I've just made my first formal complaint of copyright infringement to LinkedIn re the reproduction of the Art Business Page on my blog as a PULSE article on LinkedIn. [Update: this link now generates a 'Sorry this article is no longer available']
The "author" decided to:
- give it an absolutely crap headline (obviously produced by a scraper bot)
- delete any reference to the name of my blog or me - or the copyright statements which are very clear in the side column or bottom of my blog.
How to complain about a copyright infringement on LinkedIn
 |
| First - tell it like it is! |
Information about Copyright
This is the page which tells us about the LinkedIn Copyright Policy. To my mind it fails to take demonstrate very clearly that the company understands in full the conditions of the 'safe harbor' provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Bottom line it MUST....
upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
Notification Forms
It also provides links to the relevant forms:
- Notice of Copyright Infringement form
- the Counter-Notice Regarding Claim of Copyright Infringement form,
You can submit your form electronically Fill out our online submission form to contact the LinkedIn Copyright Agent
Queries
I have to say I'm very surprised and puzzled by:
- LinkedIn's Copyright Policy - To my mind - and I've reviewed a lot of these statements in the past - their policy seems to ignore the fact that websites which publish material which infringes copyright do NOT enjoy 'safe harbor' protection and protection from liability UNLESS they take action to remove it ASAP. This needs to be made clear to members. They can send the notice I've sent them to the author if they choose - but action by LinkedIn should definitely not be dependent on his response. They have enough information (i.e. two pdf files which reproduce in full the page on my blog and the article on Pulse) to act on their own account without any reference to the author at all.
- LinkedIn's Quality Assurance Policy for Pulse articles - Frankly if you are running a network for professionals I expect a professional and high quality approach to the quality assurance of articles published by Pulse. It clearly isn't hitting the standards it needs to if it can publish an article with a nonsensical title which appears to be the product of some sort of scraper bot.
Consequences
I have indicated to LinkedIn that I shall also be reporting the Pulse article to Google - and I'll be doing that today as frankly their statement re. copyright does not lead me to think they are going to act promptly.
I've certainly found on previous occasions that the fastest way to get material removed from being indexed by Google is to make the copyright infringement report to Google rather than the plagiariser. (I've now reported the infringement using this copyright infringement form which relates to Blogger)
Today I'm going to introduce a footer to all my blog posts which will indicate that all text and images are copyright to me or the artists or photographers.
UPDATE
It worked! The content has been removed by LinkedIn! By the time Google got round to looking for it to remove from their index it had disappeared - as confirmed by the second nice email from Google confirming it's no longer available or in their index.....
"Hello,Thanks for reaching out to us.Upon recent review of the following URL(s), we were unable to locate the content in question:http://www.linkedin.com/.../resources-artists-how-insure...If you believe this is in error and are still able to see the content at the URL(s) in question, please reply with additional information so we are able to investigate. If there was a mistake and the content is available at a different URL, please file a new report at support.google.com/legal.
Regards,The Google Team"
Copyright for Artists
For more about copyright for artists - and information I've accumulated over the years - please see my section about Copyright for Artists on Art Business Info. for Artists. It contains links to:
- How to protect artwork online
- Copyright and artists' rights
- How to do a reverse image search
- Copyright in different countries
We have one right now going on, where a "consultant" is touting his "work" by using our material (conveniently blurring our trademark notice on the picture of ours he's used).
ReplyDeleteThe so called "consultant" is pretending he's not seeing our requests and LinkedIn has apparently changed its reporting tools since last time we had to do this and now goes to a dead link...
Here's a link to our LinkedIn post since we can't report anything so far: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plagiarized-once-more-william-villers