• FreeAdvice has a new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, effective May 25, 2018.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our Terms of Service and use of cookies.

My rights?

Accident - Bankruptcy - Criminal Law / DUI - Business - Consumer - Employment - Family - Immigration - Real Estate - Tax - Traffic - Wills   Please click a topic or scroll down for more.

W

WeeRedHen

Guest
What is the name of your state?What is the name of your state? Virginia

The situation: I have designed and maintained a website for five years comprised of articles I wrote, illustrated with photographs I have taken. I have a page on the site called "Legal Matters," which lays claim to the entire content of the website (unless otherwise noted -- I've used a few photos from a friend and have credited her as per her instructions) as my intellectual property -- the articles, HTML coding, photographs and site graphics. I also include a statement that reads: "Reproduction of written, graphical and design elements presented in this web site, in whole or in part, including storage in electronic media, without the expressed permission of the owner is prohibited."

I have done everything within my power to protect my rights as the owner/publisher of the contents of my website including META tags that disallow archiving, spending numerous hours contacting, corresponding with, and coming to a resolution with visitors who have "borrowed" content from my site without my prior knowledge or permission, and instituting an IP ban on services/software that "grab" websites for storage on visitors' computers or servers.

The problem: In an analysis of my website statistics, I noticed two "hits" from an online service that enables their members to archive any website/web pages and store it on a server. The owner/CEO of this service has utilized technology that ignores the NOARCHIVE meta tag. As soon as I discovered that my website was being archived on the other website's server (I'm trying very hard not to use names; I hope I'm being clear), I wrote an email to the owner/CEO of the service telling him that I don't allow archiving or storage of my site, and to please provide me with the appropriate measures to prevent it from happening through his service. This is something other archiving services readily provide to Webmasters -- instruction on how to "opt out." He responded with a brief email asking me to call him, or give him my phone number, so we could discuss my concerns "in person." He said he thought I misunderstood his service, that file-sharing is not allowed; the service's members aren't allowed to share stored content.

I hadn't even considered the file sharing issue; I was concerned about unauthorized archiving of my site. I went to the service's site, played with the demo and figured out how his server was accessing and storing my files. I then instituted an IP ban to prevent it from happening again and wrote the owner/CEO of the service another email, telling him that I prefer to conduct all correspondence regarding website issues in writing. I pointed out the statement on my site that denies permission to store my files electronically and requested that he remove all cached/archived content his members had grabbed from my site from his server immediately (this service also enables its members to password protect the content they've stored, so I can't see exactly what they've grabbed). I also requested that he respond with a confirmation that my files have been removed from his server.

From what I understand about copyright law (and I admit that the legalese makes my head spin), as the author/ publisher of the articles, as the photographer, and as the website designer, it is my right to deny or grant permission for duplication, copying, storing, and archiving of the files that comprise my website.

My question (finally): Is my understanding correct? And if so, does this include caching/archiving services such as the one I've described here, even if the members are "not allowed" to share files? (Despite that claim, I found no statement as such on the site -- the service's press releases tout how easy it is to share with friends and colleagues.) If my understanding is correct regarding my rights, what can I do or say next, if he fails to respond to my email?

Thank you in advance for your time and any advise you can provide.
 


divgradcurl

Senior Member
From what I understand about copyright law (and I admit that the legalese makes my head spin), as the author/ publisher of the articles, as the photographer, and as the website designer, it is my right to deny or grant permission for duplication, copying, storing, and archiving of the files that comprise my website.
That is correct.

My question (finally): Is my understanding correct? And if so, does this include caching/archiving services such as the one I've described here, even if the members are "not allowed" to share files? (Despite that claim, I found no statement as such on the site -- the service's press releases tout how easy it is to share with friends and colleagues.)
Yes. Your rights include the right to control any reproduction or distribution, with a few limitations.

Question for you: Is the cacheing organization an ISP, or are they a simply some sort of member website, or somewhere in between?


If my understanding is correct regarding my rights, what can I do or say next, if he fails to respond to my email?
The $64,000 question. First of all, forget emails -- you need to be sending letters, certified return receipt requested, so you have real proof of things if yo ever end up in court. Yes, emails are generally admissible as evidence, but they are not nearly as strong as written letters, especially those letters that have proof of reciept by the bad guy...

If he doesn't respond to your emails, you'll need to either take it to the next level -- which means legal action of some sort -- or forget about.

Legal action could be as simple as having a lawyer draft a cease-and-desist letter. But, if he fails to respond to that as well, then you'll need to consider filing a lawsuit.

Are any of your copyrights registered with the U.S. Copyright office? If your copyrights are not registered, you still have rights, don't worry. But -- you'll need to register your copyrights BEFORE you can take file a lawsuit against the other company.

The reality of filing a lawsuit is this -- unless the materials that the other guy is stealing are ALREADY registered with the copyright office (registered BEFORE the infringing activity took place), the only thing you can recover from a lawsuit is "actual damages" -- that is, those monetary losses you can prove that you suffered as a result of the infringing activity. This means that unless you can show big money losses, it might be hard to find an attorney who will pursue this action very far without a large retainer up front.

Plus, you have to sue in federal court, and you'll have to sue the other guy in HIS home state.

Two caveats -- if your copyrights are registered, and have been registered since before the present infringing activity began, you can forget most of what I just said -- if the copyrights are registered, you can sue for statutory damages, which can be significant even if you don't suffer any actual damages, and you can sue for injunctive relief. A lawyer will be glad to take your case, especially if the other guy has any assetts whatsoever.

Second point -- if the infringer is an ISP, you have some other things you might need to do first before instituting any legal action -- if you let me know if the other guy is an ISP or not, I can give you that inof or point you to the right place.
 
W

WeeRedHen

Guest
Thank you so much for the time you took to respond and for using words I can understand. I was beginning to think I'd stumbled into one of those dread gray areas of copyright law.

Registering my website with the U.S.Copyright office is something I have put off doing, because I tend to redesign it once a year, to keep it "fresh," and I don't know if I'd have to register each redesign. I am obviously under-educated in this regard, and obviously need to learn more ASAP, so I can protect myself before the fact. Contacting "infringers" by email has always worked for me in the past, but the owner/CEO of this service is one of those brainchild/whiz-kids who wants to only talk on the phone; I suspect he's avoiding leaving a paper trail.

I will take your advice and send a letter, certified return receipt, restating my position and demand, and hope that will work, because taking it to the next level is beyond my means right now (unless you can recommend a lawyer who would draft a cease and desist letter for free lol.)

To answer your question -- he is not an ISP. The caching organization is a free service; one only need choose a user name and provide an email address to join and start caching any site on the Web. I've also discovered that besides enabling the members to cache websites, the service also provides tools to export zip files of all the content they've cached.

This service has already spawned at least one similar free service. I just keep hoping one of the members will cache a big corporate website with a legal department that will put an end to this service and frighten the copycats enough to close down. (The caching of corporate websites has actually already occured, but I don't know that I'm prepared to be a whistle-blower.)

This additional information is beside the point, I know. I'll send a certified letter and hope for the best. I have banned the service from further caching my site; I guess if he ignores the certified letter, I'll just have to let the previously cached files go.

Thank you again for your time and clear, concise response.
 
This is not any legal advice, what i can do is help stop bots. I am sure you are dynamically generating content. Your developers can detect the type of broswer being used, ip address, etc. you can block,send them elsewhere, or send an error page inside of your real content.

Here are some examples:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-Jul-Sun 07:56:54
66.196.90.155
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-Jul-Sun 11:05:36
209.237.238.178
ia_archiver

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-Jul-Sat 22:16:10
217.160.226.23


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-Jul-Sat 20:47:30
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=xxx.xxx.com&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-pull-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------




First some is the yahoo search engine. Since i want my website to be on yahoo, i have to deal with fact that it will cache it. ia_archiver is usually a rogue bot, which i am sure that you are dealing with. Those are the ignoring the no archive tags and the robot.txt which most good bots abide by. you should look at your logs and google around for the various ways web developers are stopping. The next entry is usually generated by bots that are harvesting email address link in your page to put on spam list. they usually do not generate an id or anything. they still will have an ip which can ban automatically when detected. Please note that, you can just make a bot just look like a normal entry like the last one in the list. this is example of a Mac OS X user using Firebox that found the page by yahoo.com search. these techniques is not a complete stop to the problem, but is a pro-active approach to stop them from archiving them.
 
Last edited:
W

WeeRedHen

Guest
Thanks for responding. I'm not generating dynamic content -- I'm using straight HTML, with a few standard scripts for highlighting, rollovers, etc., and am my own developer lol. I have all those disallows in my robots.txt files already (and many others). This guy is using a Java script that grabs the page -- coding, graphics, whatever else is there. I can't see the script itself, because it's being called from a hidden folder on his server, but by viewing source on the popup the users get when they click their "save this site" button, I can see the script's file name and where it's being called. I have my graphics in a protected folder, so they've not been able to access those, but they have been able to grab the design coding and text. The script he's using isn't anything the robots.txt file will stop, as far as I can tell. If there's something other than IP banning that will stop it, it's beyond my technical know-how.

This entire thing has really become a "principle of the matter" thing to me now. He's created this service to perform (unauthorized) cacheing/storing of sites and is promoting and encouraging doing so. I'd bet 99% of the webmasters whose sites are being saved on his server have no idea that their sites are being grabbed. And probably 99% of his users/members have no idea that what they're doing is wrong, because he addresses the issue of copyrights in his FAQs, and blows it off by saying "this isn't file sharing."

Regarding email address harvesting -- I use a graphic for my contact address. If my visitors want to send an email, they have to type the address into their email form. There's also a freebie script called "email riddler" that encrypts the address, so bots can't harvest it, but I consider using the graphic as more fail-safe. Plus, it makes it easier to do a global change in contact address on all of my pages, by just changing one graphic. I will check into the last link you've supplied here, because I'm MAC-ignorant, and should educate myself there. And I'm off topic now. Sorry.

Thanks again for your response. I still haven't heard from this guy about removing my files from his server, so I'm off to the post office one day this week to send my certified return receipt requested letter. He'll probably ignore that one too, but if I can make him nervous for just a few moments wondering how far I'm willing to go then I'll feel like I've done _something_.
 
You should really learn to code in ASP, PHP, or Perl. With dynamic content you will be able to counter his cacheing electronically. First think you should do is ban his ip from your server. That topic very googleable for you particular flavor of server. After you should learn one of the those languages. ASP or PHP would probably be the easiest to learn. I wouldn't learn perl unless you have some other programming background. Once you understand the basic of either language, you can google around for how people are combatting the bots. there serveral forums and pre-written code to handle this problem effectly. However, continue on your legal journey, but i would go ahead a seek the technical means to do this. just because you stop one, there is a whole world of people willing to do the same. what if someone takes cacheing from some never heard of country north of aussie land? besides cacheing you will stop bots that troll through you site, and basically eat up all your bandwidth. that is another popular dealt with in the same way. this is only a problem if you got 1000s pages. getting a 1000 hits from ia_robot pisses me off...alot. what i am getting is a lot webmaster in the business world that monitor their website traffic fanatically and to produce reports and stats information based on site hits and try to keep the cost of their bandwidth usage down each month do notice the bots. so there are people who know, and i think that is more the 1% of the webmaster ;)

another way is you just hire someone to setup a system for you just add on offending bots as you see fit. it isn't hard to do, it will just take time, because it will be an overhaul of the site.

that about it. i am happy to you hear you got robot.txt and the bot fooling email address.
 

Find the Right Lawyer for Your Legal Issue!

Fast, Free, and Confidential
data-ad-format="auto">
Top