As pointed out last night, the new player in this little town we call the internet is Bitacle.
Bitacle is aggregating content and serving it with advertising. The problem is… they aren’t asking anyone if the content is allowed to be served for a commercial purpose.
How does this differ from YouTube, Kazaa, Limewire…etc?
In those cases, people are simply taking owned content and using it. There isn’t any advertising. Now… if youtube starts generating huge amounts of income… that will change the playing field.
Effectively, what Bitacle is doing is going into a movie theatre, filming the movie in perfect digital quality, and then selling the copy. They go even further by stating that they hold the copyright on the material.
Copyright is one of these ‘implied’ things. You do have it, but it does help to state it. If you are reading this on a self styled ‘friends’ page you will see the content in your self styled format. On the other hand, if you’re viewing it on my journal, or on the specific page for the post (as in via clicking thru a cut), at the right on the page you see a wealth of ‘Net Badges”. The third one states the copyright of the content. A click thru states… this content may be used, but not for commercial purposes without contacting the author.
Copyright is also very clear in one fact. It is the responsibility of the user of the content to assure that they have properly checked what the status of the work is. It is also the responsibility of the owner to take action if they feel their copyright has been violated.
Translation:
1) I didn’t know I couldn’t see this work isn’t an excuse
2) If you don’t tag them for this… then you have nothing to complain about.
So… within 24 hours of discovering this, verifying it, and analyzing if they were in violation of my copyright… I have written Bitacle an email.
It is simple and to the point. I strongly suggest anyone who has had content taken by Bitacle read this: