Advice for unauthorized use of your work taking place overseas?

[Munerift]

Back in highschool in the 2002-2003 acidemic year, I was on newspaper team. I wrote an article on teen depression which made it to the first page, I was excited! The article remained off the internet, and only published in the small school newspaper. The same year I wrote a paper for my Government/Economics class on Henry VIII, I had previously thought that only my teacher and myself had access to that work.

Fast forward almost 4 years; I’m bored. I googled my name and come across my newspaper article (http://www.coursework.info/cgi-bin/page.cgi?page=preview&link=22439) and my government essay (http://www.coursework.info/cgi-bin/page.cgi?page=preview&link=19851) on this paid site..! I’m confused, I didn’t submit this stuff, and you can obviously see my name (Chalea Evans, now married) right in the document preview, these are mine..! Though this site provides a disclaimer that users are not supposed to use the material as their own and have an extensive anti-plagiarism area; clearly this is a paid site for other intentions than what are provided.

I emailed & hadn't heard anything back from them; since this site is not on US soil there’s little I can really do. I talked with a lawyer who works for my employer on a friend-basis and he suggested I send a ‘cease & desist’ letter to attempt to manipulate them into getting my work off their site at the very least.

Take a look at what I’ve created and provide feedback? (Letter.PDF â€" 124 KB: http://munerift.xepher.net/letter.pdf) Any other advice? I know for starters that I will never see any money; this as my lawyer friend suggested would simply be a motivator to get them to remove the content, and to do put the option of them contacting you for republishing rights; but if they try to then quote them an insane amount of money that they wouldn't purchase the pieces for.

I also wanted to alert others; work that I thought would never make it onto my school website let alone a giant collection of pay-access content has totally blown me away, and I'm worried that there's others out there like me who aren't even aware of this yet. Thanks guys!

[Xepher]

Wow, that's pretty crazy. The only thing I had from high school was my senior english paper, which became an article in The Hitchhiker's  Guide to the Galaxy http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A283466 Of course, that was my own idea. Your situation rather surprises me... I mean, it's a high school paper. No offense, but who in their right mind is going to pay for that?

As to a solution, you're never going to get any money of course, but you should take a bit more time in constructing that letter. If you're trying to scare them by making them think you're a lawyer, you need to be careful with your language, a lot of that letter sounds rather informal and unprofessional. Don't use ampersands (&) in place of the word "and" when you're trying for formal speech. Don't mix fractions and decimals. "& or" should be "and/or". Give 'em an extra scare, and use british spellings (such as "authorisation"), so it sounds like you might have representatives in the UK. There's several other things that could be polished as well.

Look up basic british copyright law, and quote paragraph and section(s) at them. Find out what punitive damages are and ask for those, not for some fraction of profits. Most copyright laws grant either actual damages (money you can prove lost), or punitive damages (usually predefined amounts a judge can award as punishment.) I've not seen any IP laws that award damages based solely on profit made (which is what your current letter seems to demand.) The key in all of it is to convince them you might have the means and motivation to actually follow through with your threats. A company like this pretty much lives on nothing but ripping off other people's work, so odds are they get demands like this regularly, and are less likely to be scared than most.

If you're serious about this, don't rush it. Get that letter rewritten, and take some time to let other people read it over and point out possible improvements.


Oh, one other idea I just thought of that you might consider. Since I don't think you're actually planning to make money off those papers ever, go post one on your website, and license it under the Creative Commons share-alike, non-commercial, attribution license (similar to the one all the major Xepher.Net code is under.) It basically says EVERYONE is free to copy/use the paper, provided they always attribute you as the original author, provide free access to everyone for anything they make using it, and never profit from it in any way. In this case, you wouldn't be suing for the money/damages, but to force them to provide their entire service for free, since it now includes your work. They would, of course, never do that (same way their not gonna pay you money) but it may be a different/unique enough threat that they at least remove your works.

Check it out, CC even has a license specifically for England/Wales (where this company seems to be.)
Here's the human-readable version http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
And here's the lawyer-code you should send them with your letter. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/legalcode

[fesworks]

From what I am told from a friend who works at Hunt, Harris and Webb (Proprietary CP) in the UK, CC is just as useless in court as a self-addressed stamped envelope. Even with the letter, if it's not registered, and the other person has registered it... you are boned.

Its the internet "stamp addresed envelope".

The fact that saying "copyrighted" does not make it so.

Copyrighting and patent in the real world,take a lot of work and paper work at that.
You can`t just say "COPYRIGHT" it has to be logged,recorded and applied for.

The "stamp addressed envelope" is in fact a urban myth.

It holds no relevence in a court of law as it is so easy to fake.

People still try it today.The last one i remember was someone who claimed to have invented the DYSON cleaner.
They had a stamp addressed envelope they had sent themseves in 1985..unbeknown to them..the First Dyson cleaner was made under license in Japan in 1982.
Post office stamps are both easy to make or buy...you just change the date to the one you want.
The story made our trade Newspaper..in the "what a wanker" section

If you invent anything or produce a body of published work..you have to get it copyrighted or a patent.

Anyone could steal your work,copyright or patent it and away they go.

Just ask Heinrich Hertz,Willoughby Smith and Elisha Gray.

This dude was kind enough to CP my website and comic for me. Known him online for a long time. Good guy.

Basically, according to what he has said, CC is not a legal institution for proper registry of patents or copyrights... at least not for anything that would hold up in a court system. CC basically means "common courtesy" for others not to use your work.

[griever]

In addition to what Xepher said regarding rewriting the letter, I assume the email you sent them also includes that whoever submitted the articles broke the terms of service?  I've had luck with this a few times, but people who live on plagarism might react differently (as in, not giving a damn).

[Munerift]

Thank you guys for taking the time to contribute some actual input; the most I've gotten from anyone else at this point has been "Wow!" and "...boy that would scare me!" which wasn't quite what I was looking for...

Xepher: At the time when I first found out about the 'teen depression' article being used I had thought to myself "huh? This is only applicable for Roosevelt, my high school at the time..!" After that I promptly came across my 'Henry VIII article' and thought that would be better suited for use on that type of site; but I've had several friends point out that it would be easy to extract the personally relevant information out and replace with their own content and turn in for their own work.

It still makes me feel like a dirty cheat to have my work there for children to snag as their own; even though I'm not the one whose submitted it I still feel responsible because it is my work to begin with. I do like your suggestion however for using a CC license and I think I will end up going this route for my written if not for my visual arts; do they have a universal copyright so a smarty-pants in Antarctica doesn't end up trying to snatch anything up as well if I've got it covered under USA/Wales licenses?

I know that realistically I don't have the means to back anything up should they chose to ignore me; and I'll never see a penny from them either. To be quite honest; I've got no clue on what British law dictates for copyrights and I am interested to see just what the going-rate for this kind of thing is. It will also be amusing to use their spelling, I've never thought of this previously. Thanks!

Fesworks: I've known for a good long time that the 'poor man's copyright' would never hold up, and though CC copyright may not be a 'end all; be all' solution; it would at least be a step in the right direction for me I think. Aren't lawyer-friends great..?

Griever: To be quite honest; I was in shock and enraged when I sent the email. Basically it linked to my works, I told them I was me and they did not have permission to use them, & to remove them immediately.

[griever]

I thought you were upset...the letter also seemed to reflect an outraged tone.  Anyway, check out their terms of service, which you could cite in your letter.  Also, if the email you receive back is a negative one, is there any way you can get your hands on a hard copy of the original works?  I know my high school keeps archives of all the papers and if your newspaper sponsor remembers you fondly, a call or email would never hurt.

[Xepher]

Fes: I admit I'm not up to par on british copyright law, but I'm pretty sure your friend is wrong there. The UK has the same "automatic copyright" that we in the U.S. do. That is, a work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created. You do NOT have to register it. (Patent law is different.) Registration does entitle you to more damages, and makes the lawsuit work differently, but you're still protected, even without it.

Mune: The bit I'm not sure about is that you're not a UK citizen, and the work was first "published" in the U.S. When I think about that more, I believe you have to be covered under US law (you should lookup the US version of that CC license.) Since the violation is happening abroad, any protection you're going to get is from international law. The main part of that is the Berne Convention In fact, the reason you do NOT have to register a copyright is the Berne Convention. The U.S. didn't sign on for more than a hundred years, specifically because we DID require copyright registration. However, since 1989, anything you create is protected by copyright from the moment you put it in a tangible form. (Ideas alone don't count.) From there, the Berne convention requires that all member nations recognize each other's IP laws, and thus, you're protected in Britain as well.

As to the legitimacy of the CC stuff. Your work is ALREADY copyrighted without it, so it's not at all like the "Stamped Addressed Envelope" thing (which claimed to exploit a bit of postal law which declared stuff sent through the mail as "published materials.") What the CC does is provide a basic legal document to enable you to set the terms for other people's use of your copyrighted work. It doesn't add protection to your rights, it actually gives some of them away (such as the ability for others to make copies) but  it does so conditionally. In the case of the one I linked you, those conditions require it not to be used commercially, to always credit you with original authorship, and to likewise license derived/collected works under the same license. The reason I suggested the CC is that rather than just saying "you can't use it, it's mine, give it back" (which you have every right to do already) you're saying "I said you could use it, if you did certain things, and now that you HAVE used it, I expect to to follow through on those other things." It doesn't in anyway grant you a stronger case, it just provides specific details (and the legal language explaining them) for you to complain about and demand. It's more precise threat, not a more powerful weapon.

You mention putting other works under the CC license. If you're looking to simply protect them, there's no need of a CC license at all. You are ALREADY PROTECTED as soon as you create them. The CC is about giving your work away... going from "All Rights Reserved" (which is default for anything you create) to "Some Rights Reserved." I use it for stuff I create, like the Xepher.net code and designs, because I believe that's the sort of thing people should be sharing with each other and improving, not hoarding for themselves so everyone has to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, I write a lot of short stories, some of which I hope to one day get published. These are not under the CC, as those are things I don't want other people sharing or changing or reworking. I also want to keep my chance of one day making money from getting them published. Not that YOU can't still publish/profit/etc from anything you put under the CC (as copyright owner, you can do whatever you want, the CC license just says what OTHER people can do), but there's little point in buying the right to publication (which is what a publisher pays you for), when it's already been given away for free. Anyway, long point is, if you want to share your work for others to use in some way, the CC is the way to go, with plenty of different license options so you can choose WHAT people can actually do with your stuff. On the other hand, if you just want to protect it and keep it all yours, then there's nothing at all you have to do past pushing "save."

[Databits]

Find the old dated paper with a grade on it?

I'd try to track down the person who submitted the work honestly, as they are the one who caused the damage in the first place. There are a limited number of people who generally get access to such things when you turn them in, and in the case of a teacher actually supporting a site like this... they may very well lose their job. Which I dunno about you, but if I knew a teacher was doing this, I'd be more than satisfied with their job lose due to it, as it goes against the whole idea of why the papers are being turned into them in the first place.