In May, I reported on DeviantArt photographer Lara Jade Coton who had discovered that a self-portrait she had taken when she was 14 was being used on the cover of a pornographic DVD. Earlier today she, through her attorney Richard Harrison, filed suit today in a Tampa courtroom against TVX Films, its owner, Robert Burge,…
Category Archives: Legal Issues
How the Copyright Office Hurts Bloggers
The same copyright system that allows the RIAA to go on a rampage of lawsuits and empowers movie studios to cripple fair use of their work is tying the hands of small copyright holders on the Web. Worst hit of all are the bloggers, who often endure the worst kinds of infringement only to discover…
Copyright Tool: Fair Use Visualizer
Perhaps the most difficult area of copyright law is fair use. Not only are the issues involved in fair use complicated and difficult to understand, but the answer is never satisfying. Since fair use can only be decided by a judge or jury and is handled on a case-by-case basis, there is no way to…
DMCA Game Answer
First off, congratulations to Jeremy Steele for successfully guessing which notice was correct! Due to an appeal to the Plagiarism Today Supreme Court, namely my wife, Jeremy has been declared the winner of the contest and I’ve been ordered to pay a heavy fine for being evil. So Jeremy, congratulations. You earned it by figuring…
Game: Find the Valid DMCA Notice
Often times, on this site and elsewhere, we criticize hosts for their poor handling of the DMCA while chiding Webmasters and other laypeople who make mistakes while filing DMCA notices. Though the criticism of hosts is a little more fair since they were one of the parties pushing for the notice and takedown provision, the…
Five Practical Reasons for Fighting Plagiarism
For most, being plagiarized is an inherently emotional experience. Finding out that someone else copied and claimed something that took hours to produce is bound to produce some negative feelings. This has lead some to wonder if fighting plagiarism is more about revenge than practicality. To some, it is better to simply forget about the…
New Porn Group to Tackle Piracy
In December of last year, I wrote about how the adult entertainment industry was using “piracy” to its advantage and, despite adult content making up the bulk of file sharing, was a thriving industry. However, that may change soon. A new organization, The Global Anti-Piracy Agency (GAPA), has been founded by Sureflixx Digital Distribution “with…
Picking a Dead Man’s Pocket
If reading this site and enduring the onslaught of content theft, plagiarism and scraping is making you think about packing up and shutting down your site, you might want to think again. These days, even death does not put an end to content theft. It merely opens up new avenues for it. As a recent…
Why the Cease and Desist Doesn’t Work
I’ve always felt that there is something to be said for solving a problem face to face. It seems, to me, that it is always best to resolve disagreements directly, when possible, and not involve outside parties. The cease and desist letter is the obvious way to handle plagiarism and content theft matters face to…
New Anti-Plagiarism Group forms on deviantArt
Following the recent spate of content theft at deviantArt, one of the artists that had her work lifted, Deb Walker, has created a profile and started a group dedicated to tracking down and stopping theft of dA member’s works. The group, entitled the RippedArtTaskForce, opened its doors eariler this week and according to its description,…
This work by Jonathan Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
