No, I am not going to rant about the mouth-breathing morons that think so, I am aiming higher this time. I am looking at you Univision.
This is the second FUCKING time that I have to complain about our content being reproduced in your forums. As a matter of FUCKING fact every page of your Dominican Cooking forum contains some of our recipes. Last time I had to contact the FUCKING legal department to get some action. That got you fuckers moving FUCKING fast, eh!
We are back again on the same horse. This is how it works you fuckers, FUCKING moderate your FUCKING forums. If recipe after recipe, posters by different FUCKING posters look the FUCKING same, chances are they are coming from the same source. It is just FUCKING easier to hide behind lawyer words than instruction your FUCKING mods to keep an eye on copyright violations. Your company is a FUCKING media conglomerate, for fuck’s sake. Respect for copyright is OK as long as they are your FUCKING rights.
We run a small joint, yet we managed to produce hundreds of pages of quality, original content. We FUCKING monitor our forums for suspicious content, check on FUCKING Google and warn posters if we find them copying content to our site. Check the four pictures on our front page: two are original, taken by yours trully, one I bought, the other is license-free and Ok to use if you own a microsoft office license (which I FUCKING do). Each and every piece of our site is either original or used with permission. How comes I can FUCKING do that but you FUCKING big conglomerate can’t?
Unfortunately for you Mange, I have patented the use of the business method by which one extracts payment by stating that one’s “legal team will be in touch shortly”. Cease and desist or face the consequences.
I represent the cartoon villains with the long, twirly mustaches who tie helpless maidens to railroad tracks in order to lure the hero into a trap. We have that phrase patented. Expect a cease and desist letter shortly.
I have a beathing certificate right here, which contains a state seal and is signed by government officials. Your beef is with the state of Maryland. But you could probably sue the state to get your beef back.
I am not claiming I own the recipes, these are traditional recipes after all. I am sure though that they cannot copy them verbatim from my site. Need examples?
Have you read the US Copyright office link? Some of us take the issue of copyright very seriously, and false claims of copyright are just as bad as piracy IMO. From what I can see from the examples you posted which I clicked on, there is no “substantial literary expression” as I understand qualifies for protection.
Why are you sure “that they cannot copy them verbatim” from your site? What is your legal basis for making threats to them? Have you retained a lawyer or are you coming up with your legal basis on your own?
And no, I am not “having fun”. It may seem like it sucks when people copy things from your site, but you know, that’s the way it is. People who have scans of public domain 2-D works feel like they “own” their copy and put all sorts of legal mumbo-jumbo on their websites - but they have no real legal claim either. That’s just the way it is, and that doesn’t mean that your site is not a good and valuable site, and it is not a reflection on you or your abilities.
FTR, this can be a very slippery slope here if you want to get technical about it. For example, have you independently verified the copyright of every single recipe on your site? People may claim they are “traditional” recipes - are your sure they didn’t copy them verbatim from a cookbook? And I’m not talking just Googling - perhaps 99% of all cookbooks published under copyright are probably not on Google. Do your members provide an affadvit that they are the sole creator and copyright holder of their recipes? Maybe they got them from a book in their family owned by someone else, who retains the copyright? Copying something which is copyrighted from someone “in the family” without express permission from the copyright holder could be construed as a violation as well. If it’s a “traditional recipe”, what was the first publication date? Was the copyright renewed? This could go on and on…
I’m not trying to come down hard on you, but I’m saying you might want to take a step back and think about the facts of the situation for a little bit.
I wrote all these recipes Una. And as I said, the last time they had sufficient concerns that the head of their legal department contacted me and assured they would be removed inmediately.
