Earthblog

Hello there! And welcome to the new Byteman Blog. Every month yours truly will be writing for the Excalibur website after, it has to be said, a great deal of arm twisting from Simon who runs the website and computer fairs. Well, Simon’s got his way and managed to convince me that you happy punters out there need a few words of wisdom from the Guru himself, and hey, who am I to argue!

Many of you will know me previously as I have actually been doing a Byteman column for over 15 years in one form or another for different people and organisations. Never one to be afraid to tell how it is - and regularly offending people in the process - has been a well known trade mark of mine for years. Don’t worry, though, I only offend the bad guys; that is, the ones who generally like to rip off the public or the man in the street. Big organisations do this all the time, and one of their favourite tactics is the fear technique, but more of this later. For those who are interested I have been dabbling in computers for more years that I care to remember. My first computer was the Sinclair Spectrum and I gradually progressed to the beloved Amiga. Not so beloved to Atari fans though as they thought the Amiga was a somewhat inferior machine - the arguments still go on to this day. Then came the arrival of DOS PC machines …. and many young uns’ won’t know what I’m talking about: “DOS? Never heard of it mate!” Then, on to the scene came Windows 3.1 (which to be honest I never really liked), after that came Windows 95 and so on and so forth.

So as you can see I have been around a fair number of years, more than I like to admit, frankly! I have an electronic background and have lived and worked in Germany, South Africa and Japan. Been around? You better believe it mate! The stories I could tell…. but that’s for another time perhaps. Right, let’s get on with the Blog. As I previously mentioned, I hate it when the big guys pick on the little guys and it happens all the time out there in the World Wide Web. One such company tried it on with me recently. I had an image on a website that they stated was copyright to them. This American company (no name due to legal reasons) demanded £1000 for this so called terrible misdemeanour and unless I paid within 21 days legal action would be taken. My reaction? Up yours. Well at least up theirs! They may be one of the biggest image suppliers in the world but come on have they never heard of a cease and desist notice?

Would you like to see the image? Well, I obviously cannot show it in on this website because then poor old Simon, the webmaster, could be liable. If you want to see it, go to Google and to the images section (top left of page). Then put ‘Wake Up Call’ in the search box and it’s the image of the sleeping polar bear with the penguin on top - about to give a nasty wake up with a pair of symbols. This image can be found everywhere on the Internet especially on sites that have some humorous element. Unknown to me, the picture is actually taken from an original image by the photographer Wayne R. Bilenduke. He specialises in photographing polar bears in the wild in his native Canada and this company apparently has the licence to sell some of his work. Someone had turned the picture of the sleeping bear into a cartoon type picture by adding the penguin. I thought it was humorous and used it, believing that I would not offend anyone. Oh well, nobody’s perfect!

To be honest, occasionally I have had problems in the past over the odd copyright issue. On those occasions I received a cease and desist notice - which is the usual way of doing things. You then remove the offending item immediately and apologise for any inconvenience caused. Job done. In these days of the Internet it is so easy to fall into the copyright trap, particularly with images as they are so easy to grab especially from so called public domain sources. Google Images are a case in point; they now have a disclaimer stating there could be copyright issues with images on their site. Anyway, I decided to delve a little deeper into this USA company to see why all this commotion had arrived on my doorstep.

Firstly, how did they find me? That was the burning question. It was not a website that specialised in images, but just a couple of them were on an inside web page. A little searching though brought up a lot of information on this company and the way they deal with copyright issues. Not very well it appears, and they have a very bad name with the way they deal with users. What they do is employ a company called Picsout. This is a company who are experts in trawling web sites to find copyright images. This is an automated system, which goes scavenging through servers scanning website pages for images and comparing them with the USA company database. If there is a match then out come the demand letters. The letter by the way consists of five pages. On one page a snapshot of the webpage with the offending image is shown alongside the image they have on their database. On another page is a list of reasons why you cannot cop out of the accusation. Examples like, ‘I have removed the image and the matter is now closed’ or, ‘I genuinely though the image was royalty free’ does not hold water according to their interpretation. In other words there is no excuse and you are going to have to pay, or else. The letter is very professional, full of legal jargon, and I can see the average user having sleepless nights after reading it all. In fact, after some research, I found that some people were being chased for thousands of pounds and one user was being chased for £45,000!

Many people pay because they are scared. They see big company, big court case, big legal costs, and maybe even loss of savings, or even their home. Scare tactics tend to be very successful and that’s why they do it. People do tend to scare very easily. What many don’t realise is what the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 which states –

“Where in an action for infringement of copyright it is shown that at the time of the infringement the defendant did not know, and had no reason to believe, that copyright subsisted in the work to which the action relates, the plaintiff is not entitled to damages against him, but without prejudice to any other remedy.”

In other words, if you are ignorant of the fact that a copyright existed at the time, the plaintiff (the big bad guy who is chasing you) would have a hard time in a court of law proving otherwise. Anyway, I ignored the letter just to see what would happen. Guess what? Yep, I got another one! It took another eight weeks for this to arrive and this one was a real humdinger. It was more demanding, more threatening and if the first didn’t work on a poor unsuspecting user, this one was really geared to cause sleepless nights. I put the letter in its rightful place – the bin. If they want to take me to court then fine, bring it on guys I am ready and waiting. Am I worried? Not in the least! Why? Because too many people do pay and with all that money coming in why risk losing a court case and lose all that income. Nope, it’s much too risky for them. In all my searching on Google, there is not one case which has gone to court, not one. If you want to look into this yourself put ‘Images Demand Settlement Letter’ into Google search and you will find loads of info. If you ever get a letter like this, please, please, don’t panic, just do some research - Google is a godsend in this respect. I have lost count of the number of times Google has saved me a fortune, and I will explain how next time.

Well that’s about it for this month! In the next Blog … how some British law firms have now started to use fear tactics on individuals over copyright and file sharing issues. More information on how Google can help you with many problems. Plus, I am a great fan of Open Source/Freeware programs which can be as good, if not better, than many of their commercial counterparts. There will be lots of info on the best of these and where to get it for free. If you want to share a grievance, or let me know something of interest that might assist other users, then don’t be shy, drop me an email at: bytemanblog@gmail.com and although I cannot promise to answer every one, I can assure you they will all be read. See you next time and may the bytes be with you!