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A few years ago the Daily Mail ran an article about a visualization I made. They obeyed my CC license, so I have no complaint as serious as Yau's. But the article was just full of errors, including spelling my name wrong in three different ways. I wrote the article author and pointed out all the errors and he responded "No copy editing! It's a tight budget."
The Daily Mail truly doesn't give a shit. About quality, about copyright, about decency. It seems to be working for them.
The free market in action, I suppose.
Send the Daily Mail an invoice for their use of your work. Pick a reasonable price and bill them. Then if you don't pay you've got something tangible to sue them about.
This. This is a standard procedure for photographers.
Writing a blog post does not help anybody. Ask for money and you not only get money, they are more likely to not do it again.
IANAL, but this sounds like a great idea even if you don't plan to pursue payment: It's more likely to get a change from the scuzzy people in charge of the scuzzy business than polite letters to article-writers.
And if you do feel pissed, it nicely anchors things: "My client promptly sent a notification of infringement and an invoice, which they refused to pay for X months."
I use this plugin (also available for Chrome) to redirect to pictures of tea and kittens should I accidental click on a Daily Mail link. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/kitten-block/
This review has made my day.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/kitten-block/...
It would be nice if this plugin could be configured to do the same for a list of websites, and not just the Daily Mail.
What does the law say about putting a license on use of things like this "Embedding this content into your site without written permission from the author will involve a £100000 fee for it's use. You agree by embedding this content that you abide by these terms."
Is something like this enforceable?
I think the problem with this, like with most routes that involve a lawyer, is that this isn't about being enforceable or not, but whether you can actually pay in time and money to try to enforce it.
That's why typically only companies try to enforce licenses.
The author said that even writing the blog post was hard because he had not much time to spare.
Imagine what it would cost if you sue and demand a newspaper like The Daily Mail.
> Is something like this enforceable?
No, it's not, because 1) the user never agreed to the license, 2) a license by definition cannot cover unlicensed uses. Unlicensed uses are dealt with by statute, not by a licence agreement, so it would be up to a court to decide how much to reward you.
Note that for 1) without a written agreement you can't specify additional license terms beyond the usual statutory rights. Licenses and contracts have very different requirements for what makes them valid, the bar is set much higher for licenses.
It sounds like you are describing elements of both piracy/theft (in which the offender fails to obtain or adhere to a license) and a compulsory license (in which there is a predetermined usage fee but no consent is required).
With a compulsory license, the fee is pre-determined by law or arbitration. However, in the US they are basically only applicable to music and similar works involving royalties.
In cases of piracy, damages are sought through civil suit and ultimately determined by the court, not the plaintiff. Essentially your warning amounts to "I'll sue you for X amount if you steal this". There's no guarantee that the court would find in your favor or award the full damages sought.
I say "warning" because I doubt many courts would consider this a valid EULA to begin with. Contracts of adhesion are generally enforceable only if the terms conform to the reasonable expectations of the signatory (who has no control over the terms).
But even if it were valid, and you were allowed to set your own violation fee, you would still have to go through the court to enforce it.
Is something like this enforceable?
We'd better hope the general principle isn't, because otherwise every search engine, social networking site, traffic aggregator and directory service on the web is about to spend the rest of its very short existence fighting off lawsuits.
So what about a community like Hacker News that combines community, karma, money and action.
Think of it like crowd sourced lawyers to even up egregious abusers of the public commons.
The community can somehow [1] filter actions up to the top and then automatically start a crowd funding campaign to take legal action based upon such things.
Might work against patent trolls and other organisations that we all feel are acting badly but we feel powerless to do anything about. I'd put £100 down now toward a class action lawsuit against the Daily Mail for constantly stealing peoples content.
[1] technical term meaning I haven't thought this through properly
I am not a lawyer, but one reason you can't do that is because you can't set punitive damages in a contract. The court would instead consider how much the unauthorised actions actually cost you and decide what damages are owed.
Unlikely (IANAL) because it would be hard to argue the fee is reasonable.
You can specify that it is not available (but good luck seeing anything from a case about violating the license).
You might be able to do this with something like £100, though, and just invoice them. I'd guess staff lawyers would say just pay it.
> I made an alert pop up that said “poop” whenever someone loaded the Stuff.co.nz page. Like I said, I'm sophisticated.
I would probably have handled this much less maturely, haha. What would be the legality of displaying some really graphic image (like goatse) to only 10% of users when you detect you're within an iframe? :P
Ripping the source code of the visualization is so scummy though. I wish I could say I can't believe the Daily Mail, but this article isn't even surprising...
JWZ used to detect the hacker news referrer and redirect all links that originated on hacker news to goatse. Now it's only slightly less graphic.
I think the NZ Herald is worse than stuff. A meaningful percentage of their content is now Reddit stories.
How would the Daily Mail feel about (and what would they do) if someone constantly scraped their website and redistributed the content? Perhaps a fun side project called TheLessAdsDailyMail.com?
That's a good idea! What if we repeatedly scraped their site and then display it to some of the users on our site. Then, we could charge them some small fee to click on the link.
We could sell them some of the data around who clicked on the link, and even charge their users after we segment them. We would probably have to crawl the site a lot of times and then display their content, but essentially we would own it.
Someone should try this. If it worked out, maybe you could expand to buzzfeed, techcrunch and then literally all of the sites on the internet.
Why didn't anyone think of this? You would just be able to charge websites (and their users) for providing you content!
edit: After thinking about it, it would probably be hard to do this. We could maybe create a standard and then show sites based on how well people listen to that, and then for the rest just see what are users look for and pick.
Copying an entire site is a bit different, if you copy one of their articles I doubt anything would happen. Maybe a sternly worded email.
If you copied their entire site, used their name, and removed their ads I'm sure they'd get lawyers involved.
We all know what they'd do. Respond with threats and litigation probably.
What I Would Do: Find out what law firm represented the Beastie Boys when they went after GoldiBlox.
Why I Would Do That: They were successful in their defense of the rights of the Beastie Boys and reached a settlement that included a public admission of guilt.
Long-Term Goal: To discourage such behavior through numerous examples of punishment using established rules.
Something tells me the Beastie Boys have a little more money to spend on lawyers than this guy does.
And that's a significant problem - most of the time organizations like the Daily Mail are ripping off small-time practitioners of data visualizations, comics, whatever... if it's something produced by a large company with lawyers you can bet they wouldn't touch it.
The morally corrupt posing as moral guardians.
I know people who have had other things like photos from flickr stolen by them.
They are disgraceful!
This kind of thing is beyond rampant at all levels.
I think the people most concerned about following the rules are small-medium businesses that are big enough for someone to try to sue, but not big enough to have an army of lawyers that makes them practically invincible from all claims that don't originate from a similar Super-Massive-Corp. Business insurance is pretty meaningless for practically any claim that doesn't involve unsafe facilities, and they often include clauses similar to "If you lose in the wrong way, you owe us all the money we paid for your defense".
There's an impression that since big media outlets are such big targets, they're careful about this type of stuff, but it's not true at all. They're only careful when it's another SuperMassive's copyright. They know that a legal fight with them is not possible for any other creator, and they know that they can get an immediate benefit by violating your copyright. They'll rip your stuff off, they may take down the thing they didn't have a license for after you complain, and they'll just laugh at you because they know an attorney is going to charge tens of thousands to even start proceedings against someone as big as them.
We need to fix the way legal costs work.
You must be really good at creating visualizations. :) way to go sir!
autorespond *@dailymail.co.uk I hereby deny permission to reuse content from my website.
sounds like someone needs to set his X-Frame-Options header.
It suddenly occurs to me that in addition to it being rude to deep-link someone's content via <iframe>, it may be dangerous to Daily Mail's security model.
I wonder if they've configured everything correctly to ensure that an embedded iframe can't find its way to the user's Daily Mail cookies or credentials?
This reminds me of the days of flash. There use to be a ton of sites stealing other people's flash games. You could buy flash obfuscater and de-obfuscate programs. People would steal your game code and re-skin the game,etc. Then the new strategy was to put the ads inside the video game.
the daily mail is awful, I wish people would ignore their garbage.
I would suggest doing something like Nanex does with their graphs and images, use watermarks or some other identifying mark that is clearly unique to you. This way, they may think twice about clearly showing work that is not theirs.
The Oatmeal was recently linked to without permission by the Huffington Post. Matt Inman had a predictably brilliant response.
First things first: How did you even track who was using your Visualizations? Can you explain so others can learn from the lesson as well.
If they actually downloaded and republished your dikes, then that is clear copyright infringement. Which is both a crime, as well as cause for civil action.
You could report them to the DA (or whatever is the equivalent where you or they live.)
It would be interesting to see how that went!
The Flowing Data is great. Yau really builds great visual charts of various data.
Remember to disable your ad blocker when on dailymail.co.uk to fund this high quality content, it's not cheap to make! Wouldn't want them to have to close up shop!
Perhaps the solution would be to embed a link to your site within the content you create itself, be it visualizations or whatever else?
Why is it any worse to link to a page than to put it in an iframe? (The author's page header was still on there, so there's a clear attribution.) Why is the author so dissatisfied with his page getting so many views? I'd assume that's the point of putting things on the internet.
They embedded/copied/proxied it. They did not 'steal' it.
Regardless of whether you find their behaviour acceptable, those are two very, very different things.
If you put a lot of effort into a project and don't want it stolen, please REGISTER THE COPYRIGHT.
0. Register the copyright within 3 months after you publish the project.
1. Register online at https://eco.copyright.gov/ - it costs $35 (or so) and is not particularly difficult to do.
1.1 registration is not difficult, but it is tedious and involves navigating a super-old government website that kinda sucks.
2. You can also hire a lawyer to register for you, which costs around $200-300.
3. Once you have the copyright registration, you can write a polite letter to whomever is stealing your stuff (or write a nasty letter, depending on your mood).
4. You can force them to pay you compensation for stealing your copyrighted content.
5. If your stolen stuff is being hosted by a third party provider (like imgur or whatever), you can send the host a DMCA takedown request, and the host will quickly remove the offending content.
that is just US law. Milage may vary in other countries.
edit - a lot of downvoting on this comment. Too snarky? Too anti-open-source? i thought this is useful info. Sorry to offend!
I can't help but think that it would make sense for Mr. Yau to either (a) Change the server setting to emit the X-Frame-Options: DENY header or (b) monetize views on his graphic.
In general, you can't assume people won't deep-link your content, and that includes embedding. Taking steps to protect against or take advantage of traffic spikes is the responsibility of a content provider.
This, of course, wouldn't protect against DM just straight yanking all his assets and hosting them itself, which should be clearly immoral (and possibly illegal, depending on jurisdiction). But "framers gonna frame" is a fair thing to assume about the nature of web content, along the lines of "<img> tags are cheap and if people see something funny on your site, they're gonna use 'em to share it."
As soon as you searched you saw that many other people had written this kind of thing, and yet that hadn't done any good. What made you think this post would make any more difference than the previous ones you found?
If you want to actually make a difference, talk to your solicitor. You might even get some money out of it.