23 ms·
"The web is considered 'public domain'"
- tjic 16y agoSome of my written work was once pirated by a coporation. In 1984, when I was 13, I wrote an article on revising the AD&D combat tables, sent it in to Dragon magazine, and it was published the following year. Before it hit print, I was given a contract to read and sign. The contract specified that I was selling "first serial rights" only, and retained all rights for republishing, putting in anthologies, etc. I signed the contract, and got a $100 check. 20 years later, Dragon released a CD-ROM compendium of all content. My article was included, without my permission. This was not "initial" serial rights - this was a republishing. I sent an email saying "you owe me additional payment". They wrote back saying "no". I filled out a small claims court form in MA, submitted it along with a $40 processing fee, and waited. A few weeks later I was given a court date. I showed up. The Hasbro magazine rep (Dragon was published by TSR, which had been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, which had been acquired by Hasbro) did not show. I won the case by default. The court mailed the judgement to Hasbro. A month later Hasbro mailed me a check for $2,000, in accordance with the judgement.
- TheSOB88 16y agoAwesome. Sadly, this person is getting advice to "lawyer up" when it's really unnecessary to even get a lawyer involved. In these types of cases lawyers would just complicate things.
- steviesteveo 16y agoActually this is one of the types of case, that is one person is clearly and obviously in the wrong but absolutely refuses to admit it, where having a lawyer is particularly helpful.
- electromagnetic 16y agoA lawyer isn't necessary, file a small claims action against them in your local area. If you're a writer you claim jurisdiction where you work (like the poster of this thread did), which generally means the other person will never be able to get there. They're either hiring a lawyer/paralegal to go to court or they sit and wait for the court to order payment. Personally, I'd be filing small claims against them on the order of a thousand dollars or so and include a claim for expenses. Good chance it's job done and you got the cash.
- run4yourlives 16y agoThis case seems so cut and dry though that a lawyer is hardly necessary. Small Claims court will do the job perfectly fine.
- ja27 16y agoI'm pretty sure that cases like this is why that CD-ROM compendium was pulled from the market. Ironically, it's probably a collector's item now. It's actually quite frustrating, because there are a number of magazines that want to publish back issue electronic archives, but can't because in they never imagined that they'd want to republish articles electronically and there's no practical way to chase down all the authors, artists, photographers and potentially the advertisers to get the rights. I know one magazine publisher that just shrugged his shoulders and gave up. There are decent-quality scanned copies of every issue on the torrents now, but he isn't pursuing any action to stop it.
- dmm 16y agoReasonable copyright term limits would go a long way towards solving this issue.
- tjic 16y agoThis has nothing to do with copyright law. I sold the first serial rights for $100. I would have sold all rights for $120 or so. ...but they never asked.
- dmm 16y agoIf it weren't for copyright law they could anything they pleased, so this has everything to do with copyright law.
- ejames 16y ago> ...but they never asked. That's rather the problem - asking every person who holds the rights can be genuinely difficult. In your case, the original magazine was published years ago. Even if the publisher had kept your contact information - and didn't lose it when the got bought out by another company, and THAT company didn't lose it in the next level of buying out, etc. - the contact would no longer be accurate all those years later. Even if they did somehow manage to contact you, it's possible that you wouldn't have responded to the letter asking for rights anymore than they responded to your letter asking for payment. There could be this same problem for every article in every issue for the entire span of the magazine. Hasbro could have noticed somewhere along the path to you initiating court procedures and have offered a quick payment of $120 to make you happy instead of the $2000 default judgement, but a corporation as large as Hasbro probably gets a lot of complaints, some of them nuisance complaints or crank calls. It's quite possible that the $2,000 they had to pay was cheaper - maybe even dramatically cheaper - then the filing and/or legal footwork involved in accurately determining that it was necessary to pay you. And when determining what you need to do in order to comply with a law is very burdensome or difficult, I would say that it's fair to call that a problem with the law. A good law should make it easy to obey the law - not easy in a moral sense where it's a low standard, or easy in the loophole sense that you won't get caught anyway, but easy in the accounting sense that accomplishing non-nefarious, law-abiding objectives should cost small amounts of money in overhead activities.
- plorkyeran 16y agoThey ran into a lot of legal issues with that CD. Supposedly KenzerCo got the rights to all the pre-3.0 D&D stuff so that they could make Hackmaster by agreeing not to sue.
- tzs 16y agoI'm kind of surprised that worked, since at first glance this would seem to be a copyright case, which no MA court has jurisdiction over.
- camiller 16y agoTake another glance... This could probably be argued under contract law as the defendant having exceeded the use they contracted.
- gallerytungsten 16y agoThis is a great story, and the outline of it parallels my own experiences with small claims court. When big corporations mess with you, small claims is a very effective way to level the playing field. Here is some additional information on the process. You have to find the "registered agent" for the company, which can usually be looked up online at the Secretary of State site for the state where the company is located. If they are out of state, serve the complaint by certified mail, with return receipt.
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoWTF is up with people? It's one thing to play fast and loose with the rules, but where do people get the audacity to even try that level of BS? When someone catches then red-handed, why do people keep denying? It's just silly - there's no way you can successfully argue the article was in the public domain, so you should probably just donate the $130, and be glad you're not on the hook for the $30,000 in maximum statutory damages. What is it with our culture where people just can't admit they were wrong?
- aplusbi 16y agoIt's not denial, it's ignorance combined with stubbornness. The editor said she's been doing it for years, so obviously she's correct and Monica is mistaken.
- goatforce5 16y agoBRB. Just gotta go copy some content from Cooks Source website to throw up on my blog. An industry veteran editor has just told me it's OK to do.
- rlachenal 16y agoMake sure it's actually Cooks' content and not something they just lifted from another site :|
- ceejayoz 16y agoTheir latest edition has a Food Network post copied without a byline. Someone's about to have their ignorance corrected.
- flipbrad 16y agoIt's advisable to learn to spot a publicity troll when you see one.
- ceejayoz 16y agoSupposedly, they've got real advertisers, and people have been calling them all day. Some have cancelled their ad buys.
- duke_sam 16y agoCan she not use the DMCA to request that any offending online copies be removed and then sue in small claims court? I'm always amazed at how any copyright law doesn't make it any easier to seek compensation if you are an individual. To the point where copyright only seems to have meaning if you have a team of lawyers on staff.
- dustingetz 16y agothe sponsors of these laws were businesses, so it makes sense and isn't necessarily even bad for the law to be written for the common cases.
- patio11 16y agoDMCA is really, really easy to do. If you can read and follow directions, you can DMCA someone's hosting provider for less than $6 and ten minutes of work or less. (I prefer doing it by certified mail, return receipt requested, which is the polite businessman's way to say This Is About To Become Serious Business For Your Attorney If You Don't Give Me What I Want.)
- shiftpgdn 16y agoSave yourself $6 and do it by e-mail. Just find the abuse e-mail listed for the IP/Host and 99.9% of the time they'll take care of it in 24 hours or less.
- rmc 16y agoRegistered post is much muc less ignorable than email. "I didn't get that email" is an excuse they might give, but you can't say that with registered post. For the sake of $6 it's worth it.
- Dylanlacey 16y agoI've had someone try (For a $1000 insurance claim against their business). I didn't mention it was registered post until they claimed they didn't get it. "Oh, really? Well the registered post office said that there's a signature on this from you, and it was definately hand delivered."
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoTaking others peoples content and using it commercially without asking ... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840481. Interesting comparison in the reactions from HNers IMO.
- wwortiz 16y agoHow is mirroring geocities and/or supplying a torrent of the content using it commercially? Reocities even responds to takedown requests.
- flipbrad 16y agoSupplying the torrent isn't directly commercial but upping others' content with your own ads, is. And should be subject to claims to account to claimants for income received unless they published under a wide enough copy-left licence. However, a reform to copyright law I'd gladly see happen is that orphan content (which officially deleted websites arguably are) should be exempt from copyright. I mean, how can people seriously retain rights to profit from work which they OK'd (explicitly or implicitly) the deletion/ending the publication of? What reocities does, in my mind, whether commercial or not, is great. I also think there should be a default, opt-out licence covering all new content published, along the lines of CC share alike - attribution - noncommercial. Creators are free to opt out of the licence - explicitly - and reserve ALL rights if they want. Wouldn't cover CooksSource's actions (commercial) but it would stop you infringing my copyright when you forward my emails. Also, responding to a takedown is a completely non-sequitur to 'how is that commercial'. For better, or worse; commercial, or not; you have to comply. Insane that such a logical fallacy can attract such karma.
- timwiseman 16y agoI agree with that part of copyright reform needs to deal with orphan conent. However, approving having something deleted does not by itself make it an orphan work. After all, the copyright holder may have had it deleted in one place to publish it in another or had it removed so that it could be reworked into a new revision before being posted. Orphaned works are those where either the copyright owner no longer exists (a corporate entity that went out of business for instance) or where there is no practical way to identify the proper copyright holder. Not merely those that have been removed from one particular place of publication.
- radioactive21 16y agoIt's funny sometimes people think the internet is so big, no one will notice, when actually its the other way around. Not only does the internet do a good job of exposing things, it catalogs everything, so it's hard for you to just remove something without someone or something saving it. I once had someone wrote some crazy shit on their blog about my friend. My friend approached this person, and she denied it, and apparently tried removing her blog post. Luckily Google cached the entire thing.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- msredmond 16y agoThe editor who responded to her e-mail is a complete idiot who knows nothing about copyright, and is being completely irresponsible and liability to her company. If she worked for me, she'd be fired, instantly (although I make sure all my editors understand copyright law -- so this is probably coming from higher up -- how could her bosses leave her so misinformed?). I too have been in publishing for 20 years, and now work exclusively in online publishing. They violated her copyright, period. We get the rights to everything we publish for a reason, and if someone publishes something of ours without permission, we request them to take it down -- most do it instantly (I've never had to file a DCMA), but that's her next step -- DCMA/e-mail her ISP. Really is mind-boggling that someone who considers themselves a professional journalist would send an e-mail like that -- embarrassed for our whole profession.
- jobrahms 16y agoI get the feeling it's a one-girl operation and there are no higher ups.
- ilamont 16y agoThe thing that surprised me about this story is she claims to have worked in publishing for 30 years and has the audacity to spout this crap. Sadly, though, Internet scraping by print journalists happens a lot. Wired editor Chris Anderson plagiarized material for his book (or by his account, "failing to cite sources") and there used to be a regular parade of plagiarists having their stories highlighted on Romenesko, a well-known blog and newsletter aimed at professional journalists. A common scenario is copying and pasting from other news sources, but Wikipedia figures prominently as well. Copying and pasting is too easy and too big a temptation for people with low standards, and cheaters assume they won't get caught.
- gregory80 16y agoagreed, such people and publications are an embarrassment to journalists at large. Though I am not one to suggest getting a lawyer, I would take the steps towards that direction, including DCMA takedown and the like, as suggested by several others. If this editor has been knowingly doing 'this' activity (clearly violating copyright) a class action lawsuit against the entire company could be in short order for copyright violation en masse. Having to pay a lawyer sucks and is expensive, but outright theft and then re-branding with their own copyright is disgusting. I wonder how interested groups like EFF and ACLU would be in this story.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hxa7241 16y agoYes, it is good to point out insensitive/mistaken/hypocritical companies. But there is something that can get lost in these cases. Everyone is provoked to a belligerent counter-attack: demand restitution! lawyer-up! sue! But this only consolidates the underlying problem. It is just the wrongness of the system popping up in a different place. The way forward is less restrictions, less legal action, not more aggressive enforcement for everyone. If someone plagiarises something, and then excuses themself with a pack of bumptious squirmy nonsense, they can be ridiculed. But generally we all ought to be copying stuff pretty freely.
- bigiain 16y agoYou don't consider the offer to "make good" by donating $130 to the school of journalism to be a perfectly good first option before "belligerent counter-attack"? Griggs was an idiot - but thats OK, there's no law against being an idiot. There _is_ a copyright law though. Griggs was offered a simple and inexpensive way to to fix the crime she committed out of her idiocy, and she chose to not take up that offer. What else should the copyright owner in a case like this do except get belligerent?
- tbrownaw 16y ago> But generally we all ought to be copying stuff pretty freely. Which we can't do under the current laws, regardless of whether we ignore people who don't understand those laws. What's the best way to get the laws fixed?
- techiferous 16y ago
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- dtf 16y agoLooks like the Internet Retribution Machine is currently in full effect on the offender's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cooks-Source-Magazine/196994196748 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cooks-Source-Magazine/19699419... Among the commenters are vigilantes hunting for further infractions and advertisers withdrawing their business.
- grellas 16y ago"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at . . . I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!" The thing that struck me most about this reply was how perfect it is as an illustration of how not to deal with people when a problem arises. 1. When someone is angry about something you did, it is not right to adopt a breezy tone, as if you are doing some online chat with a friend. This is a disrespectful way of denigrating the concerns raised by that person. 2. The same can be said about the patronizing attitude - the "I have been around forever and know all there is to know about copyright and don't need to hear complaints from someone is an ignoramus on the topic" attitude. Even when you are in the right in dealing with, say, a disaffected customer, you never patronize in this way. It immediately causes the person to feel "shat upon," if I might use that phrase, and to react badly, even if you are correct in your position. When a problem exists, address it directly and don't play games with trying to act superior to the person making the complaint. 3. If you are going to address a legal complaint, at least make some minimal effort to understand what you are talking about. I understand that people can have philosophical disagreements about how copyright is enforced but one should not purport to make statements about technical issues of law when one has no idea what one is talking about. Here, just about everything the writer says about copyright is wrong and very obviously so. 4. When someone is already upset, you don't go about gratuitously provoking that person in responding to the complaint. "We stole your work but it really stunk and we did you a favor by writing it far better than you ever could have done" is the sort of response that must rank right up there with other classics in asinine fatuity. I am sure there are other things wrong with this as well but this is surely a list of very obvious things to avoid in dealing with a complaint. This sort of thing is guaranteed to provoke, inflame, and escalate the problem to a point where this person will surely regret it.
- ilamont 16y agoThe editor of the cooking magazine has allegedly been scraping other material, as well: At present, people seem to have found matches between Cooks Source articles and the Martha Stewart website; The Food Network; NPR; the website of Boots (the chemist); Alternet; Weight Watchers; and a website owned by Disney. http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=3450 http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=3450
- joezydeco 16y agoThere's a rapidly growing list on their Facebook discussion page citing all kinds of ripped-off articles and their original sources. One does NOT fuck with Oprah.
- rbanffy 16y agoWell... There will be a smoking crater where their offices used to be.
- lotharbot 16y agoThe most complete listing of Cooks Source plagiarism I've seen so far, including stolen images and at least seven specific Food Network recipes: http://www.edrants.com/the-cooks-source-scandal-how-a-magazine-profits-on-theft/ http://www.edrants.com/the-cooks-source-scandal-how-a-magazi... One source at Food Network stated their legal department is looking into it.
- zavulon 16y agoLooks like their website is already down http://www.cookssource.com/ http://www.cookssource.com/ And angry comments keep on being posted on their Facebook page, although the ironic thing is I think you have to click "Like" to be able to comment ...
- duck 16y agoAnd the Washington Post picks this story up - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks_source_masters_new_recip.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks...
- fleitz 16y agoShe should find a lawyer, if it appeared in the print magazine, you're looking at $30,000 times the number of copies of the magazine.
- dcbell 16y agoFun fact---I discovered "Open Source Cook" on facebook while I searched for Cooks Source. I was thinking today that there MUST be an open-source set of recipes or something similar out there. Silver lining to the cloud.