I suggest that you play it 98% straight with a 2% bluff thrown in for effect, Christopher. Contact the board, and tell them that that your “friend” gave them the lyrics without your authorization. Remind them that it is illegal for them to post copyrighted material without the permission of the author, and you are hereby asking that they remove the material immediately before you are forced to take further action. I suspect that any responsible website would remove the lyrics immediately without questioning you further.
FWIW, I run The CJ2A Page. I invite people to send their photos and stories about their CJ2As; but I have it posted in two places that by sending them to me, they are giving me permission to use them. One guy sent some photos that he didn’t take. I asked him if he could get the guy who took the photos to send me permission to use them. He said the guy’s reaction was, “He’s kidding, right?” I assume the photographer thought it was funny that I would ask for permission to use them. But I didn’t get “the words”. That is, I didn’t get anything from the photographer saying, “Yes, you may use my photos.” (BTW, he wasn’t a professional photographer; just someone who took some photos.) No permission, no photos. (Or stories.)
How about e-mailing a friendly mod or administrator and asking for their advice ? They may have some good tips for dealing with the situation, by figuring out what they themselves would do.
Not all message boards are so friendly. I have a problem with people linking to my images directly on message boards. Usually, but not always, a mod will remove it. Occassionally I post on the board myself and ask them not to repeat the behaviour in the future. A few times the posters have been quite hostile. What they fail to understand is that not only do I go to a great amount of work to create these images, but bandwidth costs money, and by linking to an image on a heavily traffiked board, a BIG chunk of bandwidth is used.
I have been considering creating some kind of invoice to send to people who repeatedly link to my images, to pay for the bandwidth. It is not free.
Also, for the Lycos network, having my name handwritten at the bottom of the image /before/ scanning, as well as it being located on my server, is not enough to establish I own the image.
I haven’t had any experience with people copying my writing, though people like to steal my .sigs.
So, he posted your song but said he didn’t write the song? That would be alright with me --but I don’t know if I would want my name posted on the net without my permission to go along with the song but as long as they didn’t claim they wrote it…
What country are you in? Did you check the Fair Use act part of the Copyright law to see if it was used properly? I see lyrics posted on the net a lot. Well, at least deaf people can know your song.
