legal rights

AboutUs.org Continues Their Annoyance

I say annoyance in the subject line. It’s always been more than an annoyance. When someone violates my legally copyrighted content, I don’t consider it anything less than just that: a violation of copyright.

I ended up emailing Ray at his email address ray@aboutus.org over this. The email is below.

While at this point I haven’t felt the need to file a lawsuit against AboutUs.org, I’m going to speak out about it as much as I can. Recently, I discovered that www.pylonhosting.com, a hosting company I at one point maintained (and still own) had made it on to Aboutus.org. When AdamReyher.com made it on there, there was a good amount of content scraped from the front page and copied onto the AboutUs.org page. I was less than happy with this, so I manually removed it. They continued to remove the history and put the site in an “Opt-Out” category, but still encouraged users to continue to update content. What???

But this time, when I discovered PylonHosting.com, not only had they scraped front page info, they copied the entire body of content on the front page. This is way more than “fair use” in my viewpoint. I have no problem with fair use–quoting someone else’s website. But when you deliberately copy that content in large quantities, it’s getting out of hand.

In light of this, I proceeded to, of course, edit out the page with my less-than-satisfied remarks, and then continued on to writing to “Ray” at his email address: ray@aboutus.org (oh noes! he’ll get spammed since I didn’t mask it!) requesting, and yes, demanding that the history for several of my sites be removed. And not only just the history…I wanted any copy of my content removed from existance, including any sitewide backups which had been made.

Hello Ray,

I have expressed deep dissatisfaction with the manner in which AboutUs.org gathers information which, indeed, is legally copyrighted by site owners and how said information is scraped from their sites.

I have removed several of my sites personally. However, that history still remains, containing my copyrighted content on, as far as I’m aware, one of the listed domains in this email’s subject line: PylonHosting.com. In regards to (http://www.aboutus.org/How_can_I_OptOut_of_AboutUs%3F), I am composing this email in order to have this history manually removed.

However, I ask more than that. AboutUs.org certainly maintains backups, quite possibly before said information was removed. In order to fully eliminate duplicates of my copyrighted content, I respectfully request that any and all backups containing information relating to the sites here-in this email be either removed from existence or modified to remove my content. I don’t care if said content is not publicly available. It’s still the COPY part of copyright.

Of course, using all senses of logic, there’s no plausible way for me to verify that said (private) backups no longer contain my content. But out of professional courtesy (which you appear to be operating out of ) I’m asking that you fully comply with my wishes, and yes, demands regarding content which legally belongs to me in any and all forms.

Sincerely,

- Adam Reyher

An extreme request? Definately. Any way for me to prove he’s done it? Absolutely not. A reasonable request? I think so. After all, it’s copyright violation. Raising the stakes? Heck yes.

And that’s what I want; I want to raise the stakes and put so much pressure on AboutUs.org that hopefully lawsuits will be filed in the near future and they will either be shut down, or be forced out of “business” for the sheer inconvenience it has caused them. Period.

You should do the same. Remove your site from AboutUs.org yourself … put on a comment of copyright violation and your dissatisfaction, and write a similar email to Ray (once again, his email address is ray@aboutus.org).

What about royalty-free music?

I am a hobbiest photographer and videographer. And I enjoy putting any vacation trips that I’ve taken into one “be all” video which sums everything up. Video editing, basically. (Adobe Premiere FTW).

Needless to say, I add music to the background. For my own personal use videos, ie, only ones I myself keep hold of, I have always used regular old music out there. Anything I could find that I had in my CD library. But that practice got kind of sketchy when I wanted to give copies to some friends since, they too, were on said trip. So I got stuck with royalty fees.

Now, the royalty fees really aren’t that bad. But I sitll don’t want to have to pay them.

So this begs the question of you readers. Do you know of any free (as in beer) royalty-free music out there that I could download, preferably instrumental stuff? Anything under the Creative Commons licenses? I’ve found resources in the past, but I couldn’t find any really “good” stuff, if you know what I mean.