Forum Moderators: not2easy
I generally don't worry that much with a low volume forum, and often times will go to the forum and join in, and suggest to the hotlinker that they should at least link to the page where they copied my picture.
In this case, the user had copied my entire page, including the picture, into their post, and they had not given credit or included a link. They just said something like "I found this on the web and it's the way I used to do it." It really was intended to be helpful to another forum member, and done in good faith.
Now, this is not a big money topic, and the real core of the page is something (a recipe) that is specifically *not* copyrightable. But it wasn't just the recipe, it was the introduction, my creative instructions, my notes and my references, as well as that hotlinked picture, all of which are covered by copyright.
I joined the forum, and thanked the poster for the compliment. Then suggested what was wrong with the way that she posted my entire page and didn't even give credit or a link. I also mentioned that the people that she was providing the recipe to had no way of contacting me with questions, then I answered a couple that had come up.
I ended up in a back channel conversation with her, and pointed out how posting like that in a forum is not fair to the author because it deprives them of income, search engine traffic, and credit. That it is not fair to the forum where she posts, because they could get nailed with a DMCA takedown. And it is not fair to other users because they do not get to find the real, useful sources for the information.
So now, this high volume poster is now going to think about these things and modify her behavior to be helpful to everyone, not just the other forum members.
This is why I believe in starting out with the carrot, rather than the stick. I was friendly and she now has a good feeling about the publishers that she was copying from, instead of it being a faceless website.
The forum she posted on, on the other hand, is so far ignoring my friendly request to edit her post and replace my "page" with a link to my site. They get one more nice message before I mention the DMCA. If they don't respond to that, the first DMCA message goes to AdSense. Then another slightly less friendly message to them, before the DMCAs go out to Google, Yahoo and MSN search.
I will wait on sending a DMCA to their host, because that would be punishing all those members of the forum that use it on a daily basis.
I'll take the "fall" as the uneducated reader that doesn't have a clue what your talking about but is eager to learn.
Could you explain the telltale sign in the stats...hotlinks to forum image?
This person copied an entire page off your personal website and put it in a forum?
I guess you don't need to explain how one does that, but what did it look like in your stats?
I do understand how she should have simply posted a link to your page, and I do have appreciation for how you handled it. Well done.
Kathryn
Oh yeah, and what is a DMCA?
the telltale sign in the stats of hotlinking is lots of http get requests for the image file with an external referrer.
I am completely with you on this one. Hotlinkers - at first I was upset, then I was annoyed, and today I rarely care about them. But reading your post brought back the bad feelings...
Argh! Looking at the stats, then all of a sudden a rush of download traffic without corresponding pageviews. The reason is almost always a forum post somehwhere in Cyberspace. Yes, I still get angry when I see (in rare cases) up to 100 (yes, one hundred) photos, each around 70KB in one single post, i.e. one pageview on the forum sucks 7 MB from my server. Fortunately these forums are very low traffic - I don't want to imagine what happens if this is posted to a HIGH traffic forum. (Well, one thing is clear - the DMCA notice goes out the second I see this happening.)
I appreciate your approach to educate others, but I simply do not have the =time= to do that. I usually have work to be done, and both ignoring (no/low effort) or using my DMCA template (medium effort) works for me.
I answered a thread on a forum I frequent and someone created an article on another site using my exact content response. The kicker is, the person kept my signature information which I have at the bottom of my thread (Name, contact info, email).
He obviously wasn't trying to pass the content of as his own, but it really does upset me. I read about webmasters threatening to sue scrapers like this. Do I have any legal recource on this after a DMCA? At what level of stealing content can I sue him or others for damages? And what damages can I sue for?
