Anyone who is a regular reader to this site knows that, in order to get Adsense removed from a scraper or plagiarist’s page, you are required to file a DMCA notice. Adsense has its own DMCA policy and follows it very strictly. Though results can be obtained through that means, few bloggers actually use it….
Category Archives: Legal Issues
Is Trademark the New Copyright?
I want to be clear before I begin that this article is not an attack on open source, copyleft or any of the products listed. Rather, it is an exploration of the role trademark will play in the future of copyleft and intellectual property in general. What do the following have in common: Ubuntu, Firefox,…
CAPTCHAs and the DMCA
Yesterday I received an email Ben Maurer, one of the engineers for reCAPTCHA. In addition to responding to a comment on a post from last week, he alerted me to a copyright case involving Tickmaster (TM) and RMG Technologies. According to the complaint and subsequent injunction (embedded below), RMG produced an application that allowed users…
workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper
On the surface, workFRIENDLY is something of a novelty site. The idea is pretty simple, you punch in a URL that you want to visit and workFRIENDLY pulls up the site in a format that resembles a Microsoft Word document (see Blog Herald on workFRIENDLY). The idea is that, if you use the site to…
Modified Scraping on the Rise
It appears that Google’s push to handle duplicate content may be having an unintended side effect. Even though a recent report by Attributor indicates that the search engine has done a terrible job separating originals from copies, the spammers don’t seem to be taking any chances. Spam bloggers are no longer content on scraping entries…
Whois Service Comes Under Fire
Article Updated According to a recent AP article, the Whois service, a series of databases with information about the individuals that register domains, has come under fire from privacy advocates and a new proposal seeks to do away with the service altogether. Such a move would be a tremendous blow to law enforcement, lawyers and…
Updates on the Lara Jade Case
Back in May, I reported on Lara Jade Coton, a professional photographer who discovered that a self portrait she took of herself when she was fourteen was used as the cover art for a pornographic DVD. Later, in July, she filed a lawsuit against the company behind the DVD, TVX Films, with the aid of…
Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters
When Justin Leonard created his site infomercialscams.com, he probably anticipated that he’d attract some unwanted legal attention. By letting people post their infomercial horror stories and calling out the con artists of late night, he was bound to ruffle some feathers, including a few lawyers. However, he probably didn’t expect any of that attention to…
The DMCA on 7 Message Board Hosts
Message boards are often thought of as dinosaurs on the Web. Where once having a presence on message boards and forums was almost as ubiquitous as email and IM, message boards have fallen on hard times, pushed aside by blogs and social networking sites. However, there are still many thriving communities on the Web that…
Copyright 101 Quiz Answers
There were only a couple of takers on the last game but the results were interesting. Both participants did very well. PT regular and all-around good guy Jeremy Steele met the requirements to win the game, getting both seven correct answers and the bonus. However, kudos also has to go to the lovely and talentedAmita…
Category Archives: Legal Issues
Google’s Shell Games
Anyone who is a regular reader to this site knows that, in order to get Adsense removed from a scraper or plagiarist’s page, you are required to file a DMCA notice. Adsense has its own DMCA policy and follows it very strictly. Though results can be obtained through that means, few bloggers actually use it….
Is Trademark the New Copyright?
I want to be clear before I begin that this article is not an attack on open source, copyleft or any of the products listed. Rather, it is an exploration of the role trademark will play in the future of copyleft and intellectual property in general. What do the following have in common: Ubuntu, Firefox,…
CAPTCHAs and the DMCA
Yesterday I received an email Ben Maurer, one of the engineers for reCAPTCHA. In addition to responding to a comment on a post from last week, he alerted me to a copyright case involving Tickmaster (TM) and RMG Technologies. According to the complaint and subsequent injunction (embedded below), RMG produced an application that allowed users…
workFRIENDLY: An Accidental Scraper
On the surface, workFRIENDLY is something of a novelty site. The idea is pretty simple, you punch in a URL that you want to visit and workFRIENDLY pulls up the site in a format that resembles a Microsoft Word document (see Blog Herald on workFRIENDLY). The idea is that, if you use the site to…
Modified Scraping on the Rise
It appears that Google’s push to handle duplicate content may be having an unintended side effect. Even though a recent report by Attributor indicates that the search engine has done a terrible job separating originals from copies, the spammers don’t seem to be taking any chances. Spam bloggers are no longer content on scraping entries…
Whois Service Comes Under Fire
Article Updated According to a recent AP article, the Whois service, a series of databases with information about the individuals that register domains, has come under fire from privacy advocates and a new proposal seeks to do away with the service altogether. Such a move would be a tremendous blow to law enforcement, lawyers and…
Updates on the Lara Jade Case
Back in May, I reported on Lara Jade Coton, a professional photographer who discovered that a self portrait she took of herself when she was fourteen was used as the cover art for a pornographic DVD. Later, in July, she filed a lawsuit against the company behind the DVD, TVX Films, with the aid of…
Copyright and Cease and Desist Letters
When Justin Leonard created his site infomercialscams.com, he probably anticipated that he’d attract some unwanted legal attention. By letting people post their infomercial horror stories and calling out the con artists of late night, he was bound to ruffle some feathers, including a few lawyers. However, he probably didn’t expect any of that attention to…
The DMCA on 7 Message Board Hosts
Message boards are often thought of as dinosaurs on the Web. Where once having a presence on message boards and forums was almost as ubiquitous as email and IM, message boards have fallen on hard times, pushed aside by blogs and social networking sites. However, there are still many thriving communities on the Web that…
Copyright 101 Quiz Answers
There were only a couple of takers on the last game but the results were interesting. Both participants did very well. PT regular and all-around good guy Jeremy Steele met the requirements to win the game, getting both seven correct answers and the bonus. However, kudos also has to go to the lovely and talentedAmita…
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This work by Jonathan Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
