My last blog post was about the latest company to steal my intellectual property and the serious attitude problem they’ve got about doing anything about it. Just to recap, we’ve got a company in India running a trip to Leh using ConstantContact to run their email campaign (here’s the advert :http://bit.ly/lTp9g2). The Indian company used an image of mine hosted on my website to promote that. I’ve asked both companies several times to remove that and they’ve not done so.

In the case of Constant Contact they’re hiding behind DMCA claiming I need to submit an official DMCA complaint. They rather misunderstand DMCA in particular and the purpose of law in general. When you steal something you don’t actually need the law to tell you it’s wrong. And I couldn’t give two hoots what law the USA may or may not have passed, I don’t live there, I’m not an American and I couldn’t care less.

What I do care about is things like international conventions such as the “The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works” and just a plain sense of what’s right and wrong.

After getting a response from the “Compliance Manager” at Constant Contact telling me, again, to use their DMCA process I sent a reply telling him I wasn’t interested and expected him to act.

Let me make a small digression, if you worked in an office of half a dozen people and you took it in turns to make a cup of tea each day at 11am and took it in turns to buy some tea and milk you’d be reasonably sure of getting a cup of tea every day and you’d be sure that your turn to make the tea would come around pretty often. If your company decided to employ a Tea Lady you can be quite sure you’d not be prepared to make tea for everyone again now there was a full time dedicated tea specialist.

And so it is in companies with “Compliance Officers”, “Quality Managers”, “Customer Care Managers” and all the other modern nonsense job titles used by the non-productive. Once you’ve got a “Compliance Officer” no one else is going to bother with complying to anything and your ”Compliance Officer” isn’t going to much bother about, for example, customer care because that would be someone else’s job.

There’s no doubt that Constant Contact know this is my image, it’s got my watermark on it, my details are in the EXIF data and it’s hosted on my website, you can’t pretend there’s any serious doubt about it.

So, the ”Compliance Officer” at Constant Contact is not bothering to reply to emails confident in the knowledge that he’s “complied” with his broken understanding of the role of law and perfectly able to reconcile that with being entirely aware the law’s actually being broken. He also knows that their customer, the Indian tour company, are no longer running their advertising campaign as I’ve updated the image they’re linking to display something entirely different.

And that’s how modern companies work! You’d not want to be their customer really.

Tags: constant contact | copyright | image reuse

I do actually look at the access logs for my website, not only that but as a former programmer I’ve a whole load of tools I’ve written to look at those logs and spot things like broken links or tell me what’s a popular page. So when someone access the site a lot, and we’ll define “a lot” as being more than Google, or one particular page or image gets a lot of traffic then I do notice.

So, not surprisingly I did notice that one image from the Indian Himalayas was accessed 1692 times (and counting). It turned out that an Indian tour company running a trip to Leh in Ladakh, India was running an email campaign using my image to promote it. Not only using my image in fact but using the version stored on my server so getting me to provide them with bandwidth to do it!

First, I’m all in favour of businesses in the developing world but potential customers of this one might want to think twice about travelling with them. They’re running a trip to Leh which is a great town but it’s a couple of hundred of km from where this photo is actually taken. This photo is taken at a place called Karzok Gömpa in Jammu & Kashmir looking over a lake called Tso Moriri which is around 4000m above sea level and where the Dalai Lama has a summer residence. It’s a beautiful place but it’s nowhere near where these guys are running their trip!

It would be really, really cheeky to reuse this image

It turns out the guys in India aren’t acting alone though. Their promotion for the tour is being run by a company called Constant Contact, Inc. of Waltham MA in the USA. About a week ago I contacted “Constant Contact” with copies to the Indian company asking them to stop using my work. It turns out “Constant Contact” might be better named “Reluctant Contact” as I didn’t hear anything from them for a week.

I tried again using their normal support contact and managed to extract a response. It wasn’t a helpful response, in fact it was pretty outrageous. They sent me a link to their terms and conditions and invited me to register some sort of formal complaint in a form and manner of their choosing.

This makes me see red! I didn’t ask them or their customer to use either my copyright work or use my bandwidth and what I most certainly didn’t do is sign up to follow their process. To misquote Asimov, misquoting Johnson, process is the last refuge of the incompetent. It’s the stock response of people who lack the basic wit to know what the right thing to do is. Moreover, processes are designed by people so entirely witless that they assume their lack of wit is shared by everyone around them. Possibly I’m digressing a little here!

Nevertheless, what I expect with such a blatant theft of image is some pretty immediate action, what I won’t accept is them arguing the toss and I won’t accept being forcibly co-opted into their process and procedure. I’d also point out there’s no legal footing for that either, if someone steals your stuff you’re not obliged to consent to their demands to get it back because that would be a whole other crime. It’s like having your car stolen, finding out the thieves are breaking into your house daily to steal money to run your car around and then having caught them finding you’re supposed to pay them to get your car back or they’ll keep driving it.

It’s a sign of the quality of the Indian company that they’ve not updated their site yet, if you access it instead of seeing the image they expect they’re getting redirected to an image explaining it belongs to someone else and they stole it. You might think they would have noticed. It does particularly grate that this company run trips and promote with them my images, I run trips and tours and the images I use were obtained by lugging a camera around personally. In the case of the Himalayas you do notice the extra weight at 5000m!

Tags: constant contact | copyright | image reuse

If you’re reading this then it’s already old news that I’ve been updating my websites. The snowslider blog is now part of my SwissMountainLeader website and the blog entries from the two sites have been merged. You can find the blog using the blog tab on the main menu of the swissmountainleader.com but all the old links should be working.

The people who subscribe by email will have seen some signs of the site redesign as they received about 12 emails referring to old blog posts as I moved them between sites, sorry about that and it shouldn’t happen in future. The content of those emails will be a little different reflecting the new urls.

If you’re linking to content on either site and want to confirm you’ve got the right links then drop me a note if you want.

Tags: general | snowslider | website