Friday 10 May 2013

Stop Legalised Theft of Copyrighted Works

Well it seems once again that this topic has surfaced, the unfortunate 'Us' photographers and illustrators alike are subject to copyright theft. I myself have been unfortunate and have discovered my images having been tampered with or not received a credit to my work.

David Bailey has also voiced his opinion once more and I am posting a link to an e-petition you can also sign electronically and help get 'our voice' heard.

It seems as though even those who have taken steps to secure their works either through Digitally Watermarking or registering their respective works with Intellectual Property Office

Remember in the USA your work is automatically copyrighted as like the UK for the US go to the US Copyright Office Whatever your choice PLEASE DO NOT USE My free copyright.com The afore mentioned site is now officially a SCAM it was initially set up by Mathew Whittaker.

When Matthew Whittaker launched MyFreeCopyright.com in 2006, many people questioned whether the service was a scam. Legally, the service is not linked to any government copyright office. What it was designed to do was to prove that a person had created a specific work on a specific date and time, by digitally registering that work. Since there was nothing illegal about what the service was, and it did that service well, it became popular with thousands of bloggers, web site developers, artists and others creating intellectual property that they wanted proof of creation for.

Now, all that has changed. In May of last year, seven years after he created it, Matthew Whittaker sold the web site and it appears that it is now owned by one Regge Chan in Hong Kong.

By June, people began to talk about the site being down and then once it was back up, complaints began to slowly trickle out that people had their accounts deleted. The first assumption was that their accounts had been hacked, however, one account holder, who has asked to remain anonymous, suspected that this wasn't the work of hackers.

He began his own investigation and found that systematically, accounts were deleted, emails to the service were going unanswered and all the works associated with deleted accounts had been removed from the site - all without warning.

So your best bet is to do it the hard way and probably the way we should all go be you a photographer, an illustrator, a poet or a musician in fact anyone who creates a piece of work.

So lets do our bit and sign that e-petition

Cheerio for now

David

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