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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘copyright law’
04.03.2023
If you are a pirate, then GoDaddy seems to be the place to host.
Last November, we spotted three stolen articles on the sephari.co.nz domain, which appears to be hosted by GoDaddy. I filed two DMCA notices, to no avail.
They were in the standard format, one that GoDaddy requests and has acted on in the past.
The only thing I got back was this:
Your claim was received and will be reviewed and processed in the order that it was received. There is no need to submit the claim again. Thank you.
Kindest Regards,
D Preston
Go Daddy | Trademark & Copyright Claims
Come March and the articles are still there. So I filed another. Here is the body of the letter:
It appears that a GoDaddy customer has taken our work without permission. The infringing pages may be found at:
http://sephari.co.nz/museums/royal-new-zealand-ballet-debuts-12-works-digitally-on-may-12-lucire-lucire/
http://sephari.co.nz/culture/hands-on-in-the-midwest-lucire/
http://sephari.co.nz/culture/travel-in-brief-dining-with-vistajet-indonesian-celebrations-holland-americas-150th-lucire-lucire/
The originals of the above items are located at the following URLs:
https://lucire.com/insider/20220504/royal-new-zealand-ballet-debuts-12-works-digitally-on-may-12/
https://lucire.com/2022/1014vo0.shtml
https://lucire.com/insider/20221120/travel-in-brief-dining-with-vistajet-indonesian-celebrations-holland-americas-150th/
There is no contact point for this client, so we have come directly to you.
We do not believe that the unauthorized publication of our work can be defended under the fair use doctrine nor has it been licensed under Creative Commons. Its publication does not serve public policy. It is our copyrighted work, and we have never given permission for this party to feature it.
I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material or reference or link to such material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use).
I hereby state that the information in this notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed.
I see D. Preston is on the case again. Here is what they said:
Dear Sir or Madam,
The website jyanet.com is not hosted by GoDaddy. We ask that you please note the following information:
The REGISTRAR is the company that sells a domain name registration to a person or company.
The REGISTRANT is the person or company that purchases a domain name for use.
The HOSTING PROVIDER is the company that provides space on it’s computers for the files that make up the content of the website.
Thatâs right. Theyâre telling me that my own companyâs website is not hosted by them.
A website that does not appear anywhere in the complaint except for under my signature and in the reply address.
The rest is all mansplainy bollocks that says I should approach my own hosting provider to complain about myself.
I donât know if they are illiterate, incompetent, obtuse, or overwhelmed.
But a pirate would simply love having a host that will run interference for them.
I wrote back:
Dear D. Preston:
Please read my complaint. Jyanet.com is not at issue here and I know you do not host itâas this is our company’s domain name.
It is not even mentioned in the attachment (which I am re-attaching): why would I file a complaint against ourselves?
The only place jyanet.com is mentioned is in my reply address.
Now, as in November when we filed our first DMCA notices with you, the complaint is about sephari.co.nz, which, based on our research, is hosted by you.
This has gone on for months.
I know the difference between registrar, registrant and hosting provider.
You were sent a standard letter in the format that you requested. A format that GoDaddy has acted on successfully before, not to mention other hosts.
I respectfully request you act on this copyright breach.
Itâs not all doom and gloom. I had some fun with a couple of these people who hotlinked our images, while stealing the articles or spinning them.
Update, March 24: Finally a resolution, which coincidentally arrived at the same time I was asking connections on Mastodon to check if the domain was down. This took four months.
Tags: 2023, copyright, copyright law, customer service, DMCA, Lucire, Mastodon, publishing, USA
Posted in business, internet, publishing, USA | 2 Comments »
23.12.2022
I think these are going to get more frequent. We received another copyright claim, accusing us of publishing a photograph without authorization. They wanted around âŹ500, part of that for the licence, and part of that for running it since 2009.
This one, from a German company, was easier to deal with than an American firm that approached us with a similar accusation some years back, using the same tactic of including a pro forma invoice in the body of the email. I donât remember the US firmâs name, and right now Iâm not comfortable revealing the German firmâs since Iâm still checking to see how legitimate they are.
I remember the Americans dragging it out over days, never answering the substantive parts of my legal argumentsâgaslighting is part of their intimidation tactics. They wanted me to cough up, citing sections from our Copyright Actâan act which I knew better than they did and how the sections actually operated.
Their last email was citing one section which I knew they would fail on if they were to go to court, so I said, âYou already have my response.â
They never actioned any lawsuit and I felt the whole thing was a scam. The way the American was avoiding getting to the core of the argument and not understanding commercial law (which could come into it as well as copyright law) told me as much.
Of course the image at issue was used legitimately, but in this case I didn’t have any evidence where it was from. All I knew were our procedures.
I never let on I had a law degree and he was emailing our main work email, so he never saw my signature file with my qualifications.
In this latest case, the approach was a little softer. In addition, things were a lot clearer, since I recall how we came to run the allegedly pirated photo of a Coty perfume: it came via a press release.
The beauty of having used Eudora as my email programâand still using it 27 years laterâis being able to grab old mailboxes and load them up again.
And there it was, the press release from October 2009 in the inboxâtwice, in fact, one sent to a former editor and one to our general media wire address. In there was the download link, which, happily, made it into the Internet Archive so I could confirm for myself that that was the source.
This German company had an online process where you could feed your evidence and details of your licence. I provided one of the releases and fed in the name and company of the person responsible. One of the companies was Coty, Inc., whom I very much doubt would not have made sure we in the press were covered.
In the message field I advised that if there were a claim for costs, they should approach Coty, Inc. and Coty SASâall the while knowing that they would have secured the necessary licence.
Tonight, the German company emailed to say they would not pursue the claim further, which was a speedy resolutionâbut I wonder if they will continue going after people who got their image the same way but not having records stretch back that far. If they are con merchants, they will. If they’re legitimate and professional, they won’t.
A few things strike me here. The first is the timing: sending out on December 21 and demanding a reply by December 28. Thereâll be offices that arenât working through the Christmas break.
Secondly, my memory is that pro forma invoices, as far as New Zealand is concerned, are illegal. I can also think of them breaching other legislation. (N.B.: this blog post doesnât constitute legal advice.)
Thirdly, will everyone still have their 2009 emails and will the Internet Archive have found the download link to spider? Unlikelyâand this makes it unfair on the publisher.
Fourthly, I would say this claim falls outside the Limitation Act.
Donât get me wrong: I believe photographers, indeed any author within the meaning of the Copyright Act, should be rewarded for their work. We send out DMCA notices a lotâbut only after we have written a velvet-gloved email to the publisher or a comment on their blog.
Iâve even toyed with using such services ourselves over a series of articles, some hosted by Go Daddy who seems reluctant to have their customer remove them.
I would only consider them if I can identify the parties who have allegedly pirated, and not leave it to their systems, which appear to make overly sweeping approaches.
Further, I do not approve of the pro forma invoice tactic.
I can see through the legalese as Iâve had legal training and specialized in intellectual property. But I donât believe everyone can see through it. Theyâre designed to intimidate, and based on some forum discussions, that intimidation works.
And I fear we are going to see many more of these. Like our experience earlier this year with a Spanish company, it seems they automate their processes too much, identifying piracy where there isnât any. Gullible companies like Facebook and Google believe them and act against a smaller player.
Typically, copyright owners have turned a blind eye to the use of images of, say, packaging if the associated article is about them and promotional in nature (again, as this wasâwe alerted our readers to a fragrance launch).
I canât promise you that we have records of every image weâve used, because we might have clicked on the email server-side to get the download link, and Eudoraâs filters took out the actual message once it was imported, for example. Or one of us went to a free photo site where an uploader hadn’t done their checks.
All I know is that weâve behaved ourselves. Iâd never accuse someone of doing something that they didn’t do and make my approach look like a scam. One hopes copyright reform will balance things on this front.
Tags: 2009, 2022, commercial law, copyright, copyright law, Germany, intellectual property, law, New Zealand, packaging, piracy
Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology | No Comments »
09.12.2022
Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a âfair priceâ for local news content under new legislation.
Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running âThe internet is scaryâ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech pay my firm? Any back pay? We have been in this game a long, long time. A lot longer than the newbies.
And what is the definition of âsharingâ?
Because Google could be in for a lot.
Think about it this way: Googleâs ad unit has enabled a lot of fake sites, scraped sites, spun sites, malware hosts, and the like, since anyone can sign up to be a publisher and start hosting their ads.
While Google will argue that they have nothing to do with the illegitimate usage of their services, some might look at it very differently.
Take the tort of negligence. To me this is classic Donahue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 territory and as we’re at 90 years since Lord Atkinsâ judgement, it offers us some useful pointers.
Lord Atkin stated, âYou must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to beâpersons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.â
If you open up advertising to all actors (Google News also opens itself up to splogs), then is it foreseeable that unethical parties and bad faith actors will sign up? Yes. Is it foreseeable that they will host content illegally? Yes. Will this cause harm to the original copyright owner? Yes.
We also know a lot of these pirate sites are finding their content through Google News. Some have even told me so, since I tend to start with a softly, softly approach and send a polite request to a pirate.
Iâd say a case in negligence is already shaping up.
If Google didnât open up its advertising to all and sundry, then there would have been far fewer negative consequencesâletâs not even get into surveillance, which is also a direct consequence of their policy and conduct.
Do companies that are online owe a duty of care to internet users? Iâd say this is reasonable. I imagine some smaller firms might find it more difficult to get rid of a hacker, but overall, this seems reasonable.
Was this duty of care breached? Was there causation? By not vetting people signing up to the advertising programme, then yes. Pre-Google, ad networks were very careful, and I had the impression websites were approved on a case-by-case, manually reviewed basis. The mess the web is in, with people gaming search engines, with fake news sites (which really started as a way of making money), with advertising making pennies instead of dollars and scam artists all over the show, can all be traced to Google helping them monetize this conduct. There’s your obiter dicta right there. (Thanks to Amanda for remembering that term after all these years.)
Google hasnât taken reasonable care, by design. And itâs done this for decades. And damages must be in the milliards to all legitimate publishers out there who have lost traffic to these unethical websites, who have seen advertising revenue plummet because of how Google has depressed the prices and how it feeds advertising to cheap websites that have cost their owners virtually nothing to run.
Make of this what you will. Now that governments are waking up after almost two decades, maybe Big Tech is only agreeing because it fears the rest of us will figure out that they owe way, way more than the pittance theyâll pay out under these legislative schemes?
Anyone with enough legal nous to give this a bash on behalf of the millions of legitimate publishers, past and present, directly harmed by Google and other Big Tech companiesâ actions?
Tags: 1932, 2020s, 2022, advertising, Aotearoa, Big Tech, copyright, copyright law, Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, law, legislation, negligence, New Zealand, publishing, tort law, UK
Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
23.08.2022
This is too good. Now, Hearst Communications, Inc. was sensible enough to realize that what I raised was real, and a senior VP put me on to a colleague dealing with Hearst Magazines International. Nothing yet, but I wrote a release, sent it to a few colleagues, and published it on Lucire describing what had happened. As it’s going in to Lucire, unlike Google, I’m really careful about libel.
Just now, Red Points Solution SL has been by and issued another notice. They canât deal with the negative publicity so they play the only card they know how: issuing another DMCA notice to Google and leaving Hearst SL wide open to a penalty of perjury.
I mean, I’ve seen stupid (like that time a former disgruntled staffer wrote an anonymous note to people who knew me but hand-addressed the envelope), but this is like walking into a trap (that I didn’t even realize I had set!).
Now, what if word got out even more widely that Red Points Solution SL is shutting down free speech? Time to send the release more widely?
If only I had more timeâbut this might be tomorrowâs free-time project.
Tags: 2022, copyright, copyright law, DMCA, free press, free speech, Hearst, JY&A Media, law, Lucire, media, press freedom, Spain, technology
Posted in internet, media, publishing, technology | No Comments »
21.08.2022
I suppose it’s positive that Google has finally responded to our first counter-notification against Hearst SL’s and Red Points Solution SL’s fraudulent DMCA notice. Hey, Google, why don’t you begin by asking your complainants for proof before presuming an innocent party guilty? Then used your milliards of dollars and high-tech to see that our work is original? Would have saved us a lot of time.
You’ll soon see the other two counter-notices I filed on the first issue alone while I waited and waited and waited for you to respond. Failing to do that first step has cost us all time. And you knew of this problem back in the second half of the 2010s, if not before.
This system is really broken.
Oh well, another two weeks of libel by Google on the first issue alone. Everyone: use Mojeek.
Tags: 2022, copyright, copyright law, DMCA, fraud, Google, Hearst, publishing, Spain, technology, USA
Posted in internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
20.08.2022
Yesterday morning, we received a second notice with two more URLsâone with wholly our own contentâfrom Hearst SL and its contractor, Red Points Solution SL.
Iâve done a bit more digging and itâs usually fraudsters who engage in this behaviour. You can read more about them in Techdirt, Mashable and Search Engine Land.
With their millions of dollars, I guess these two Spanish companies are now in the same game of fraud.
And Google believes them, even though Mashable wrote about these techniques in 2018.
If itâs that easy to manipulate Google, then itâs finished as a credible search engine.
Meanwhile, Red Points Solution and Hearst SL open themselves up to charges of perjury. Not too smart there.
Three firms with millions, even milliards, of dollars who donât like the independents, and one firm now falsely claiming ownership of work from us, French Sole, BFA.com, and LâOrĂ©al. With LâOrĂ©al, why would you involve your own advertiser? Does Hearst SL want to slit its own wrists as a company?
Tags: 2022, copyright, copyright law, fraud, free press, Google, Hearst, JY&A Media, law, licensing, Lucire, LâOrĂ©al, media, press freedom, publishing, Spain
Posted in internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
19.08.2022
Still nothing from the Spanish outpost of Hearst or from Red Points Solution SL on their false accusation against Lucire, so tonight I contacted one of the Hearst VPs in New Yorkâas they’ll more likely understand where we’re coming from. Whenever there’s been a copyright matter, Americans tend to respond quickly, faster than Europeans or the Britishâexcept for Big Tech, natch. Those folks you need to threaten. It’s frustrating to continue seeing a DMCA notice when we do a site: search on Google, one that isn’t warranted. I’ve found a senior enough VPâI’ve been around long enough to know who’s whoâwho I think would get it.
Further investigation shows Red Points being named as defendant in quite a few casesâand they’re just the ones that the search engines have picked up. Who knows how many others aren’t put online or are worthy enough of being reported on?
I’d be extremely wary of a company whose technology appears to be very unreliable, if our case is any indication, and exposing their clients to lawsuits. I see from the Google complaint only two sites have fallen foul to their specious claimsâand you have to ask why not every single article written about Valentina Sampaio being named Armani Beautyâs newest ambassador? Were we picked out because they felt we were small enough to be picked on and that we wouldn’t fight back? And why would they risk claiming not only our original content as their client’s, but the work of L’OrĂ©alâa major Hearst advertiserâtoo? It’s potentially destructive for Hearst and harms its relationship with an advertiser.
They’ve picked on the wrong peopleâespecially a magazine that is known to some people inside Hearst.
I was curious to see what part of the Spanish web I had accessed in the last year. Answer: not a lot. More in the last day or so looking up Hearst’s Spanish outpost.
Tags: 2022, copyright, copyright law, DMCA, Google, Hearst, New York, NY, Spain, technology, USA, World Wide Web
Posted in business, internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
18.08.2022
 Yesterday, I returned to find a DMCA claim filed against us by Red Points Solution SL, purporting to act for Harperâs Bazaar España publisher Hearst Magazines SL, falsely accusing us of breaching their copyright with this article. You can read the notice here.
Naturally, I filed a counter-claim because their accusation is baseless.
Our source was PR Newswire, and itâs not uncommon to find stories of interest through that platform. In fact, Armani Beauty was so keen to get this out there on November 3 that we received the release in four languages at 15.28, 15.30, 15.33, 15.36, 15.39, 15.46 and 16.03 UTC.
The quotations and images were supplied by Armani Beauty, which is part of LâOrĂ©al. Iâve worked with people from LâOrĂ©al for over two decades and know their systems well enough, including the money they have for licensing images for press usage.
Lucire has a lot of original articles, but some of our news is release-based, as it is for anyone in our industry.
Our rule is: even when itâs a release, you write it up individually in your own words. You may have something additional to bring to the story. And we arenât a repository of releases.
The only time we would run a release mostly verbatim is if we issued it, something that might happen once every couple of years.
Naturally, Google has so far done nothing and our story remains absent from their index. Big Tech loves big firms like Hearst.
Iâve tagged Harperâs Bazaar España in social media demanding they front up with their evidence. Iâve also messaged Hearstâs Spanish office with the following.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Yesterday, your firm lobbed a false accusation against us by deceptively claiming your copyright had been breached by one of our articles. I note that you filed this as a DMCA complaint with Google.
We have filed a counter-notice.
We find it appalling that you would claim an original work has breached your copyright.
The imagery and quotations to our articles were sourced from L’OrĂ©al, and we have informed them directly of your deceptive and misleading conduct.
I demand you furnish proof. As you will no doubt fail to, we demand you withdraw the complaint. We reserve the right to pursue our own legal remedies against you.
Yours faithfully,
Jack Yan
Publisher, Lucire
I basically thought they were being dicks and my friend Oliver Woods chimed in on Twitter about it. Oli’s very insightful and objective, and I respect his opinion.
They are being dicks, but there is a strategy behind it. Petty little minds wanting to look good on Google, not liking someone else ahead of them. (Not that I ever looked to see where our story ranked. I mean, seriously?)
It reminds me of a US designerâs rep who emailed me a while back wanting us to remove an article.
I asked: whatâs wrong with it? Did we err in facts? Is it somehow defamatory?
When I probed a bit more deeply, it turned out that they were incensed it came up so highly in a Google image search.
I explained that that wasnât a good enough reason, especially since the story had been provided to us by a PR firm.
They countered by saying that as they had not heard of us, it was highly unlikely that they would have released us that news.
I thought it was a very strange strategy to accuse someone you wanted a favour from of lying.
I still have the email from their PR firm. Call me Lord of the Files.
Iâm not going to reveal the identity of the designer. I asked one of my team to see if he would call me directly instead of having one of his rude staff insult me. He never did call. The image is still there, and I bet theyâre seething each time they see it.
Itâs not even a bad image. It just doesnât happen to be hosted by them.
I donât really know why search engine domination is so important. We all should have a fair crack at it, and let whomever has the most meritorious item on a particular topic come up top.
The American designer, and the Spanish outpost of this American media giant Hearst, are obviously not people who like freedom of the press, freedom of expression, or a meritorious web. American people might like this stuff but a lot of their corporations don’t.
Which is why Google is terrible because it doesnât allow it. We know through numerous lawsuits it has biases toward its own properties, for a start. Iâve observed them favouring big media brands over independentsâeven when independents break a news story.
Mojeek is just so, so much better. No agenda. Just search the way it was and should have stayed. Thatâs the ânext Googleâ, the one that could save the web, that I had asked for in 2010.
Except it shouldnât be the next Google because we donât want more surveillance and tribalism.
Fair, unbiased search is where Mojeek excels. I really hope it catches on more. God knows the world needs it.
I think the world needs Lucire, too, the title that Harperâs Bazaar Australia named as part of its âA-list of styleâ. The Aussies are just so much nicer.
PS.: Hearst uses a company called Red Points Solution SL to do its supposed copyright infringement detection. Based on this, they must be pretty shit at it. And remember, we don’t even publish in Spanish. Yet.
I see you have falsely accused us of copyright infringement with our article at https://lucire.com/insider/20211103/valentina-sampaio-named-armani-beautys-newest-ambassador/ when we have done nothing of the sort.
We demand that you withdraw your DMCA complaint to Google.
https://lumendatabase.org/notices/28469986#
Our storyâs source is Armani Beauty through PR Newswire, to which we are signed up as a legitimate international media organization. The story is our work, using facts and quotations provided in the release.
PR Newswire provided us with this release on November 3, 2021, at 15.28, 15.30, 15.33, 15.36, 15.39, 15.46 and 16.03.
A counter-notice has been filed.
We require an explanation from you on why you have targeted a legitimate media organization with your deception. Clearly your detection systems are not very good and we would certainly be discouraged from using them.
P.PS.: One more email to Red Points Solution SL on August 19, 21.56 UTC after they doubled-down with another notice removing two URLs from Google. Again, no proof of their original work was provided, and none can be seen in Lumen even when requested. It seems Google will lap anything up if it sees a big company behind it.
I have reached out to you through numerous means but yet to hear back.
I publish Lucire, a magazine with a 25-year history and five editions worldwide. You might even say we’re the sort of business that would need Red Points Solution’s services.
However, we’ve found ourselves at the other end, with legitimate media stories from our website removed from Google with DMCA notices you’ve filed.
Your client is Hearst SL.
If your latest efforts are down to Hearst’s orders, then they are claiming ownership over material that is not theirs.
All our content is original, and where it is not, it is properly licensed.
In the first case:
https://lucire.com/insider/20211103/valentina-sampaio-named-armani-beautys-newest-ambassador/
Your client does not own this material at all. We own the story, and the quotations and images are owned by and licensed to us by L’OrĂ©al. Hearst has no connection to it other than Harper’s Bazaar being mentioned in an editorial fashion.
In the second case:
https://lucire.com/insider/20190905/nicky-hilton-hosts-brunch-to-celebrate-her-collaboration-with-french-sole/
Your client does not own this material at all. We own the story, and the images are owned by and licensed to us by French Sole and BFA.com. Hearst has no connection to it other than Harper’s Bazaar being mentioned in an editorial fashion.
In the third case:
https://lucire.com/insider/page/164/?mobiinsider%2F20120130%2Felizabeth-olsen-models-asos-magazines-cover%2F%3Fwpmp_switcher=mobile
Your client does not own this material at all. In fact, we own this material fully. No Hearst properties are even mentioned.
Counter-notifications have been filed on the basis that it is our original content and that your client has no right to make the claim in the first place.
It would be far easier if you would review your systems as presently they are opening your client and yourselves up to a legal claim âŠ
We think you need to go back to your client and have them show you just how they can legitimately claim ownership of material that is not theirs.
In the meantime, we insist you stop these notices as they are unwarranted and unfounded.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Tags: 2022, copyright, copyright law, deception, DMCA, fashion magazine, freedom of expression, Giorgio Armani, Google, Hearst, Lucire, LâOrĂ©al, Mojeek, press freedoms, publishing, search engines, Spain, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, USA | No Comments »
09.08.2020
I havenât read the full judgement of the Land Rover Defender case, where Jaguar Land Rover sought to protect the shape of the original Defender under trade mark law, to prevent Ineos from proceeding with the Grenadier.
According to Bloomberg, as reported in Automotive News, âThe judge upheld the findings by the IP Office that while differences in design may appear significant to some specialists, they âmay be unimportant, or may not even register, with average consumers.ââ
On the face of it, this would appear to be a reason for upholding JLRâs claimâbut the Indian-owned Midlands car maker seems to have muddled the cause of action it was supposed to have taken.
Iâve already taken issue with its inability to protect the L538 Range Rover Evoque shape in China under that countryâs laws, and while that judgement was eventually overturned in JLRâs favour, the company could have saved itself a great deal of stress had it filed its registration in time. It had been ignorant of Chinese law and wasted time and resources pursuing Ford Motor Company affiliate Landwind for its Range Rover Evoque clone, the X7. I sense Landwind could have afforded the ultimate fine.
Here I think arguing copyright might have been a better method. The Land Rover Station Wagon shape hails from 1949, and with 75 yearsâ protection, the company is covered till 2024. You donât need to show a registration, and the onus of proof, once objective similarity is found, is on the defendant. That test of objective similarity, unlike that in trade mark, is not based on what the average consumer thinks, but on what specialists think. And the scenes Ă faire doctrine has been adopted by precedent in the UK.
Maybe that was the game plan all along: to fail here, and to proceed using copyright later. Iâm sure the plaintiff knows this. Now, armed with the judgementâs findingsâthat the differences are insignificantâ Jaguar Land Rover can pursue a copyright claim using these as evidence.
To me, the Grenadier is sufficiently similar. Some point to the Puch G as another source of inspiration but I canât see it. And since a court has ruled that they canât see it, either, then Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos had better not break out the champagne just yet.
Tags: 2020, car, car design, car industry, copyright, copyright law, Ineos, intellectual property, IP, Jaguar Land Rover, Jim Ratcliffe, Landwind, law, Tata, UK
Posted in business, cars, design, India, UK | No Comments »
13.04.2019
European Unionâwww.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link
Iâm reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month.
Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we wonât go after anyone who links to our publications.
We presently donât care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link back to the rest. I canât see our position changing on this.
We do care if you take entire chunks (e.g. the text of an entry on Autocade, since they’re only a paragraph long). In some cases we only have the rights to photos appearing on our own site so we may want those removed if they’ve been copied from us.
Over the years Iâve just contacted publishers and asked them politely. Only a tiny handful actually respond; quite a few sites are bot-driven with feedback forms that no one checks. They get DMCAed.
But I donât have a problem with the systems that are in place today.
It seems the EU is going to wind up creating a segregated internet: one where Big Tech and large media corporations can afford to do everything and smaller publishers canât. This is already happening, thanks to Googleâs own actions with favouring mainstream media sources rather than the outlet that had the guts to break the news item. Big companies are flexing their muscles and lawmakers are bending over backwards to serve them ahead of their own citizens. (Incidentally, I canât see the UK doing anything differently here post-Brexit.)
Smaller publications might band together and share among themselves by some sort of informal agreement.
So for us, when it comes to linking and excerpting, keep doing it. Unless something happens that forces me to change my mind, Iâm all for the status quo ante in the EU.
Tags: 2019, Big Tech, copyright, copyright law, EU, fair use, Google, law, media, publishing
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