How much is that doggie on the sofa?

I had great laughs this morning reading through B’s latest Eurotrippen post about the celebrity life of her dog, but it also got me thinking about a German TV show I saw on the weekend, which had an item about photos and copyright.

B’s photos are all her own, so she’s free and clear. But what if B didn’t have a dog? What if she had that twisted little idea in her head, but no dog to illustrate it? She could probably find a few pics of doggies dressed in leather and lace and weave a little story around them, right?

Sure, but she’d be putting herself in serious financial peril, not only for the obvious reason that a lot of photos out there have rights on them, but that there are websites out there dedicated to sucking you in to using their photographs on your blog and then turning right around and suing your sorry ass off.

The TV show profiles a couple who started up a little site dedicated to keeping birds as pets. They went a – googling for a few shots of common vegetables so they could brighten up a page on what to feed them. They clicked on one of the top results and found hundreds of photos on the Voldemort of recipe sites, the link to which I not only absolutely refuse to provide, I won’t even mention its name.

If you fail to look for the page that says they don’t give out the photos for free, and take one of their photos for use on your blog, the site tracks the photo’s new location and immediately fires off a bill to you for around €700 euro – or more than one thousand US dollars – per photo! Our pair of budgie boffins were asked to fork over €8600, and they are just one of hundreds the show says the site has already sued.

Since users are most likely to click on the top lines rather than wade through pages and pages of stuff, the shows says the site uses Google-bombing to game themselves into the top ranks of search results. And with more and more people getting into blogging for the first time without a clue as to its many pitfalls, their supply of fresh meat is almost endless.

The experts on the show say that if you don’t want to go to court and risk paying thousands more should you lose, there’s not much you can do besides negotiate the price down. After all, nearly a thousand euro for a fuzzy thumbnail jpeg is pretty outrageous.

So if you want to be like B, do what she does and use your own dog, your own camera, your own frilly clothes, your own electrician’s tape, and your own sofa. That way, the only mess you’ll have to clean up is a few hairs – provided it’s fully housebroken.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: You can tape the show – schade, nur auf Deutsch – in repeat on Wednesday, February 20 around 2345, or Friday the 22nd at 0920 on HR (Hessischen Rundfunk) or simply watch it on the web via the link provided above when they get around to posting it.

PPS: Please see this excellent post on fair use from The Blog Herald, a blog on blogging.

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What I think about this whole blogging thing

If you’re also a blogger, you’ve probably heard this before:

I am, to be honest, mystified by the whole blog phenomenon. I’m barely interested in the minutiae of my own day, so why on earth would I want to read about someone else’s?

That’s from an old friend with whom I’ve recently re-connected via Facebook. No, not THAT old friend.

Here’s what I wrote back:

I know what you mean. There’s even a book title on blogging that goes to exactly that: No one cares what you had for lunch.

But scrape beyond the surface, spend some time seriously sifting through the vast array of blogs out there, and you’ll come across gems. I liken it to writing a newspaper column or even doing stand-up comedy. You write about what everyone has experienced sometime or another, but put a twist in it that makes the reader say, hmmm, never thought of it that way before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but what keeps you going is the challenge. Or you do a bit of a niche thing, like what it’s like to be a gay expatriate. Or an expatriate who is stateless, rootless, godless and gay. Or a funny Canadian freezing his ass off enjoying winters sports in Norway.

Some blogs are as unusual as the jobs held by the people who write them. If you go to my blogroll, check out Gimcrack Hospital. It’s written by this nurse who works in a hospital for old people who’ve literally fallen off their rocker. She’s a psychiatric geriatric specialist. It’s at times hilarious, at others shocking, brutal, touching, whimsical and flirty. I love it. Ummm, NSFW, especially on Fridays.

Some blog for money, and some have made fortunes, but mostly I yawn at their stuff. I mean, I know they have a following of millions, but icanhascheezburger.com – for the past few months consistently the most popular blog on WordPress – is nothing but a bunch of cat pics with mangled English pasted over. I do not find it funny. But people send the stuff in, they post it, a few laughs are had, and the money rolls in.

There are now so many tens of millions of blogs, it’s starting to resemble life itself. You can choose whom you want to read and communicate with, just as in real life you can choose whom you want to be friends with. Some you will find fascinating, others boring, still others disgusting. I like to think there’s room for all of us.

Sometimes I make the mistake of comparing mine to others and think I should have done the usual and invented something really quirky instead of Letters Home (I dropped the To You a while back) but then again, if I called it something funny and edgy and cool like Little Red Rabbit Turds I would have to live up to it – be funny and edgy and cool all the time.

That’s not only impossible to maintain, it isn’t me. I’m political one day, whacko the next, introspective the third, ranting the fourth, dripping with cynicism the fifth… I prefer it that way because some blogs start to look like the same post over and over after a while. This way, even if it’s at the risk of alienating some readers who prefer one type of writing and not others, I can try to keep fresh myself. Besides, I’m not a kid anymore. If I were, I’d be on (retch) MySpace.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m still having fun doing it, though it can piss you off at times when people steal your content and stick ads up beside it, and sometimes you don’t feel like posting, so I don’t. But I’ve met some real-life people – and not just in Dresden this past autumn – and that’s been fun, too.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: Today marks one year since my first post. Thanks for reading, commenting, clicking on links, checking out the blogroll and the photos way down at the bottom, and for just dropping by. -Ian

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Whom would you miss if bloggers went on strike?

Just saw a long list of TV shows hit by the Hollywood writers’ strike. After nearly three weeks of no new jokes, punch lines, plotlines, storylines or storyboards, production has stopped or forced many to go off the air or in re-run, while the launches of 24 and Cashmere Mafia – whatever the hell that is – have been postponed.

As a union member, I sympathise with strikers hitting the bricks for what they believe in, even train drivers who indirectly put my life in danger.

But as an expatriate Canadian living in Germany, the writers’ strike is a faraway sideshow, playing out in a land I’ve never lived in and wouldn’t like to. The only shows I watch out of the whole list are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – because it comes on CNN and we have that on cable – and The Colbert Report, because I find him hilarious and make an effort to find him on spewtube. The rest? Don’t even recognise them.

But what if bloggers went out on strike? Sound crazy? We’ve got our grievances too, you know! From spammers, sploggers, scrapers and thieves to the petty annoyances of comment trolls, we’ve got every right to lay down our laptops and pick up our picket signs. And just because we have absolutely no hope in hell of ever getting any of our gripes addressed doesn’t mean it should never happen, if only for a week or so.

And if we did, I sure would notice. That’s because I’d miss:

• My nurse, who brings me my daily drip of medical weirdness.
• Bombay Duck, and not only because she’s an old friend from journalism school.
• The oozings of madness pooling from The Leaky Brain.
• The oddball observations of Hermann the German, even though I don’t agree with him half the time, and tell him so.
• Indeterminacy, a blogger who challenges you to write your best.
• The Elle Effect, because I admire raw talent in one so young.
• Charlotte, because she writes so fluently and I learn something new every time I go there.
• The Dilbert Blog.
• Passive-aggressive Notes
• Euro Like Me, whose writing came highly recommended from EuroTrippen.

No particular order, and of course I’ve left out many who should be on the list. But if you head over to EuroTrippen’s write-up of last weekend’s whiney expat meetup in Dresden, you’ll find some more .

Whom would you miss if bloggers went on strike?

© 2007 lettershometoyou

What to do if you’re getting as sick as I am of having your blog copied

1. Get used to it. I still get a little pissed off whenever another case comes up, but a little less each time because it’s becoming so frequent. Latest case: A “travel” blog scraped and copied yesterday’s Dresden bloggers’ weekend post word-for-word.
2. That being said, don’t pass it off as something you can do nothing about, or worse, think it’s some form of flattery. One comment I once received was, “gee, I wish MY stuff were being copied.” If everone had that attitude, blogging would be doomed.
3. Develop a routine so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time. I have a form letter on file ready to fill in and fax off to Google Adsense just in case the thief is dumb enough to use them. Considering its mammoth size, Google has been surprisingly quick and unbureaucratic in getting them to pull my content and their advertisements from offending sites.
4. Go to The Blog Herald and read their post on the Five Content Theft Myths.
5. Or save the following. It’s what Google sent me when I complained the first time this happened.

To expedite our ability to process your request, please use the following format (including section numbers):

1. Identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work that you believe has been infringed upon. For example, “The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on (URL to your post)”

2. Identify the material that you claim is infringing upon the copyrighted work listed in item #1 above. You must identify each page that allegedly contains infringing material by providing its URL. Make sure it is the URL of the thief’s post.

3. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred).

4. Include the following statement: “I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the allegedly infringing webpages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

5. Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

6. Sign the paper.

7. Send the written communication to the following address:

Google, Inc.
Attn: AdSense Support, DMCA complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043

OR Fax to:

(650) 618-8507, Attn: AdSense Support, DMCA complaints

It’s that simple. I admit it’s not the whole solution, because it only covers Adsense, but it’s a start. I haven’t zapped them all, but if I get a few, it’s worth it.

© 2007 lettershometoyou