A couple of times my videos have been turned into gifs and uploaded to reddit along with copying and pasting all of the text from the article.
It seems difficult to get them removed from imgr as you need to send lots of information but the person uploading them clearly didn’t have permission from me who made the video. Even if the source was taken down now it’s been shared loads already.
There is a “source” link to my site in one of the comments but the GIF has been downloaded 150k times in the last day but I’ve only had 8 people follow this link. Does this make it acceptable for people to take content?
Is there anything I can do? I didn’t want to aggressively watermark as it might stop people on facebook from sharing it. But I will have to in the future.
I wouldn’t mind so much if my site was uber successful, but I’ve been working on it full time for 6 months and barely make a dollar a day.
If you become aware of user content on reddit that infringes your copyright rights, you may submit a properly formatted DMCA request (see 17 U.S.C. § 512) to reddit.
But the do not provide a link to a form; I would guess they are not really interested as @cado suggested.
AFAIK the Copyright office does not have such a thing as a “form”.
From the best I am able to interpret the Law, what is required is a “request letter” containing specific information in proper “legalese”.
acceptable proof that you are who you say you are
identification of your original material
identification of the infringing material
your contact information
your testimony that you have copyright to the material
your testimony that the information in the request is correct
Whether or not much will be done about it, who knows.
Companies like that annoy; they say they want a " properly formatted DMCA request " so that means they know what information they are looking for. They could easily give some idea what they want in a link on their website or provide a link to another website. But they do not and want the user to search for the information and then hopefully provide the information they want.
I think that they hope you get feed up jumping through hoops and give up.
Yes, a “turn a blind eye unless absolutely forced to look into it” attitude does seem to be much too prevalent.
I think it may in part be because of the common beliefs that “everything on the internet is free” and “the internet is so big I probably won’t get caught at it”.
One example that bewilders me is YouTube.
It is not uncommon to find pirated copies of recently released motion pictures.
The uploaders use various “tricks” to evade detection.
So who benefits and who loses?
The viewer gets to see a recent movie for free
YouTube / the uploader get “ad views”
The movie industry does not get a cent for its work.
Hidden under the “… More” is “Report”
Would displaying Report really take up that much more space than the word More?
If you click that you get a “must sign in” - another hoop to jump.
It looks like more to me they are just saying they adhere to the law. Some credits are 100% stolen content, even if i can get it taken down or the Reddit user deleted (very unlikely) the damage is already done and they can just sign up for a new account in seconds.
I’m kinda happy that over 200k people have downloaded my work, so it must be good content, but I’ve received a tiny amount of credit or revenue so if it continues I won’t be able to make any more content.
The really annoying thing is the amount of people saying thanks to the OP for the great content, when they clearly just spend seconds turing it into a gif and copy pasting!