Annoyed

[Bertha]

Generally I'm an easy going bloke, I tend to go with the flow and not get too upset about such things as Brexit and my local soccer team being rubbish. However, occasionally I think, wtf! Such as when the formally excellent Petticoat Discipline Monthly/Quarterly as conceived and run by Susan McDonald becomes a shallow parody of its former incarnation and has the audacity to charge for accessing archived material that was previously free as Susan intended. I have a flickr site where for quite a few years, amongst other things, I have posted composite cartoon images I have created, complete with captions that reflect my own personal inclinations. Now, I have no qualms in admitting that on some occasions I have used and recreated other peoples images to suit my own taste, but for myself, correct or not, I have always taken the view that whatever I post, be it stories or captioned images, I have put them out in the general domain and people can do with them what they wish as long as everyone has access. But, I recently came across an ABDL/Femdom site that has a gallery section that included many images taken from my flickr site and all the images had been blocked from saving by visitors as being copyrighted! This was not just my stuff but other very familiar internet images too. How do they have the audacity to do this? As I said, I am quite placid in nature but this kind of behaviour where ownership is claimed arbitrarily really annoys me.

[sissybaby34]

Very well said, copyright original work, but other peoples! I have a relative who is a professional photographer who has had that happen to them. It was dealt with by sending them an invoice for using the image. They soon took the images off their site. 

[alison]

You can still view the old PDQ pages for free on the wayback machine, web.archive.org.

[Betty]

I see this sort of thing all the time. Even the at well known, popular, & "reputable" Ghetty Images, I regularly see them  posting images with their water mark on, demanding money for them, & blocking even the watermarked images from being downloaded, when I know beyond a shadow of a a doubt, that they do not own the image. In many cases they were stolen from dead people, & they now claim all rights to them.

Sometimes they just purchased old photos from an estate or auction. Just because they bought a 100 year old photo album at an auction does not give them a copyright to the photos. They may have to right to post or re-sell them, but they can't have a copyright to the images in the album.

It would be like me buying & restoring or modifying an old antique Ford. After I'm done, it doesn't give my patent rights to Ford or copyrights to it's design. It may even be nice that someone spent the time & money to save/restore something from the past, but that doesn't mean they automatically own or have exclusive rights the past. We all have the right to save & preserve history, but we can't have exclusive rights to history.

You can sell a history book. But you can't own the history in it.

I see this when trying to post stuff on youtube too. You can put a musical soundtrack on a video that is public domain music. The tune may have been written over 100 years ago, recorded by the old Edison company. Or it's a very old classical piece performed by a USA military orchestra/band, that clearly states that it is public domain. But dozens of "copyright" copyfraud companies will claim rights to the music, just because they collected all the public domain material, burned it onto discs, & put them up for sale. They're claiming rights as the distributor or publisher of material, when they don't actually own the material itself.

I've even seen them claim rights to the sound of crowd noises, applause, or a cat meowing on a video, just because a disc that they burned also has crowd noise, applause, or a cat in it.

There's a public domain horror film from the 1950s on my youtube channel. Some of the sound effects in the film were used in the background in a 2009 Rap song (if you can call rap a song). Every month, I get at least a dozen copyright claims against that movie by companies claiming to own the rights to the rap song, accusing me using the rap music's audio in the movie.

The movie's audio was recorded in the 1950s, & they hadn't invented rap then. They couldn't have "stole" the audio from a 2009 rap tune. And the rap song claims themselves are a fraud anyway. How could a dozen or so different copyright companies claim rights to the same song every month?

But every month I have to waste the time to file a dozen or more disputes against their claims against the movie, & wait just about a month for the movie to be cleared again. But by that time there are a dozen more complaints from different copyright companies about that same damn song that has the movie's sound effects in it.

There is no such thing as you can't download & save an image you see on the internet. If you can't right click & save or save it in other normal ways, there's at least 100 ways around it to save it anyway. Just google the problem or look for advice/add-ons for your browser to do it. If it's too hard or won't work with one browser, use a different browser. There's no harm to have more than one browser or even 6 browsers on your machine. Except or Chrome, explorer, & edge, browsers don't run stuff in the background when you don't run them. They just sit there turned off until you click on that browser to start it.

I keep Pale Moon, Firefox, & Opera on my machines because I need all of them for different stuff. They each have at least that one special thing that another browser can't do or can't do easily. It only takes a second or so to open up another browser if something doesn't work they way you want. You can use more than one browser at a time too. It uses hardly any more computer resources than opening up another window in the same browser.

[Starla]

Unfortunately, the reality of the Internet age is this: no matter what legal, digital, or hindering means you use to protect your work, the fact remains that if you put it on the Net, it's essentially and practically no longer yours. It's akin to putting all your belongings on public display in your yard: even though the law is on your side, you shouldn't be shocked if a lot of them get purloined. "Gentleman's agreements" and "common courtesy" no longer exist. This is not a value judgment, but simply a realistic assessment.

[Robyn Jodie]

I am not so concerned about the copiers.  It's the people who copy someone else's work and claim THEY have the copyright.  I've even heard of cases where they tried to issue a "cease and desist" order against the original author!

My favorite story of copyfraud commupance is how for years a subsidiary of Sony has claimed copyright on "Happy Birthday To You," has been collecting royalties, and has "scared off" restaurants from using the song when someone comes in with a birthday celebration. Someone finally countersued and (Surprise!) it was ruled that the only thing that was copyrighted is one particular obscure version of the melody.  Now some of the companies who have paid royalties are demanding their money back....

[Betty]

Yep. Even Disney claimed copyrights to Happy Birthday years ago. It turned out they only had rights to their particular versions & performance of the song, not the song itself. But it didn't stop them from charging anybody who played the song, or forcing people to remove the song, until some powerful politicians got hit with their copyright claims for their birthdays.

I get that on a lot of classical music written 100 years ago or more too, even with versions of it that I played myself or programmed my software to play. It turns out every record company & lawyer that represents them is on your back because they own recordings of the same classical piece. They only own the performance on their recording, not the piece itself. But that doesn't stop them from trying to claim they own every song & sound in the world, just because they have a recording of it or something similar.

They even try to claim rights of your dog, cat, or bird sounds on youtube just because they have recordings of those animals too. Got applause from a crowd in your video? Dozens will even claim rights to the applause in you're children's school play because they have applause in some of their recordings too!

When you can prove they don't own the sound, they argue that it sounds too much like their recording of the sound so it is still infringing on their copyright.

If the music was performed properly from the original sheet music, most good musicians playing the piece will sound the same or similar.

When they make a copyright claim against a 1950s Vincent Price movie on behalf of a 2009 Rap song, don't tell me they just made a mistake. If they're issuing dozens of these claims to everybody running that public domain movie every month, they must know by now that a 1950s movie couldn't possibly have copied a 2009 Rap song. But as long as they own a rap song that has sound effects from the movie in it, they continue to claim it's theirs so they can make lots of money on it.

The song sucks so they're probably not making much money on it. So they make money off the movie through their copyright claims on behalf of the song, getting a lot of the ad revenue that the movie gets from plays on youtube or other places.

[Bertha]

It appears to be an endemic problem with big companies ripping people off to make money. Lower down the scale, as I said, I have a realistic attitude to stories and pictures I post, if people enjoy my posts fair enough, it's just this site preventing others from doing what they have already done that irks me.

[Robyn Jodie]

I have a realistic attitude to stories and pictures I post, if people enjoy my posts fair enough, it's just this site preventing others from doing what they have already done that irks me.

If it were me, I might get irked by the ones who charge for what I created even though it's free on my original site.  Especially if they try to shut down my site as infringing "their" copyright on what I, in fact, created.

[Betty]

Just put up a new video on youtube. The first tune on the video is performed on bagpipes by the United States Air Force. It is definitely in public domain & not copyrighted. According to USA law, nobody can own or copyright a performance done by the USA military. The original song was written almost 250 years ago, so is also in public domain. It was slapped with copyright claims within 10 minutes of putting it up.

I have a theory as to why so much of the modern music sucks these days. Just about anything you make is slapped with dozens of claims by these copyfraud crooks wanting a cut, or stealing your work, then claiming rights to it. A live performance may have applause in it. Look out! The copyfraud people also have recordings with applause in it so now want all rights to your performance, for imitating their applause. A few of the chords in your song will be the same as in other songs, but the copyfraud people will try to say they own those chords because they appear in their music.

And of course, ALL these copyright people - - even sony & disney will claim to own all public domain material because they stand to make extra money by doing so. Sure, there's penalties for making a a false claim. But they get away with it by saying the claim was made in error by a machine when they get caught. Not guilty, it was a machine problem & they can't fine, sue, or arrest the machine or the programmer for making a typo or error.

I say we should have the right to face our accuser, & that it can't be a machine. It's all BS anyway. These same "mistakes" have been going on for years. They could have fixed these machine "errors" & "mistakes" by now, but because they make lots of money on these mistakes, they're in no hurry to fix them. I'll bet these mistakes are deliberately designed to be there so they can make money, but deliberately designed to look like mistakes when caught, so they can get away with it.

It's like a survey of the checkout counters in groceries show customers are frequently charged the wrong price for their item instead of the listed & advertised price. Honest machine/computer/scanning mistake? Over 90% of the mis-charges were HIGHER, not lower than the listed price. If it was an honest mistake the mis-charges should go either way almost equal. Because these mistakes are almost always in the store's favor. That's clear evidence that these "mistakes" are designed to happen.

An average of 79 cents in overcharges per a customer's long grocery list may not be a big deal or noticed. But with a 1,000 customers a day (most popular supermarkets) that may add up to an extra $750 a day, $5250 a week, $22500 a month, or $273750 a year for a supermarket. That market may have 1/2 dozen branches around a city, so the regional management can be taking in over 1.6 million dollars a year on that 79 cent per customer "mistake". Look at that, they charged you sales tax or other taxes on a non-taxable item - - who gets that money for that mistake? Look at your phone & utility bill. Do you really think all those taxes, & tarrif charges are legitimate?

They'll wring you dry from any angle they can get it you. Nobody gets arrested or fined if caught, because it was a simple machine mistake. My electric company brags we've been getting 15 cents per KWH for years. But with all the taxes & tariffs, when I do the math, it's more like 30 cents per KWH - - up from 20 cents just 4 years ago. Yet the state claims it hasn't raised taxes for utilities in a decade, but I'm sill paying 10 cents more per KWH than 4 years ago.