{"id":7546,"date":"2011-08-28T23:25:44","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T03:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=7546"},"modified":"2011-08-28T23:25:44","modified_gmt":"2011-08-29T03:25:44","slug":"ip-reiver-attack-death-to-laughingwolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2011\/08\/28\/ip-reiver-attack-death-to-laughingwolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Death to Laughingwolf"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Laughingwolf<\/p>\n

On April 28, 2011, an IP reiver who hides behind the pseudonym Laughingwolf posted the entirety of the section of my September 20th, 2010 post “Ernest C. Withers and the F.B.I.”<\/a> devoted to the Withers matter at his blog, Loopy Lair: The Home of Laughingwolf<\/a>. No link to my original post, no credit to me \u2014 thus tacitly claiming authorship of this essay for himself. That behavior has a name: plagiarism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Laughingwolf’s Blogger profile<\/a> indicates only that he’s male, lives somewhere around Toronto, and works in the arts as a “writer\/animator,” which means he should know about IP rights and has no excuse for these actions. “Loopy Lair” has been online at Blogger since December 2006; my browsing thereof suggests that all text and image content there (aside from visitor comments and Laughingwolf’s replies thereto) gets pirated from other sites, sometimes with credit to the original source, often, as in my case, with none.<\/p>\n

\"LaughingwolfThe blatancy of this fraud, which I discovered on August 25, brought out my own inner wolf. I’ve zero tolerance for plagiarists. Dispensing with the courtesy of personal notification to Laughingwolf\u00a0that I’d discovered his thieving, this time I decided to go straight for the jugular. Blogger is a Google product. It offers a “Report Abuse”<\/a> function that involves reading some clear instructions about “Removing Content From Google”\u00a0and then filling out a simple form. Doing so sets in motion the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), forcing Google \u2014 as host of the blog \u2014 to investigate expeditiously and remove promptly\u00a0any offending material.<\/p>\n

An hour later,\u00a0that post was gone<\/a>. Google’s “Blogger Team” emailed me subsequently to confirm this, the message opening with “Thanks for reaching out to us.” (Oh, the pervasive language of the therapeutic model . . . it’s everywhere.)\u00a0Presumably Google also sent this miscreant a serious warning about his DMCA liabilities.\u00a0Laughingwolf”s email address is sinner1man@hisemailprovider.com. Perhaps he’ll put into practice the motto of his blog, “Paws and reflect . . . ,” before he’s tempted to sin that way again.<\/p>\n

\"Laughingwolf<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n

\"GoogleAppropriately, Google required me to certify that I was the legal holder of the copyright to this essay. (Alternatively, one could identify oneself as the authorized representative of the copyright holder \u2014 a designated lawyer, literary agent, etc. \u2014\u00a0if that were the case.) This matters very much, because the possibility of misuse of the DMCA exists; mistakenly or maliciously, one could use it to press for the removal of material that was legally online, or even to shut down a website legitimately publishing licensed material.<\/p>\n

Falsely claiming copyright\u00a0is in fact a criminal offense, though the fine is small enough that it doesn’t seem much of a deterrent. Here’s the federal law on that:<\/p>\n

Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.\u00a017 USC \u00a7 506(c)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"If you publish a website or blog, then, you should know exactly\u00a0how to file a DMCA counter-notice if wrongly accused of copyright infringement, because that too must be done expeditiously. The site PlagiarismToday offers a clear explanation of the counter-notice option<\/a>, while The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse provides a simple\u00a0counter-notification generator<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most false claims of copyright don’t occur online, as it happens, but in print, with print publishers deceitfully putting their copyright notices onto public-domain material and soliciting licensing fees for the use thereof. This is reprehensible, and inexcusable. While I believe in the necessity of the copyright law, I also agree that copyright should have an expiration date, upon which work enters the public domain for free use by all. (For an excellent source on this abuse of copyright law, see “Copyfraud” by \u00a0Jason Mazzone, Gerald Baylin Professor of Law at\u00a0Brooklyn Law School. Click here for a free PDf download<\/a> of his 2006 essay, originally published in the\u00a0New York University Law Review<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

\"Macaque

Macaque self-portrait, Indonesia, 2011, as captioned by the London Daily Mail.<\/p><\/div>\n

As noted in a previous post \u2014 “Copyright for All Primates?”<\/a> from July 27, 2011 \u2014 the British news agency that licensed publication rights to a series of self-portraits by a macaque monkey tribe has implied repeatedly that it owns exclusive rights to those images and controls all subsequent usages thereof. UK law may differ from US law in this regard, but that comes perilously close to a false claim of copyright protection. I suspect that\u00a0Caters News Agency Ltd.<\/a>\u00a0of Birmingham, UK has decided to tread carefully here, insinuating violation of copyright without actually asserting it in so many words, precisely because they have no legal grounds on which to stand and any formal threat would prove toothless.<\/p>\n

For sophisticated but accessible takes on this situation by people with far more legal expertise than I, see “Black Macaques and a Camera Cause a Copyright Uproar,”<\/a> a\u00a0brief by third-year law student Mark Tratos, posted at the website Intellectual Property Brief<\/a> (a publication of the Washington College of Law at American University in DC), and “Patent and Copyright Theories for Unnatural Fortuitous Creations \u2013 The Macaque Self-Portrait,”<\/a> at Ryan Alley: Intellectual Property Law<\/a>, the website of a respected patent attorney.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

I’ve said previously that this ain’t rocket science. If I can understand the analyses to which I’ve linked above, you probably can too. Get familiar with the basics of copyright law.<\/p>\n