Haje,

Thanks for reply. Like you pointed out, I think it was about the timing of the notices being served & this article being published. Imagine my surprise to see that article after our congenial email conversation. That’s where the “sucker punch” feeling came from. You still have a reader in me because the content is just that good. In the mean time however, to cover my own butt, I’ve removed your RSS feed from my Google Reader feed. I don’t want to have a repeat of what happened here. I hope you are able to resolve the code issue with Tumblr (or where ever it lay) so that both the reader who shares your content & you can benefit from the traffic to your site.

Now that that’s done, I’m curious about your thoughts about Creative Commons?

Anyway – I think you’re illustrating very well one of the trickier parts of DMCA / copyright protection: People who end up infringing on copyright by accident, without any intention of malice whatsoever. On a personal level, I think I got it wrong in your case – A simple e-mail directly to you would have been a more polite way of requesting to take the content down. It’s clear that you’re upset, and I’m actually a big fan of your Tumblr stream, so I regret the way I ended up serving a DMCA notice directly to Tumblr.

It illustrates another point as well though: I found another 20 infringements yesterday, and have to make a choice: Do I spend a lot of time analysing each case to see whether or not I should be polite, or should I just send out 20 form letters and be done with it? Yesterday, I chose the latter, which upset someone who is (or, by now, possibly ‘used to be’) a Photocritic reader. Lesson learned, I’ll have to spend more time thinking about how to approach people who make accidental infringements.

On the point of RSS feeds and re-publishing: It took me a while to realise how you actually ended up re-publishing the content. (What Aaron did, basically, was to click on a ’share’ button within Google Reader). Whilst Reader won’t display the blog posts to the world at large, the ’share’ function works differently: It appears that the feed gets passed on to a third-party site, in this case Tumblr. Tumblr then parses the feed and posts a short version to Aaron’s feed – but in this case, it posted the full version via a different template, which I found via the unique string embedded into my RSS feeds.

This raises an interesting question: Are services like Tumblr, who have a (semi-)automatic mechanism for re-publishing content on rocky ground legally? I would argue so, because their mechanism enables (or should I say ’causes’) people to unwittingly commit copyright infringements; but then, Tumblr is an awesome service in general, and on the whole trust them to not be lame about stuff like this – so in a way, both Tumblr and a.bird made a minor mistake each, which resulted in an infringement I had to react to.

Finally, I suppose I should point out that this article has been several months in the making – it’s a coincidence that it got posted the same day as 20 people were served with DMCA notice – sorry if that felt like a ’sucker punch’, most certainly not my intention.

Best,

~ Haje

First, let me say in the outset that I am in no way advocating ripping off an artists content, however you want to label it. It’s unethical and simply wrong.

In the section regarding RSS, I feel that there is a gross generalization about readers who share articles with services like Google Reader. As it’s worded, the article seems to imply that if you share with these services you are trying to “clone” the sight and subsequently generate revenue from that “clone”. Again, this is a gross generalization and highly inaccurate. As it happened to me, I clicked the Share button in Google Reader and I have a Tumblr site that collects the shared links. (Contrary to the screen shots provided, I’m doubtful Tumblr included the entire article.) The intent was to share something that I thought was worthy to be shared, not to somehow gain a profit from it. I know ignorance and intent of the person who shared the story won’t hold water in the courts and I’m sure I’m probably not going to find many sympathetic ears here but I’m of the opinion these kinds of strong-arm RIAA style tactics against the casual reader only does harm to the readership.

Perhaps I’m being too emotional or irrational, but as a “regular guy” and wannabe photographer, getting the CDMA notice then to see this article, it feels like a sucker punch and cheap shot.

I don’t understand why people copy articles – that’s a waste of their disk space while only linking to the original is almost equally valuable. And if they ask you for a permission to include a short quote with the link, I have no doubt you will agree, and it will improve search engine ranks of both sites…

I have taken the liberty of linking to it from my blog – hope that dosen’t trigger te lawyers :) Only a link nothing copied, promise!

I follow your blog with interest and appreciate your guidance here as a photographer myself