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Topics - Moe Hacken

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1
San Diego's largest newspaper has been slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit by a news media firm that has recently become very active in copyright infringement lawsuits.

It will be very interesting to see how the deep-pocketed publisher of the newspaper will respond to this.

Read more:

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2014/jul/25/ticker-emu-t-suedem-copyright-infringement/?c=174356

2
Porn trolls have been floundering in court as of late, and appear to be so dense they're willing to go right back into trolling action so they can get sanctioned some more:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120716/08573019710/copyright-troll-claims-sanctions-against-him-are-bullst-hes-going-to-keep-sending-questionable-subpoenas.shtml

Here's porn troll Evan Stone's reaction to being sanctioned for being too stupid to follow the court's clearly-stated instructions:

Quote
“They just punted, and said you waived your arguments, so we have to affirm,” he told Ars Friday morning. “I'm ready for someone to take this up, this issue of copyright subpoenas in the Fifth Circuit. That's really the bigger issue. I'm just going to move on from this whole sanction thing. I think it's bullshit and I think it shouldn't have happened. I’d rather move on with my life than be right. That's what I’m going to do. We're going to do some more copyright subpoenas, and we're going to bring them before the district and see if they are accepted or denied and then bring them before the Fifth Circuit.”

Evan Stone seems to be quite unclear on the concept. The blowback he's causing will help build the case against abusive trolling. Thanks, Evan Stone, for being so incompetent you're helping our side.

3
While comparing the different definitions of "royalty-free" provided by different vendors, I found something on iStockphoto that blew my mind: They offer ... COPYRIGHT TROLL INSURANCE!

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Every royalty-free file licensed on iStockphoto includes a free Legal Guarantee. This is our promise that content, used within the terms of the license agreement, will not infringe any copyright, moral right, trademark or other intellectual property right or violate any right of privacy or publicity.

If you receive a threatened or actual claim that your use of iStockphoto content (used within the terms of the license agreement) is infringing any rights mentioned above, notify us of that claim and, with your consent, we will defend you and be responsible for your damages and expenses up to $10,000.

Wait a minute. We've seen people get trolled for more than $10,000 for a single image. Don't worry. For a little extra cash, you can buy peace of mind with the iStockphoto EXTENDED Copyright Insurace Plan!

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If you need a little extra peace of mind from iStockphoto, the Extended Legal Guarantee increases iStockphoto's responsibility for your damages and expenses up to $250,000. This Extended Legal Guarantee comes free on any file purchased from the Vetta Collection or Agency Collection, and can be added to any other file outside of those collections.

There is no financial cap to iStockphoto’s liability under the Pump Audio Content License Agreement.

You can license (or purchase) an Extended License when you first download content or anytime afterwards. Please note, when purchasing the Extended License at a later date, you will be required to re-license the file.

If you need to ask, the extended plans are not cheap. I'm flabbergasted that they will sell you an image and admit that you can STILL get trolled for it and you would need to get protection (or even extended protection) for the image you licensed from THEM!

Now here's a scenario to consider: You buy a Standard License image from iStockphoto, figuring you don't need to pay the extra cash to be covered for more than $10,000, then parent company Getty sends you a letter demanding $20,000 for the infringement.

Unless I'm reading this wrong, this is the craziest thing I've read about licensing from a stock photo company in my life. See if you get the same notion from reading this page:

http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses

If this is the case, I see a very ugly conflict of interest in the scenario where Getty Images claims you infringed by using an image you licensed from iStockphoto. Let's not forget that Getty Images owns iStockphoto.

4
Getty Images Letter Forum / How is this different from PicScout?
« on: May 27, 2012, 03:21:41 PM »
It's now all over the media, and I really don't see that much difference between this and the PicScout business model:

http://tinyurl.com/7rykvhf

http://tinyurl.com/78vf6ro

How is this different from the Google Street View people storming into these people's houses, sticking a USB stick in their laptop, and downloading anything they please?

How is PicScout's rudebot any different when they bang into your server to suck out information that's none of their business and it has been made clear that they are not to go there?

VKT loves to say that just because he leaves his keys in the car's ignition, that doesn't give you the right to climb in and drive off. Really? So just because our servers can't be easily secured from PicScout's gross intrusions, that gives THEM the right to come in and take whatever they want on our bandwidth nickel and sell it to anyone for their trollish purposes? The guy's trying to have it both ways and I'm not buying it for a second.

How is it that gathering "evidence" against a person in this manner does NOT require a warrant or court order, and how can it be argued that any evidence thus collected could be admissible in court?

Even the Department of Homeland Security has to get a warrant or court order to be able to collect electronic information, or any kind of private information, for that matter. That doesn't necessarily stop them from doing surveillance, but they are well aware of what would stick in court and what would get thrown out.

This needs to be made specific: PicScout evidence collected without an appropriate court order or warrant is NOT admissible in court. That won't stop them from rudely snooping, but it would make their business model change DRASTICALLY. They would only be worth hiring in the US if there is a very specific case where the surveillance can be justified and is approved by judicial oversight. No more gill netting for the trollbot.

Fair is fair. We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights for some very good reasons. I'm not done using my civil rights so I think I'l stand up for them.

5
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

6
Following the great advice given in this forum about setting up bad bot traps to harvest IPs that need to be blocked, I caught a crawler ignoring my robots.txt file. It was an IP address from China pretending to be a Baidu crawler. It turned out to be registered by these people:

https://www.markmonitor.com/solutions/role_based_solutions-legal.php

Towards the bottom of the page they mention how they can ...

"detect infringement using the industry’s widest monitoring net"

Which apparently means snooping around with incognito crawlers to see what they can find. This broadens the Intellectual Property Crawlerbot playing field beyond images to include games, media, music, and just about anything that can be branded including text copy. Let's hope they don't intend to emulate the extortion letter business model. I think I'll block their IP anyway.

This is what you need to block to keep them out of your server:

IP address: 123.125.71.110
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)


7
Getty Images Letter Forum / A non-lawyer idea about "The Letter"
« on: May 03, 2012, 05:04:53 PM »
It sounds like most people are receiving a letter accusing them of infringing a copyright because they allegedly have a copy of an image file on their server, which was identified by a crawlbot designed for this specific purpose. As "proof" that a copyright infringement took place, they take a screen capture and attach it to "The Letter". The screen capture allegedly shows an image that was copyrighted being wrongly used. That allegation has yet to be disputed, but there is another fact that is indisputable. The image capture they send with "The Letter" contains copyrighted content, such as the website logo, which they have no permission to reproduce, especially for commercial use.

I'm not a lawyer. Is this line of thinking going anywhere?

BTW, this is a great forum, thanks very much to Oscar and Matthew for their hard work and to all the contributors for taking part in this exchange of ideas. Knowledge is power.

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