's bandwidth, not mine.  Also, their bot will have to spend much more processing time to search. That's money from their pockets, not mine. 

I have no objection to copyright owners trying to identify copyright infringers and enforce it. What I object to is services that operate in a way that deprives my blog readers of access because my blog periodically crashes when the image scraping service decides they want to search and which by increasing the resources I need to rent to keep my blog running  shifts much of the cost of their searching onto me.  If they want to make money by searching for violations that's fine. But I don't want to donate my server resources to their commercial enterprise. 

552

Hawaiian Letters & Lawsuits Forum / Re: Hawaiian Art Network v. Moku-aina Properties observations

« on: January 30, 2012, 10:05:13 AM »

HAN dropping a V.K. Tylor case will embolden everyone who reads here and has gotten a V.K. Tylor letter!

553

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Will soon receive letter from Getty

« on: January 29, 2012, 11:09:54 AM »

Yes, Getty sends letters to not-business oriented entities. I was sent a letter for a hotlinked image in comments on my hobby blog.

554

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Interesting development in a German Case

« on: January 28, 2012, 09:28:38 PM »

Didn't you recieve a letter from Getty for an image that was linked in your blog..they may not "go after" as in filing a suit, but they certainly try to go after..

Yes. I mean actually file suit. I got a letter and they sent a second letter. I suspect picscout didn't even look at the html before they send out letters.

I'm crossing my fingers but after responding to letter 2, I haven't heard back. I'm beginning to think they are going to just stop. . .   But what I mean by "going after" is filing suit.

555

Legal Controversies Forum / Re: Interesting development in a German Case

« on: January 28, 2012, 02:26:09 PM »

Buddhapi--
Even without this case we don't even know if current US law is stable on this issue.

What we have is a ruling from the 9th circuit.  We don't have a ruling from SCOTUS.  My understanding is a ruling from the 9th circuit doesn't bind any other circuit. Moreover, the 9th circuit is often overruled.

In principle, Getty could go after someone in one of the other circuits and the other circuit could rule differently from the 9th. In practice, Getty would have a heavy burden because at least some justices in other circuits are likely to interpret US law as those in the 9th circuit did.  Also, given the entities that benefit from the current law (e.g. Google), if Getty does pursue one of these cases, I imagine amicus briefs would magically appear explaining why not linking should not be viewed as violating US copyright law.   All in all, it is highly unlikely Getty would go after anyone hotlinking an image.