The site that Stashy has become is a link farm site. There are, quite literally, many thousands of them on the Web, many with that exact design.

This is what happens when a domain is allowed to expire, which happens every day to thousands of URLs, and they are scooped up by spammers hoping to cash in on the residual traffic.

This can happen with ANY domain that is shut down for ANY reason. Forget to renew? This can happen. Business close? This can happen. Get taken down by the FBI? This can happen. Anything can cause this. It's not a result of my activities or anyone else's. It, sadly, is the normal result of letting a domain expire.

Sad, but true.

The site that Stashy has become is a link farm site. There are, quite literally, many thousands of them on the Web, many with that exact design.

This is what happens when a domain is allowed to expire, which happens every day to thousands of URLs, and they are scooped up by spammers hoping to cash in on the residual traffic.

This can happen with ANY domain that is shut down for ANY reason. Forget to renew? This can happen. Business close? This can happen. Get taken down by the FBI? This can happen. Anything can cause this. It's not a result of my activities or anyone else's. It, sadly, is the normal result of letting a domain expire.

Sad, but true.

I hope I find you in good health.
A year and a half later or so after your article, I am pleased to inform you that obviously stashy.com now servers a higher purpose for society, that being essentially offering links to porn pages. I hope you find this refreshing and most pleasing to your plagiarism endeavours. After all, advertising sex is much more fun and harmless than sharing other people's stuff. And on that point I want to ask you have you already written at least a dozen articles on how sharing on twitter, facebook, myspace, random blogs and other social media is an infringement on copyright?

I hope I find you in good health.
A year and a half later or so after your article, I am pleased to inform you that obviously stashy.com now servers a higher purpose for society, that being essentially offering links to porn pages. I hope you find this refreshing and most pleasing to your plagiarism endeavours. After all, advertising sex is much more fun and harmless than sharing other people's stuff. And on that point I want to ask you have you already written at least a dozen articles on how sharing on twitter, facebook, myspace, random blogs and other social media is an infringement on copyright?

Considering that most of the Flickr users involved had licensed their work under “All Rights Reserved” and had thus expressed their intention to protect their works, I'm unsure of what other actions you'd want them to take. The only other option would be to mark the images as private or simply not share them on Flickr at all. It seems unfair to tell people that they have to either deal with their works being copied and pasted without permission or never share them on the Web.

I am interested in any thoughts you have here.

Considering that most of the Flickr users involved had licensed their work under “All Rights Reserved” and had thus expressed their intention to protect their works, I’m unsure of what other actions you’d want them to take. The only other option would be to mark the images as private or simply not share them on Flickr at all. It seems unfair to tell people that they have to either deal with their works being copied and pasted without permission or never share them on the Web.

I am interested in any thoughts you have here.

I am not saying that Stashy was right or anything, I am saying that Flickr users probably waged war on the wrong party. Concerning laws in the EU, I must inform you that while the legislature in all EU member states should be harmonised, this does not mean it is the same.

My point is that if one does not make the necessary steps to protect one’s work, he/she has no right whatsoever to tissue threats toward to the students, who have created Stashy. What I mean is that the reaction and criticism of the users, whose work was abused, was rather unnecessary harsh. I will repeat my words again: overed milk is safe from the cats.

Just because none of the images you uploaded received a warning does not mean that they were not likely infringements. If you did not create the images yourself, there was no strong fair use argument (which would be difficult with Stashy) or the image was not in the public domain, it as likely an infringement. Just because images have been copied many times before on the Web does not make it any less of an infringement when you do it again.

So, unless you created all of the images yourself, there’s an almost certainty that at least some were an infringement.

As far as Flickr users stating that their images should not be used, that is exactly what “All Rights Reserved” means, which is the default license in Flickr. I’d imagine through sheer probability that most of the images involved had that. The same goes for DeviantArt. Copyright is a permission system, if a work does not come with any information, it is assumed to be copyright protected, since the Copyright Act of 1978 here in the U.S. and longer elsewhere, if you have no permissions on a work, the default is all rights reserved under current law, not public domain or anything else.

Yes, there are other great tools for sharing information and, as I pointed out in the article, they are occasionally abused. However, those tools have significant non-infringing uses, something that Stashy did not have.

Stashy was a U.S. site and bound by U.S. law, I can not speak for Bulgarian law but I do know that, if you have been admitted to or are seeking admission to the EU, your law will be bound by EU law and the rules there are even stricter on such topics than the U.S. Even Google News was successfully sued for copyright infringement in the EU.

The strange thing to all of this is simple. Ive spoken with at least one of the founders, he seems to have admitted that they made a mistake and they appreciate my offer to help in the future. They’re going to continue building sites but will be consulting with me and attorney friends of mine before progressing, or at least indicated an interest in doing so.

The issue at this time seems to be resolved as the admins at Stashy actually agree with myself and those that share my viewpoint. They made a mistake and were adult enough to admit it and smart enough to pull out before things got worse….

Best Regards