
"The web is considered 'public domain'" - slater
http://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html
======
tjic
Some of my written work was once pirated by a coporation.

In 1984, when I was 13, I wrote an article on revising the AD&D combat tables,
sent it in to Dragon magazine, and it was published the following year. Before
it hit print, I was given a contract to read and sign. The contract specified
that I was selling "first serial rights" only, and retained all rights for
republishing, putting in anthologies, etc.

I signed the contract, and got a $100 check.

20 years later, Dragon released a CD-ROM compendium of all content. My article
was included, without my permission.

This was not "initial" serial rights - this was a republishing.

I sent an email saying "you owe me additional payment".

They wrote back saying "no".

I filled out a small claims court form in MA, submitted it along with a $40
processing fee, and waited.

A few weeks later I was given a court date.

I showed up. The Hasbro magazine rep (Dragon was published by TSR, which had
been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, which had been acquired by Hasbro) did
not show.

I won the case by default.

The court mailed the judgement to Hasbro.

A month later Hasbro mailed me a check for $2,000, in accordance with the
judgement.

~~~
ja27
I'm pretty sure that cases like this is why that CD-ROM compendium was pulled
from the market. Ironically, it's probably a collector's item now.

It's actually quite frustrating, because there are a number of magazines that
want to publish back issue electronic archives, but can't because in they
never imagined that they'd want to republish articles electronically and
there's no practical way to chase down all the authors, artists, photographers
and potentially the advertisers to get the rights.

I know one magazine publisher that just shrugged his shoulders and gave up.
There are decent-quality scanned copies of every issue on the torrents now,
but he isn't pursuing any action to stop it.

~~~
dmm
Reasonable copyright term limits would go a long way towards solving this
issue.

~~~
tjic
This has nothing to do with copyright law.

I sold the first serial rights for $100.

I would have sold all rights for $120 or so.

...but they never asked.

~~~
ejames
> ...but they never asked.

That's rather the problem - asking every person who holds the rights can be
genuinely difficult.

In your case, the original magazine was published years ago. Even if the
publisher had kept your contact information - and didn't lose it when the got
bought out by another company, and THAT company didn't lose it in the next
level of buying out, etc. - the contact would no longer be accurate all those
years later.

Even if they did somehow manage to contact you, it's possible that you
wouldn't have responded to the letter asking for rights anymore than they
responded to your letter asking for payment.

There could be this same problem for every article in every issue for the
entire span of the magazine.

Hasbro could have noticed somewhere along the path to you initiating court
procedures and have offered a quick payment of $120 to make you happy instead
of the $2000 default judgement, but a corporation as large as Hasbro probably
gets a lot of complaints, some of them nuisance complaints or crank calls.

It's quite possible that the $2,000 they had to pay was cheaper - maybe even
dramatically cheaper - then the filing and/or legal footwork involved in
accurately determining that it was necessary to pay you.

And when determining what you need to do in order to comply with a law is very
burdensome or difficult, I would say that it's fair to call that a problem
with the law. A good law should make it easy to obey the law - not easy in a
moral sense where it's a low standard, or easy in the loophole sense that you
won't get caught anyway, but easy in the accounting sense that accomplishing
non-nefarious, law-abiding objectives should cost small amounts of money in
overhead activities.

~~~
protomyth
Or they could have just bought all rights at the start. Then the author gets
paid / is happy and they can do what they want.

~~~
camiller
That gets back to the other part of ja27's argument "...they never imagined
that they'd want to republish articles electronically...".

I'd be willing to bet that almost no print media is currently securing the
rights to directly load content into the brain. They may regret that 50 years
from now.

~~~
ja27
I wonder how someone like National Geographic does it, since they seem to have
no problem publishing electronic versions. Maybe they've just automatically
secured all rights? Or only used staff writers/photographers so they only
publish things produced as "work for hire"?

~~~
ghaff
It's been a legal issue: Greenberg v. National Geographic Society

<http://www.publaw.com/erights3.html>

------
grellas
_"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at .
. . I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the
magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings
forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public
domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and
put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are
aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took
offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know
that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and
is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your
portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your
requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!)
institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never
charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have
many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"_

The thing that struck me most about this reply was how perfect it is as an
illustration of how _not_ to deal with people when a problem arises.

1\. When someone is angry about something you did, it is not right to adopt a
breezy tone, as if you are doing some online chat with a friend. This is a
disrespectful way of denigrating the concerns raised by that person.

2\. The same can be said about the patronizing attitude - the "I have been
around forever and know all there is to know about copyright and don't need to
hear complaints from someone is an ignoramus on the topic" attitude. Even when
you are in the right in dealing with, say, a disaffected customer, you _never_
patronize in this way. It immediately causes the person to feel "shat upon,"
if I might use that phrase, and to react badly, even if you are correct in
your position. When a problem exists, address it directly and don't play games
with trying to act superior to the person making the complaint.

3\. If you are going to address a legal complaint, at least make some minimal
effort to understand what you are talking about. I understand that people can
have philosophical disagreements about how copyright is enforced but one
should not purport to make statements about technical issues of law when one
has no idea what one is talking about. Here, just about everything the writer
says about copyright is wrong and very obviously so.

4\. When someone is already upset, you don't go about gratuitously provoking
that person in responding to the complaint. "We stole your work but it really
stunk and we did you a favor by writing it far better than you ever could have
done" is the sort of response that must rank right up there with other
classics in asinine fatuity.

I am sure there are other things wrong with this as well but this is surely a
list of very obvious things to avoid in dealing with a complaint. This sort of
thing is guaranteed to provoke, inflame, and escalate the problem to a point
where this person will surely regret it.

~~~
reduxredacted
In all seriousness, this could have been the single worst way to respond to a
complaint.

The only conclusion I can draw is that she doesn't use a computer for much
more than e-mail. I have a rule when communicating with a vendor or a costumer
from my company: Would I like it if these words and my attribution (as well as
my company's) ended up on every major news aggregation site (or just "4chan"
works).

Put through that filter, I'm required to look at it from the perspective of
not only how "I think it sounds" but "How it could be misinterpreted". The web
site for the magazine is down. I can't imagine what her inbox must look like
at this point. If this was my error and my responsibility, I would have driven
the $130 to the Columbia School of Journalism that afternoon, apologized as
requested and begged my company for reimbursement (that I wouldn't have
deserved and likely wouldn't have received).

~~~
rhizome
It could have, but consider that it may be an intentional stirring of the pot.
Since their domain was created only 6mos ago and the whole affair is so
absurdly tone deaf, I'm calling epic troll of the US-Internet World on this
one.

Now for the advertising postmortem...

~~~
roel_v
"I'm calling epic troll of the US-Internet World on this one."

That would be magnificent and a giant feat of social engineering, but I don't
think it is. It's too subtle, there are too many unknown factors to be able to
control the situation (how were they going to know that a person with a high-
profile blog would respond with just a claim of 100$?) and the time line is
too long for a troll. Nor is there a (positive) connection to any brand.

But if it is, hats off.

~~~
flipbrad
no, a glance at the @Cookssource twitterfeed (referring, amongst other things,
to Poe's Law) makes it clear that to a large extent this is an epic trolling.
<http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law>

~~~
ceejayoz
Welcome to the world of fake Twitter accounts. Wait until you see how vulgar
BP was about the oil spill on @BPglobalPR!

~~~
flipbrad
Good catch it seems. Mea culpa.

------
ZachPruckowski
WTF is up with people? It's one thing to play fast and loose with the rules,
but where do people get the audacity to even try that level of BS? When
someone catches then red-handed, why do people keep denying? It's just silly -
there's no way you can successfully argue the article was in the public
domain, so you should probably just donate the $130, and be glad you're not on
the hook for the $30,000 in maximum statutory damages.

What is it with our culture where people just can't admit they were wrong?

~~~
aplusbi
It's not denial, it's ignorance combined with stubbornness. The editor said
she's been doing it for years, so obviously she's correct and Monica is
mistaken.

~~~
goatforce5
BRB. Just gotta go copy some content from Cooks Source website to throw up on
my blog. An industry veteran editor has just told me it's OK to do.

~~~
rlachenal
Make sure it's actually Cooks' content and not something they just lifted from
another site :|

------
msredmond
The editor who responded to her e-mail is a complete idiot who knows nothing
about copyright, and is being completely irresponsible and liability to her
company. If she worked for me, she'd be fired, instantly (although I make sure
all my editors understand copyright law -- so this is probably coming from
higher up -- how could her bosses leave her so misinformed?).

I too have been in publishing for 20 years, and now work exclusively in online
publishing. They violated her copyright, period. We get the rights to
everything we publish for a reason, and if someone publishes something of ours
without permission, we request them to take it down -- most do it instantly
(I've never had to file a DCMA), but that's her next step -- DCMA/e-mail her
ISP.

Really is mind-boggling that someone who considers themselves a professional
journalist would send an e-mail like that -- embarrassed for our whole
profession.

~~~
ilamont
The thing that surprised me about this story is she claims to have worked in
publishing for 30 years and has the audacity to spout this crap.

Sadly, though, Internet scraping by print journalists happens a lot. Wired
editor Chris Anderson plagiarized material for his book (or by his account,
"failing to cite sources") and there used to be a regular parade of
plagiarists having their stories highlighted on Romenesko, a well-known blog
and newsletter aimed at professional journalists. A common scenario is copying
and pasting from other news sources, but Wikipedia figures prominently as
well.

Copying and pasting is too easy and too big a temptation for people with low
standards, and cheaters assume they won't get caught.

------
duke_sam
Can she not use the DMCA to request that any offending online copies be
removed and then sue in small claims court?

I'm always amazed at how any copyright law doesn't make it any easier to seek
compensation if you are an individual. To the point where copyright only seems
to have meaning if you have a team of lawyers on staff.

~~~
patio11
DMCA is really, really easy to do. If you can read and follow directions, you
can DMCA someone's hosting provider for less than $6 and ten minutes of work
or less. (I prefer doing it by certified mail, return receipt requested, which
is the polite businessman's way to say This Is About To Become Serious
Business For Your Attorney If You Don't Give Me What I Want.)

~~~
shiftpgdn
Save yourself $6 and do it by e-mail. Just find the abuse e-mail listed for
the IP/Host and 99.9% of the time they'll take care of it in 24 hours or less.

~~~
rmc
Registered post is much muc less ignorable than email. "I didn't get that
email" is an excuse they might give, but you can't say that with registered
post. For the sake of $6 it's worth it.

~~~
Dylanlacey
I've had someone try (For a $1000 insurance claim against their business). I
didn't mention it was registered post until they claimed they didn't get it.

"Oh, really? Well the registered post office said that there's a signature on
this from you, and it was definately hand delivered."

~~~
rmc
Exactly my point. If you had sent them an email, then they could keep claiming
they never got it. Registered post is an ace up your sleeve that you can pull
out when you want to catch them with their pants down. You now have record of
them misleading you. If this goes before a judge, that counts against them,
since they are playing dirty. Registered Post saved the day, all for $6.

------
radioactive21
It's funny sometimes people think the internet is so big, no one will notice,
when actually its the other way around.

Not only does the internet do a good job of exposing things, it catalogs
everything, so it's hard for you to just remove something without someone or
something saving it.

I once had someone wrote some crazy shit on their blog about my friend. My
friend approached this person, and she denied it, and apparently tried
removing her blog post. Luckily Google cached the entire thing.

------
ilamont
The editor of the cooking magazine has allegedly been scraping other material,
as well:

 _At present, people seem to have found matches between Cooks Source articles
and the Martha Stewart website; The Food Network; NPR; the website of Boots
(the chemist); Alternet; Weight Watchers; and a website owned by Disney._

<http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=3450>

~~~
joezydeco
There's a rapidly growing list on their Facebook discussion page citing all
kinds of ripped-off articles and their original sources.

One does _NOT_ fuck with Oprah.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... There will be a smoking crater where their offices used to be.

------
hxa7241
Yes, it is good to point out insensitive/mistaken/hypocritical companies. But
there is something that can get lost in these cases.

Everyone is provoked to a belligerent counter-attack: demand restitution!
lawyer-up! sue! But this only consolidates the underlying problem. It is just
the wrongness of the system popping up in a different place. The way forward
is _less_ restrictions, _less_ legal action, not more aggressive enforcement
for everyone.

If someone plagiarises something, and then excuses themself with a pack of
bumptious squirmy nonsense, they can be ridiculed. But generally we all ought
to be copying stuff pretty freely.

~~~
tbrownaw
> But generally we all ought to be copying stuff pretty freely.

Which we can't do under the current laws, regardless of whether we ignore
people who don't understand those laws. What's the best way to get the laws
fixed?

~~~
gloob
_What's the best way to get the laws fixed?_

"Convince everyone to ignore them" seems like a reasonable first step.

~~~
tomjen3
Well in that case, mission accomplished.

------
duck
And the Washington Post picks this story up -
[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks_source_masters_new_recip.html)

------
zavulon
Looks like their website is already down

<http://www.cookssource.com/>

And angry comments keep on being posted on their Facebook page, although the
ironic thing is I think you have to click "Like" to be able to comment ...

------
fleitz
She should find a lawyer, if it appeared in the print magazine, you're looking
at $30,000 times the number of copies of the magazine.

------
pbhjpbhj
Taking others peoples content and using it commercially without asking ...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840481>.

Interesting comparison in the reactions from HNers IMO.

~~~
wwortiz
How is mirroring geocities and/or supplying a torrent of the content using it
commercially? Reocities even responds to takedown requests.

~~~
flipbrad
Supplying the torrent isn't directly commercial but upping others' content
with your own ads, is. And should be subject to claims to account to claimants
for income received unless they published under a wide enough copy-left
licence.

However, a reform to copyright law I'd gladly see happen is that orphan
content (which officially deleted websites arguably are) should be exempt from
copyright. I mean, how can people seriously retain rights to profit from work
which they OK'd (explicitly or implicitly) the deletion/ending the publication
of? What reocities does, in my mind, whether commercial or not, is great.

I also think there should be a default, opt-out licence covering all new
content published, along the lines of CC share alike - attribution -
noncommercial. Creators are free to opt out of the licence - explicitly - and
reserve ALL rights if they want.

Wouldn't cover CooksSource's actions (commercial) but it would stop you
infringing my copyright when you forward my emails.

Also, responding to a takedown is a completely non-sequitur to 'how is that
commercial'. For better, or worse; commercial, or not; you have to comply.
Insane that such a logical fallacy can attract such karma.

~~~
timwiseman
I agree with that part of copyright reform needs to deal with orphan conent.

However, approving having something deleted does not by itself make it an
orphan work. After all, the copyright holder may have had it deleted in one
place to publish it in another or had it removed so that it could be reworked
into a new revision before being posted.

Orphaned works are those where either the copyright owner no longer exists (a
corporate entity that went out of business for instance) or where there is no
practical way to identify the proper copyright holder. Not merely those that
have been removed from one particular place of publication.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>However, approving having something deleted does not by itself make it an
orphan work. After all, the copyright holder may have had it deleted in one
place to publish it in another or had it removed so that it could be reworked
into a new revision before being posted.

Destruction of a work I retain the copyright on is part of my [moral] right.
For example an artist may not wish their earlier work to be seen, they should
have the right to prevent it deleteriously affecting their reputation without
that work being considered "orphaned" and fair game.

Reocities bringing back my teenage webpages may mean that people find things
authored by me that I no longer want to be available, I took the appropriate
course in letting Geocities wipe their servers; what right do Reocities have
to recover that without my say so?

I don't care as it happens but I could and assuming that the servers are in a
Paris Convention/TRIPS country I should win. TRIPS requires countries to treat
commercial scale infringements as criminal!

FWIW safe harbour only works if you know you're not holding works for which
you don't have the copyright or a license.

>Orphaned works are those where either the copyright owner no longer exists
[...] or where there is no practical way to identify the proper copyright
holder.

The former are orphaned if their estates or business successors can't be
found. The later are not orphaned, they're just a PITA.

~~~
flipbrad
not to get too 'cooksource' or bolshy on you but why on earth would you have
moral rights? why is this an issue of 'win'? you publicised your content,
technology made a million copies of it, people found it useful to them to
communicate it from one to another in various (licensed) formats. Your content
was useful to society - potentially to thousands. Yet after splashing it all
over the internet, you decide it's not worth monetising and so you get to tell
everyone to delete it, no matter how useful and culturally important it is? at
no gain to yourself but vast loss to society? Where does that come from,
except an un-democratically ratified treaty?

As for what was above: I fully accept the issues over orphan works, I was just
defending the Reocities iniatiative; by and large, the rebirth of utility in
what really were orphan works.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Yet after splashing it all over the internet, you decide it's not worth
monetising and so you get to tell everyone to delete it

No, you only get to delete copies you have control over. If someone has
received a copy of the document within their rights they are fine. However, in
Europe we don't have personal fair use rights [to the same extent] as you do
in USA (I'm guessing) - so keeping a personal copy of something you saw online
is an infringing act.

Why moral rights? Well that comes to the heart of what you see copyright as
for.

Moral rights are the most important part IMO, I see that those who create a
work should have the right to distribute it or not as they see fit (once
distributed their rights are [or at least should be!] exhausted over the
distributed copies). But simply because I'm no longer distributing shouldn't
give you the right to take that work from me.

A creator should also have the right to be named as creator (perpetually IMO,
even beyond copyrights current terms). They should also have the right to
control modification ("adaptation"), within the term, a limited version of
this is obviously necessary if the right to be named as creator is there. I
don't think you should have the right to write what you want and put my name
on it (this clearly overlaps with other laws, eg libel).

Basically what you're saying is other creators content should be free
(libre+gratis) for me because I think what I'm doing is right. IMO that's not
your call.

One question, how do you [legally] differentiate Reocities from someone who
takes your blog post and republishes it with ads? You may not have a problem
with that (use CC or PD licenses in which case) but most would. [Now you've
defined the difference you can start your campaign to get copyright altered.]

Shall we do trademark infringement now too .. Reocities is almost certainly
infringing there too, if the owners have a lot of money I could see a RTM
troll picking up the mark and going to town.

~~~
flipbrad
> No, you only get to delete copies you have control over. > so keeping a
> personal copy of something you saw online is an infringing act.

In other words, I'm right that you think that more than issuing content on
licences that are revocable, allowing a person to instantly revoke all
licences and be in their rights to totally withdraw something from circulation
and speech in society, you go much further than contractual controls over
speech and culture - you make it a moral right! you said:

>> Destruction of a work I retain the copyright on is part of my [moral]
right.

I am not totally against moral rights, by the way. I do know exactly what they
are, and am not from the US, or France, both of which see them slightly
differently than here, the UK. But that's irrelevant. I agree with you about
correct attribution. Note that misleading attribution is really not so bad.
People lie all the time, and where lies cause damage, we have laws in place
for that - e.g. contractual misrepresentation/negligent misstatement, fraud,
libel. Why add a super-powerful moral right, capable of reaching through space
and time, and activateable at your wish, for all of time (I assume if you want
that right to be enforceable, you're saying it should be assignable to someone
after your death, and theirs, ad infinitum)?

You forget that every citizen with a computer (including a smartphone) is now
a publisher. Copyright law is very, very complex, and that's fine if it only
affected professional publishers, as it once did, and helped create a market
capable of self-regulating copying. But all of that has changed, hugely, now.
Are you really considering my moral rights when you cite my post in the one
you just published?

Furthermore, copyright is a bundle of rights that reaches through space and
time to control how people communicate, and also how your digital devices
(your own property) can interact (DRM, region controls, etc). For it to exist,
we have to sacrifice, for the copyright term, rights to free communication, to
efficient cultural diffusion, cheap education, cheap and simple factual
accuracy (since things must be paraphrased, incriminating emails cannot be
reproduced, etc). We chose to do that, but our legislators perhaps forgot
about that sacrifice every time they extended copyright. Have a read of the
economists' amicus curiae brief in Eldred v Ashcroft (supreme court) to see
what Coase, Friedman, Arrow, Varian, Akerloff, Buchanan et al thought about
just the economic aspect of it (let alone my points just now about nonmarket
efficiency and rights to free and efficient speech).

>Basically what you're saying is other creators content should be free
(libre+gratis) for me because I think what I'm doing is right. IMO that's not
your call.

Basically, that's not at all what I have ever said or felt. See above where I
said that new content should be created - even with all rights from copyright
as it is - under an OPT OUT implied statutory license for NON-COMMERCIAL,
ATTRIBUTED and SHARE ALIKE use. (I think this covers your next question, too,
by removing the strawman you based it on)

> Shall we do trademark infringement now too .. Reocities is almost certainly
> infringing there too, if the owners have a lot of money I could see a RTM
> troll picking up the mark and going to town.

I'm sorry, what's your point here. That Reocities is bad, or that IP laws are
on many occasions very negative things indeed?

------
dcbell
Fun fact---I discovered "Open Source Cook" on facebook while I searched for
Cooks Source. I was thinking today that there MUST be an open-source set of
recipes or something similar out there.

Silver lining to the cloud.

