Topic: Big Red Scary Box!!! (re: Copyright issues)

[punch]

Holy crap.
Guys, I will not have access to a real computer until Tuesday (iphone).
If that is too late, I can go to a kinkos.
(there is also this little thing about Southern Decadance)

Let me know.
I bet I have posted 1000 articles over the years

[Sherman Cahal]

Wow, the support we've gotten from this is amazing. Thank you everyone for the work you are doing to help us out!

[Rusty Shackleford]

Uhm... I will shortly review my own stuff.

Just a reality check: has anyone on the "management team" here attempted to make contact with this attorney in order to find out if this consortium of newspapers has a list of URLs of the most "offensive" posts? Asking users to help is alright, but the complaint should have specificity and you should indicate that fair use doctrine, as you understand it, applies to abstracted articles.

Also you might want to give some thought to amending your copyright language, if indeed it says something like a blanket "Copyright Urbanohio.com". You need to specify that all content authored by outside parties is their copyright. (Just as products will specify that trademarks referenced in their documentation will be indicated as "trademark Bla Bla Co.")

I believe it would be to your advantage to acknowledge the complaint and to attempt to buy some time and to get a list of specific complaints so that these attorneys don't force you to take a meataxe to the forum.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Ok, as a specific example.

Is this OK? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19732.msg411811.html#msg411811

How about this? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,14880.msg417412.html#msg417412

[andrew0816]

I just went through all my posts and I am pretty sure that I got everything.

[unusualfire]

Ok, as a specific example.

Is this OK? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19732.msg411811.html#msg411811

How about this? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,14880.msg417412.html#msg417412

That second one. They don't want any images out there. So you must delete that. I'm sure it's Gannett news that's bring this to our attention. They own 100's of newspapers.

[cardsnxtyr]

FROM: The editors of Ohio’s eight largest newspapers


             Sincerely,

 Akron Beacon Journal
 The Repository
 The Enquirer
 The Plain Dealer
 The Columbus Dispatch
 Dayton Daily News
 The Vindicator

I assume the Blade is involved, but I thought that was amusing.

What is the 8th newspaper?

[buckeye1]

OK I'm done, except for articles in locked threads that cannot be edited (e.g. 2008 Presidential Thread).  This sucked.  However, I'm willing to help the mods edit other threads if needed.

[C-Dawg]

This will indeed take some time for all of us, but this was of course inevitable. The news business is struggling for survival, and let's face it, if articles are posted in full, they do indeed lose hits on the newspaper websites. With just quotes, headlines, and summaries, people have to go to their websites for the full story. That may actually help their business.

I guess look at the bright side- enough people are now visiting our forum to make it a threat.

[C-Dawg]

FROM: The editors of Ohio’s eight largest newspapers


             Sincerely,

 Akron Beacon Journal
 The Repository
 The Enquirer
 The Plain Dealer
 The Columbus Dispatch
 Dayton Daily News
 The Vindicator

I assume the Blade is involved, but I thought that was amusing.

What is the 8th newspaper?

I'd assume the Blade of course.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I second or third the idea of sandboxing any questionable content in an area that requires login in order to be visible.

[KJP]

I just cleaned all 157 pages of the Cleveland RTA thread. That took more than five hours.

Wow, you must be beat!!

Yes, I was. And now I'm even more tired having spent another 3.5 hours tending to 50 of the 443 PAGES of posts I've made. I haven't even made it back to articles from 2008 yet. At this rate it will take me 25-30 hours to go through all of my posts!

I may just delete the articles in the oldest half of my posts which go back to the forum's first year (2004).

[cd-cleveland]

I'm finished with mine.  Had a few questions/comments, though:

1)  I didn't have links for some of my posts.  Should I go back and totally delete the headline/author/source/summary?

2)  Two or three of my posts weren't editable.  I think that they were in development-related threads.

[Sherman Cahal]

^
1. Nah, just leave up the headline, author, source and summary. It can be searchable in an online news database (e.g. America's Newspapers).
2. Just flag them for a moderator.

[BBiebigheiser]

I noticed a lot of reposted articles from the Dayton Daily News and other papers in the

Restaurants & Entertainment Forums in the posts about "Closings & Relocations"

[JoeL]

Haha ... I was wondering when this would happen.

Urban Ohio (and by extension the Ohio newspapers) was definitely behind the times in allowing people to post entire articles. Most forums I've visited haven't allowed that kind of thing in years. The "big red scary box" is pretty much standard policy for most forums these days.

This really kind of highlights how unbelievably slow the newspapers are to modernize. It's late 2009, and they finally realized that sites like urbanohio shouldn't be allowed to post entire articles. (and it's not like they didn't know about urbanohio, as many of their writers have clearly lurked here for years to find out popular discussion topics for stories)

[KJP]

Yes, we can't post their articles from freely accessible sites but their reporters can use our site for source information. Something's not right about that.

[EagleFan]

Where is MTS?  How many times has he posted asking someone who only posted a link to post the whole story?

[mrnyc]

just a suggestion, but wouldn't it be easier to just file uo as a non-profit rather than go back thru all the threads? i think you can still be a non-profit if the ad money just covers operating expenses. not sure tho or if you guys had ever considered that at any point? also, i wouldnt worry about any lawyer's arbitrary time frames, because in brief legally good faith and going forward is the same thing for this (yes, i asked a lawyer friend informally about this today and yes he suggested becoming an "educational nonprofit website" as a workaround).

regardless, i'll try to go back into my own blah blah blah and change the postings and links. sigh, the internets has all grown up and now it needs to be done.

[Civvik]

This is understandable, but from now on ALL content provided by Urban Ohio members including pictures, needs to be STRICTLY protected. There has been repeated use of original material by the media, without permission.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I believe that some solution other than asking all contributors to edit their articles will be necessary. I took a look around just now and the problem here is just enormous. The only fallback to this is mass deletion.

Particularly in the sections under the category "Projects And Transportation", there is a huge abundance of threads that consist primarily of cut and pastes of news articles with very little attribution. No other section relies so heavily on pasted news. And I saw pretty flagrant repeated "violations."

My advice - I run a message board that has had major issues with hatred, flamage and aggrieved outside parties:

- For the time being, take ALL of certain categories, like the one I mentioned above, private. Private to logged in users, or to users on request, I mean. I assume that SMF has the controls available to make some sections only available to logged in users, and also to further restrict access to a defined list of users. This would make the content in dispute inaccessible to search engines and to outside parties.

- Once again, as I said earlier, you probably need a more comprehensive copyright notice, one that acknowledges ownership of other party's content. This may be part of the core issue - that some users who were sloppy about cutting and pasting news articles are doing so on a board that claims global copyright. I personally believe that copyright should lay with the original author of each posting or article, not granted implicitly to UO with no compensation. As far as I am concerned, I own everything I write, even posted here, period. But I am happy to share it here. There may be "Creative Commons" language and insignias that you could use for this.

- I really like the idea of a non-profit if it removes the legal threats. A Paypal fund could be set up to finance the work. I'd chuck in a fiver. Once a non profit corporation is rolling, it should not take much to maintain it.

[KJP]

I've gone through all 13,000 of my postings, or 443 PAGES worth, of my postings and cleaned up or deleted those which included copyrighted articles.

That took me three days.

[unusualfire]

^ That's alot but what about members that has not logged on for months and sometimes a year or more? How can anyone search to see if they have posted such stuff in the past.

[Loretto]

^ That's alot but what about members that has not logged on for months and sometimes a year or more? How can anyone search to see if they have posted such stuff in the past.

Go to the persons profile, click on  "show latest posts" and then you can click Notify (or Report to moderator if you see it in a thread you're actually reading) on any that violate the "Big Red Scary Box" rules.  Same thing if you want to check your own except you would use Modify or Edit.

[Rob Jaques]

Finished cleaning up my posts, and also tagged some that I was unable to modify.

[jmecklenborg]

I got one of these letters in 2004 for my website, so I wonder why it took 5 years for this to show up here.  I didn't change anything on my site and they never followed through with their threats. 

[CornerCurve]

Mine's done -  either all edited or flagged.

One thought: What's the rationale behind the time frame the lawyers provided? They issued the letter on Friday and have set their deadline for the following Tuesday, which happens to fall over Labor Day weekend, where people are presumably away from their computers more than usual. Are they trying to hem UO in to their arbitrary deadline and get to appear magnanimous if they grant an extension? Are they just looking for a good faith beginning to correcting the problem in this shortened time frame? Or (and I'm guessing most likely) they just want to compress the process to freak people out and show them their place.

I get the copyright issues at hand, but four days to correct things over a holiday? That's disingenuous to the goal of protecting content.   

[JoeL]

It's just establishing a timeline before a second letter (in which they would probably explicitly threaten a lawsuit). Nothing more.

It's far more interesting that they are just now attempting to enforce their copyright, despite years and year of their content being posted on this website. Again, it's a nice illustration of how poorly the newspapers are running their business.

[KJP]

I'll tell you this: I am never going to post by name or weblink an article or fragment from an Ohio newspaper again. From now on, I am simply going to say, there was "an article in a newspaper recently that said" and then paraphrase the relevant portion. I am not going to give these pathetic publications any credit for anything.

After going through many threads and many posts, I have discovered something: what do we need newspapers for anymore? There are many people posting who are in positions of knowledge of the subjects they are posting about. So we are getting news directly from the people who are making the news, or are close to the newsmakers.

That hurt for me to say because I'm a former staff writer for Sun Newspapers, and I still freelance for them. Also I like a lot of the reporters in Cleveland, including at the PD. But I do not like what has happened to the management and ownership of major media. They are closed-minded dinosaurs who have lost the meaning of pursuit of truth through journalism by getting lost in misguided efforts to be "fair and balanced" and end up quoting "the opposing viewpoint" even if that person has no expertise.

I think this forum does a much better job in pursuing truth.

[Living in Gin]

^ Agreed... The mainstream media in general (not just newspapers, sadly) has given up any pretense of doing real journalism, and now just presents he-said/she-said false equivalencies as if that's news. If 20 people were in a room and 19 of those people thought the earth is round and one person vehemently insisted the earth is flat, most mainstream news outlets wouldn't bother to do any real investigation on their part, and they'd pretend that both viewpoints are equally valid and deserve equal time in the story.

[Boreas]

I will most likely prune(delete) any thread that has not had a reply in the past 2 years.  This should take a quarter of the workload from us having to go through them all.  ...

Please don't delete thread that are idle for long periods.  The "Ferry to Canada" thread has gone without a new post for months.  However, I would hate for it to disappear, because the original content buy UO'ers is priceless. 

I also think that Rusty Shackleford is correct that the "newspapers" need to be more specific about what they are complaining about.  I also think that it is unreasonable that they only give UO a few days to work on this.  I was in Michigan from mid-August until last night at midnight.

A nod to KJP.  Newspapers really have failed in their role as key information providers in our democracy.  Reformers in Iran covered the election with just "blogs and cell phone cameras".

Hopefully, the mods can just "lock out" nonusers for a while: it will look like the site removed the "copyrighted material".  This will buy UO some time.

[DanB]

Hopefully, the mods can just "lock out" nonusers for a while: it will look like the site removed the "copyrighted material".  This will buy UO some time.

Are you that naive to think they don't have someone registered who monitors this site?

[Rusty Shackleford]

Are you that naive to think they don't have someone registered who monitors this site?

OK, at that level you log accesses. Registered user XYZ is continually hitting a certain range of articles. Should be easy to detect and lock out.

At the level of activity that you are suggesting, this would look like someone spidering the site, and many sites define that as a violation of usage terms.

[Oldmanladyluck]

I'll tell you this: I am never going to post by name or weblink an article or fragment from an Ohio newspaper again. From now on, I am simply going to say, there was "an article in a newspaper recently that said" and then paraphrase the relevant portion. I am not going to give these pathetic publications any credit for anything.

After going through many threads and many posts, I have discovered something: what do we need newspapers for anymore? There are many people posting who are in positions of knowledge of the subjects they are posting about. So we are getting news directly from the people who are making the news, or are close to the newsmakers.

That hurt for me to say because I'm a former staff writer for Sun Newspapers, and I still freelance for them. Also I like a lot of the reporters in Cleveland, including at the PD. But I do not like what has happened to the management and ownership of major media. They are closed-minded dinosaurs who have lost the meaning of pursuit of truth through journalism by getting lost in misguided efforts to be "fair and balanced" and end up quoting "the opposing viewpoint" even if that person has no expertise.

I think this forum does a much better job in pursuing truth.

Well said.  As I don't support the PD any longer (and haven't for years), it's no problem for me to NOT post any more of their bush!t articles.  We learn so much from each other through discussion than we will ever learn from reading a biased news article.

[C-Dawg]

Hopefully, the mods can just "lock out" nonusers for a while: it will look like the site removed the "copyrighted material".  This will buy UO some time.

Are you that naive to think they don't have someone registered who monitors this site?

Dan's probably right on that one. Chances are they do have registered users.