Hello Internet. On Saturday, I received a very aggressive Twitter reply from a Floridian photographer. His name is Jason Wilder and he runs http://www.ishotyourband.com/. After a few hours of back and forth on Twitter, I realized he was just angry about people using his photos and not paying for them. I get that and understand but, a glance at my Flickr page and you’d see that he and I are in nearly the same boat. Our only difference is that Jason doesn’t have an alternative income or at least that’s what he told me. Photography IS his job and he spends a lot of time tracking down guys who steal his work. Yeah, that sucks.
The exchange he and I had was over a blog post that I have on my website where I have stolen his work. I didn’t believe him. I have spent a lot of time helping photographers with stolen works. I send my friends like Thomas Hawk, Scott Beale and Merkley emails quite often tipping them off that someone out there is using one of their photos without attribution. Most of my friends utilize Creative Commons and merely ask that they are given proper credit as the photographer and that no one sells a derivative of their work.
Jason and I had a back and forth via Twitter that lasted an hour. You can review the conversation we had in these screenshots. Nothing too juicy here but I did feel his pain and frustration with stolen work. You can read these bottom to top.
It’s Tuesday and I finally received that DMCA notice from my web host sent to them by Jason. Here it is:
We have received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) complaint involving domains under your control. Please note that Hostgator has only passed on the sufficiency of the Claimant’s notice, per 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512, and has not sought to determine whether the Infringing Materials on the Web Site do indeed infringe upon the Claimant’s intellectual property rights.
Within a forty-eight (48) hour period, we will need you to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or we will have to disable this material to be in compliance with federal DMCA laws. A copy of the original DMCA notice is listed below our contact information.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, your rights as a Respondent to this complaint include, but are not limited to, a possible counter-notification to us, per 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(g)(3). We encourage you to review the federal statutory procedures for filing a counter-notification and seeking legal advice to see if taking such an action would be appropriate. We cannot provide individual legal advice, and do not analyze your particular website or activity for the legality of its content.
You may send a counter-notification using postal mail or fax; email is not accepted.
Our postal address is:
HostGator LLC
Attn: DMCA/Legal
11251 Northwest Freeway, Suite 400
Houston, TX 77079Our Fax is: (281) 476-7801
DMCA NOTICE:
Stolen Photos:
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/2011/04/16/more-frustrations- with-event-photography/
(user is hotlinking my photo for profit)
Please disable this page ASAPLink to where it was stolen from:
http://www.ishotyourband.com
I’d like to bring attention to the last eight lines of this DMCA notice filed by Jason Wilder. and dissect them:
“(user is hotlinking my photo for profit)” I found a few places that discuss hotlinking in relation to copyright and the DMCA. This WordPress Support thread did a good job of breaking things down but I must keep in mind that these aren’t lawyers. The thing is, I’m not hotlinking to Jason’s site (ishotyourband.com).I’m linking to a property owned by Photobucket. Here’s the HTML for the blog post referenced in the DMCA takedown request:
<img title=”http://i51.twitgoo.com/2s0xxrr.jpg” src=”http://i51.twitgoo.com/2s0xxrr.jpg” alt=”” width=”401″ height=”602″ />
Twitgoo is a property that Jason doesn’t own. Shouldn’t they be the ones that are receiving this request? When they do take it down at his request, that blog post I posted should have an image that looks something like this:
Now, I’m not in violation of any copyrights held by the artist. Actually, Jason making that request to Photobucket / Twitgoo would take care of quite a bit of copyright issues for him. I did some digging and here are a few places using Jason’s iPad image and I’m sure that they all didn’t ask permission before displaying the image:
- https://www.facebook.com/Concertpics.net/posts/108674369217622
- https://www.facebook.com/MikeSullivanPhotography/posts/185945168119066
- http://www.dreamtheaterforums.org/boards/index.php?topic=26636.msg1011660#msg1011660
- http://populnks.com/music/If_you_do_this_at_a_concert_I_m_going_to_kick_you_in_the_nuts_/11108228
- http://coachella.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-3158-p-3.html
- http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/iggft/if_you_do_this_at_a_concert_im_going_to_kick_you/
There are probably many more sources but this was my research in simply Googling for the filename, “2s0xxrr.jpg” Moving on:
Jason also claims that I have made a profit or intend on making a profit in my hotlinking of this image. This is also not true. There is no trace of a single advertisement on Adam-Jackson.net. The mention of “for profit” is completely false. I’ve never made a single dime on this website. So, this is a false claim. Continued in the Takedown Notice:
“Link to where it was stolen from: http://www.ishotyourband.com” I looked for the image on his website using the search tool and by going to the month of April looking for the image. I don’t see it. Jason needs to prove to me that I stole it from his website. The image was also not posted to his Flickr account (Photos taken by Jason in April 2011). Here is the gallery on his website of the event where the iPad Photo took place but, in this gallery, that referenced photo is nowhere to be found. I’ve spent hours going through his galleries and have seen nothing. I found this image via a Google Search and copied the photobucket URL and blogged it. That, I admit to but I did not steal it from his domain.
———–
There is another twist. It turns out that the person who uploaded the photo to Twitgoo / Photobuck is Jason Wilder himself. Here is the photo on Twitgoo uploaded by @ishotyourband and it has been viewed 10,021 times. Here is the tweet composed by Jason and the record of how many favorites and retweets it received on FavStar.FM. Furthermore, Jason posted it to a thread on Flickr under the Concert Photography Group and, once again linked to the photo that was uploaded to Twitgoo and not to his own web server. If you right-click on the image in that thread and view the URL, it’s the Twitgoo image and not any image hosted on his site, ishotyourband.com. Additionally, that Reddit thread I linked to above that links to the Twitgoo image has been recognized and responded to by Jason Wilder himself. He thanks everyone for the comments and upvotes of the image. He never once had a complaint about Reddit not attributing him, asking permission to use the image or asking people to go to his website instead of the Twitgoo page. My blog post where I poke fun of the subject matter which is a man recording a concert with an iPad is no different than the topic of the Reddit thread yet the thread is still there and hasn’t been subject of a DMCA takedown notice.
Jason seems pretty bent out of shape over this but where are the DMCA notices directed toward him? I feel like, if my blog is being targeted, why isn’t he for linking to IMGUR links on his Twitter pages. I’m not sure if the artists that took these photos appreciate him linking to images without attributing the author or asking their permission to link to them.
The photographer may now argue that I don’t understand The DMCA or Takedown Notices. Maybe that’s true. Internet, what do you think? Should I fight this or just take down the image? Even if I do take it down, I’m being mailed an invoice for $200 for using his image. I don’t think that’s too much money but, considering I never profited from it and it was a blog post viewed only 25 times, I feel like I shouldn’t pay the money.
It’s not that I don’t think Jason Wilder is a talented photographer, I just believe the effort he’s putting into this is ludicrous. An image viewed 10,000+ times that has been posted all over the world (sometimes by Jason himself using the same Twitgoo link) ended up on my blog where I’m not hosting the link but simply linking to the same source as the photographer and I get about 25 hits of that page and now I’m being asked to remove it and pay him $200.
I disagree. What do you think?
—————————-
[UPDATED]
Now, I’ve received an additional DMCA notice from Jason to remove screenshots I took of his Twitter account via my computer. Here is the just received email from my web host.
We have received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) complaint involving domains under your control. Please note that Hostgator has only passed on the sufficiency of the Claimant’s notice, per 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512, and has not sought to determine whether the Infringing Materials on the Web Site do indeed infringe upon the Claimant’s intellectual property rights.
Within a forty-eight (48) hour period, we will need you to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or we will have to disable this material to be in compliance with federal DMCA laws. A copy of the original DMCA notice is listed below our contact information.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, your rights as a Respondent to this complaint include, but are not limited to, a possible counter-notification to us, per 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(g)(3). We encourage you to review the federal statutory procedures for filing a counter-notification and seeking legal advice to see if taking such an action would be appropriate. We cannot provide individual legal advice, and do not analyze your particular website or activity for the legality of its content.
You may send a counter-notification using postal mail or fax; email is not accepted.
Our postal address is:
HostGator LLC
Attn: DMCA/Legal
11251 Northwest Freeway, Suite 400
Houston, TX 77079Our Fax is: (281) 476-7801
DMCA NOTICE:
Stolen Photos: (my copyrighted logo, and text from twitter)
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-Shot-2011-09-04-at-9.59.06-AM11.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-Shot-2011-09-04-at-9.59.14-AM11.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-Shot-2011-09-04-at-9.59.21-AM11.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-Shot-2011-09-04-at-9.59.28-AM11.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-Shot-2011-09-04-at-9.59.34-AM11.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/?attachment_id=3057
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/?attachment_id=3058
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/124699-96201190843pm1-300×125.png
http://adam-jackson.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/875679-96201191218pm11.pngLink to where it was stolen from:
http://www.ishotyourband.com
http://www.twitter.com/ishotyourbandThey do not have any permission to use any of my photos. Please remove it
from the server.I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials
described above on the infringing web pages is not authorized by my
registered copyright and by the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury,
that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the
copyright owner of an exclusive right that is infringed.
Thanks to my friends and followers who have helped me with this inquiry. A few dozen of you have helped out in a big way. I have a meeting with a lawyer to discuss this and see what the next steps are.