EsterlDode had lifted my page, design and all, and put it on their site with some ads hovering on top. Yes, not only did they rip off my content, but they were trying to use my content to make a buck for themselves. Or should I say a rupee. You see, after performing a WHOIS on their site, I found out that they are located in India. The city of Haldia in the province of West Bengal to be exact.

The site claimed that after 8 hours they would take down my content (how gracious, huh?) and provided a link to my original page. This was little consolation. What they did was still a violation of my copyright.

I’ve written about copyright before and it might seem like I often come down against content owners. After all, I oppose the RIAA lawsuits which, based on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) seek damages of $750 – $150,000 per violation. And I have called for shorter copyright terms. Why, then, should I expect copyright protection?

The answer is quite simple. I’m against copyright ownership stretching for 90+ years. This blog post was mere hours old when it was stolen. As for damages, those are being sought against people with no profit motive when the law was originally designed to target people making money off of others’ copyrighted works. These thieves are precisely the kind of people that the DMCA was designed to protect against. They are taking my newly released work, re-publishing it on their site without permission, and putting ads on top to make money from content they don’t own the rights to.

I have no qualms about threatening DMCA lawsuits in cases such as this one or following up those threats if need be. As it stands, I have made initial contact informing them to remove the content immediately. I will continue to monitor their activities to make sure they don’t steal any more posts of mine and have saved screen grabs of the existing offence just in case. In fact, here are the screen grabs (with the taskbar obscured and quality reduced for the web – rest assured I have non-edited, high quality versions locally). Compare these with my real post.

My Aloha Question for the day is: Have you ever had your blog content lifted by a spammer or scraper? If so, what did you do about it?

UPDATE: This morning I checked and the page was still up.  (This, despite their claim that it would be removed after 8 hours.)  I sent the following e-mail:

Hi,

You currently have a page on your website ( THEIR URL ) that was completely copied from my site ( http://www.techydad.com/?p=3490 ).  I have not authorized any copying of my content like this and, since my content is copyrighted, this is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation.  Violations like this carry a fine of anywhere between $750 and $150,000 per instance.  I have already tried contacting your via your Twitter account asking for the removal of the content and have received no answer.  I expect that this page be taken down immediately and no further pages from my site be stolen in such a way.  If you do not comply, I will contact my attorney to investigate further action.

-TechyDad

I also sent a tweet to GoDaddy, their apparent hosting provider, asking who to contact about copyright violations on hosted websites.  I don’t know if it was my actions or their software running slow, but my content is now gone from their site.  They still continue grabbing other people’s content and putting it on their site (with ads to earn them money), however.  I’m going to keep my eye on them and follow up on any leads I can to shut them down.

UPDATE #2: The scraper e-mailed me back, apologized for any trouble and asked me what I thought of "popular URL shortening service" Adjix.com.  He provided a link which displays this post within a frame with their ad on top.  I’m thinking about how to respond at this point so I would like to know what you think about it.  How would you respond?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #43

Response (XXXX) 11/18/2008 04:34 PM
Thank you for contacting Toyota with your comments and concerns regarding the use of vehicle images. The letter asking the DesktopNexus site to remove all images featuring a Toyota, Scion or Lexus vehicle was the result of mis-communication at Toyota, which we regret.

Copyright law protects the creative work product of artists, photographers, and other creators. Toyota respects these rights, including those of photographers who work with Toyota. Toyota purchases the rights to the images it posts on its sites, and welcomes public use of those images where we have the rights to give. However, this permission is limited to editorial or personal use, not commercial use, such as advertising any products or services. That’s because the photographers – not Toyota – retain the rights to any commercial use, and we cannot give permission to use those images for that purpose. In response the concerns raised by DesktopNexus, Toyota is working with photographers to determine what images may be used for non-commercial purposes, and what we can do to provide broader access.

We hope you will understand and appreciate the legal constraints we face.

Toyota also welcomes interested members of the public to use their own images or photography of Toyota’s vehicles, and we confirm that we have no objection to this use.

We appreciate your interest in our products.

Toyota Customer Experience

I am glad that they’ve backed down from the "all your car photos belong to us" stance, but their reply sounds too much like:

We found a couple of legitimately infringing photos on your site but rather than give you specifics we decided to be lazy and just order them all down. We figured you’d just roll over and take it, but then you had to spread the word. Now we’re facing a ton of bad PR so we’re going to limit our claims to just those originally infringing photos.

This is probably overkill now, but I took these photos intending to post them in protest of Toyota’s stance.  I don’t want them going to waste, so here’s my Toyota automobile.  (The dent was from someone in my office’s parking lot using my car as the signal that they backed up too far.)

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

There’s this website called Desktop Nexus that allows users to post photos for other people to use as their desktop images.  Apparently, Toyota recently decided to order Desktop Nexus to take down "all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus."  Toyota has used a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice to frame their demand, so they’re clearly claiming copyright over photos that contain those cars.

When pressed for clarification (since some photos could be legitimately infringing and some might not be), the site’s owner was told "all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others."  (He was also told that a specific identification of photos Toyota is claiming infringe on their copyrights would involve time that would be billed to Desktop Nexus – something that Toyota is legally obligated to do if they want to file a proper DMCA notice.)

According to Toyota, if I posted a photo of my Toyota automobile on here (or on my personal blog or anywhere else), Toyota could sue me for copyright infringement.  It wouldn’t matter that my car is completely my own (completely paid up).  Since Toyota once put the car together, they claim to own perpetual rights to how that car is represented photographically.

If Toyota gets away with this, where does it end?  Can Coke sue me if a coke can appears in a photo online without their permission?  Does Old Navy sue me because my photo subject happens to be wearing an Old Navy shirt while posing for a photo?

Here’s the article on TorrentFreak.com: http://torrentfreak.com/toyota-claims-ownership-081114/

Look for a photo of my Toyota car to appear on this blog soon as protest.  I call on all Toyota car owners to post photos of their cars to join in the protest.  Non-Toyota car owners can snap a photo of the nearest Toyota car.  Be considerate, though, and don’t show anything "personally identifying" about the vehicle like license plate number.