The Daily Mail Stole My Visualization Twice
flowingdata.com
flowingdata.com
The Daily Mail truly doesn't give a shit. About quality, about copyright, about decency. It seems to be working for them.
The Daily Mail is SHIT. The majority of people LOVE to read about shit.
It's not my thing, so I don't read it.
That's what free market means.
they still need to adhere to the rules of society (no stealing etc)
also, publication of stories in a newspaper has implication wider than the readership of that newspaper
and besides, any free market also needs rules in order to function properly
Keynsian economics does not equate to "good and right" - it equates to Keynsian economics - and nepotism. So much nepotism.
Bearing in mind most newspapers' circulation is crashing and Buzzfeed got very big very quickly peddling similarly lowbrow content, I'm not even convinced the market power of print media is that high.
Keynes gov't economic stimulus is created by the gov't, and people with good connections to the gov't are the recipients of this stimulus, causing nepotism to flourish. The stimulus is not distributed evenly to the economy and thus increases economic inequality.
The entire bank bailout & QE seems like a similar situation in the USA. Who got all the QE cash? The banks, not everyone.
We still have an aristocracy, or plutarchy, in fact. I come from deep within the belly of the beast and know the people who know the people and you would not believe how bent it all is. Everuthing happens behind closed doors, we just see the punch and judy show after the event.
And you know what? It's fine. If we don't like some things and don't see them right, doesn't mean that everyone else should. Some people like tabloids and that's alright.
We can't force people to like The Right Thing.
The world doesn't run in binary variables.
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.
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."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/kitten-block/...
Is something like this enforceable?
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.
Otherwise, you can always send them to collections for non-payment and/or hire a lawyer.
One of the things money seems to buy, which makes wealthy people/entities able to tackle problems that must of us realistically can't, is time.
I believe that in the end, the so-called rat-race is just a race to be free to have time, to do whatever you like to. Sure, some chains you will never be free of, but if you can shed enough chains off of you, you will have enough time to do other, more meaningful stuff, like defending your rights/intellectual property/privacy, etc.
In this case at least, it seems like the author finds it very hard to pursue this path, because in the end, what's in there for him? Maaaaaybe some money, after a long a emotionally tiring fight. On the other hand, you will lose time and money and potentially your health (since I don't see this route being stress-free).
In the end, like for most things, it ends up being a kind of personal-ROI thing. The return he sees is probably to low to be worth going after it, and the investment and risk too high.
And that's unfortunate, because in the end the abusive guys with money and time end up winning most battles :(
Someone would have to invest the time to create some structure to help the victims find each other but it should cost little to no money.
A lawyer might even find it lucrative to do this? It's like the advertisements I see asking if I've ever taken some drug or something if so I can join a class action law suit.
Finding each other is cheap, structuring such a case isn't.
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.
The complication with web sites is that there is inevitably some level of implied consent: if you put a site up and someone visits it normally, they are technically making various copies of your work along the way, without necessarily having any explicit permission from the rightsholder to do so. This is where lawyers argue technicalities about everything from hot-linking to uploading or downloading the latest Hollywood movie.
Sadly, the past few years have seen lawyers argue the minutiae of EU directives and national IP laws to the extent that any original intention or moral or economic justification for copyright has long been forgotten. Basically, this has become exactly the kind of area that gets lawyers and legal systems a bad reputation, where sometimes quite significant amounts of power are being assigned based on obscure technicalities in how laws at different levels of government have been drafted.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
What passes for journalism these days is just edits of media releases.
Sad state of affairs.
If you copied their entire site, used their name, and removed their ads I'm sure they'd get lawyers involved.
It's a fun idea though - seo bomb them until their bottom line aches.
That should allow use of slightly changed (LessAdsDailyMail) trademarks, and proper citations could handle the rest.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110826155454/http://samplingla...
I know people who have had other things like photos from flickr stolen by them.
They are disgraceful!
This is relevant because the kind of person who wants to work for a paper that espouses such views is very unlikely to care about your human, never mind intellectual property, rights.
They were also the first paper to publicly accuse the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.
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.
Here's a nice clickjacking cheat sheet I found after searching for more info:
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_S...
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?
Take a look at that last one; fans of space simulators will recognize it.
Seriously, they are garbage journalists. Editorial oversight and quality control is, at best, a hobby for that publication.
Where are the editors? Can't they even screen the things they steal at least?
But still... I mean, if I'm going to steal a diamond, I would make sure it's the real deal, instead of some Snatch's moissanite...
I highly doubt he'd complain if they just linked to his content. This is pretty straightforward copyright infringement.
Regardless of whether you find their behaviour acceptable, those are two very, very different things.
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!
1: http://thompsonhall.com/does-a-copyright-have-to-be-register...
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."
The article states that the Daily Mail scraped the files and uploaded them separately, to avoid his iframe detecting JS.
And "just monetize it" feels like a... simplistic approach. Even if the Daily Mail did a normal iframe embed, how would the author monetize, exactly?
However, he's had issues with multiple sites iframing his content against his will, not just Daily Mail. DM just went the extra mile to straight-up rehost the content, which crosses a line that directing a user's browser to mash up content from multiple servers isn't generally considered to cross (and can be controlled by content providers via use of existing cross-domain headers).
Send them an invoice for using his material, with an additional fee for not getting permission in advance.
Then take it to small claims if DM doesn't pay.
The DM gets sued regularly, so it's not as if they're invincible.
It wouldn't be more than an inconvenience to them, but some people deserve to get rude gestures when they come 'round to mooch.
Technically, no, you can't with current protocols. However, this has been regarded as bad manners ("hot linking", "bandwidth theft", etc.) since forever.
Taking steps to protect against or take advantage of traffic spikes is the responsibility of a content provider.
The trouble is, with the increasing concentration of attention on the web in the hands of a few high profile traffic aggregators and social networking sites, this kind of argument holds less credibility than it used to. It's all very well saying if you put something on-line then you're responsible for supporting it, but the reality is that someone else suddenly diverting large amounts of traffic to your site is statistically indistinguishable from a denial of service attack.
If it's qualified traffic and being directed to somewhere you welcome the extra visitors, you might appreciate it. If it's unqualified traffic and overloading your servers at your and/or your normal visitors' expense, you probably won't appreciate it. If it's not even being directed to your normal site but instead deliberately freeloading on your servers and bandwidth via hot-linking, I think you're at least well into a grey area in terms of both ethics and legality.
People make HTTP requests for all kinds of reasons. If you don't have someone managing your hosting, the responsibility defaults to you. That's one of the reasons there's an ecosystem of cloud providers now to shoulder the burden of this implementation detail that people don't want to know just to make content available online.
But the core point stands: It's the Internet. You can't trust the clients to behave; assume the worst of user input. Calling out Daily Mail as terrible (which they are, and which people should do at every opportunity ;) ) doesn't solve the root problem that nothing about the protocols restricts using <iframe> to pull in cross-domain content.
I think it is extremely dangerous to argue that anyone who wants to publish safely on the Internet should be required to do so via some huge cloud provider. We shouldn't conflate what is technically possible because our old protocols give too much trust with what we consider ethical or legal.
You can't trust the clients to behave; assume the worst of user input.
By the same argument, spammers and those PPI cold callers are OK, because we agreed to have e-mail accounts and phones. In reality, bad actors like this screw up the system for everyone, and dealing with people who screw things up for other people is why we have laws. Treating negligence or particularly actively hostile action as the victim's fault is usually a very bad idea.
It's basically his "poop" solution except properly done, and scales to all of his content instead of having to be a one-off.
If you want to actually make a difference, talk to your solicitor. You might even get some money out of it.
I, for one, didn't know about any of this. So that's at least 1 more person aware of this practice because OP chose to write about it.
I imagine I'm not the only one.