Morbid
April 10th, 2008, 11:32 AM
Some of you may not know that me and Impqueen had a conflict with the owner of another "uncensored" true crime site out there. We were reporting on the Erin Caffey (http://www.dreamindemon.com/2008/03/03/erin-caffey-had-help-caffey-family-murdered/) case at the same time and it seems as if he got his nuts in a vice when he thought we had taken pictures from his site. I have removed all reference to the other site.
Other Admin wrote, with tears streaming down his face:
What bothers me is that I leave specific messages, you cannot host the mage you ripped off our site. Sad thing is, you take credit, as if it's your own. Let me reiterate the copyrights for the site: © 2008 | OtherSite.com. OtherSite.com, it's logo, articles, & images, unless otherwise noted, are the property of OtherSite.com. Articles may be shared for personal use, content may not be published without permission from OtherSite.com. All opinions are those of the author & do not reflect the views of others. This site is not appropriate for those under 18.
I am pissed because this shows me you don't read, adhere to the warning, remove the image from this site, it is NOT yours. You may provide links, but you need permission BEFORE you post shit.
Imp caught it and emailed him back:
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
Dude, what? Are you even serious? C'mon.
OtherSite... one of our posters linked to you on the Erin Caffey thing, but the only graphic we even used that you had wasn't taken by us. In fact, it was sent to me by another poster, so we had it before I ever looked at your site, and when I checked out your site, it wasn't even in the same form as the Erin pic you posted, which was part of a larger picture, so I didn't use your larger file - I wasn't aware you had a copyright on a picture you didn't own to begin with. It's an Imageshack link.
The family pics were definitely not from your site originally, as I grabbed those myself from the Tyler paper among various other public record news sources. Had I gone in, stolen graphics you personally made, and used those, you'd have a beef and a legitimate one. Photos of people you didn't take are in the public domain, so even had I gone in and ripped it, cropped it myself, and posted it as my own, there wouldn't be shit you could do about it unless you personally took the pic of Erin and had a photo release from a parent, which I seriously doubt.
Tell you what though. I'll remove any mention of your site from ours, since it was sending you traffic. Kinda sucks, though, that you had to immediately start in all pissy, because I think that had we really had time to get to know you and peruse your site we would have liked it. The we might have added it to our blogroll which sends a fair amount of traffic to the blogs on it. Oh, and I know libel's kind of a bitch, but that Court Myspace? Not Erin. Just sayin'. Erin's dad deleted her Myspaces. We've been around for four years now. We do our homework, don't steal original content, and don't assume the worst about other bloggers. Be nice if you did the same.
ImpQueen
Dreamin' Demon
He then responded back, offering to through some traffic our way and even throws us a bone:
You can tell the Erin pictures if from the site. Listen, I respect what you do. Cover your ass, if I lifted something from you, I'd be more than happy to provide credit, where credit is due. You can keep it up, I'm trying to prove a point. We cover news, problem is, everyone took the pictures off the site the family sent us and hosted them on ImageShack. Someone mentioned it was your site, so I got heated. We're covering the same story, keep it up, to be honest, read as many e-mails as I have, you'd be upset too.
I haven't stolen anything, pictures were sent by friends & family, we just cleaned them up, but I will be more than happy to provide a link of sorts, later in the day, to draw traffic your way. I'll discuss more later, maybe we can collaborate on a final article together...The least I can do.
So Imp, being in an extremely good mood that morning responded:
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
Not to worry. We're probably talking to a number of the same people - we get family contact on about 50% of our stories. We have no need to steal your readership and don't want to do so. We get buttloads of email. I understand your being upset, and it's cool, as I did remove any pics that looked like they might have come from your site and replaced them with the same pics that were provided to us and to news outlets.
Morbid and I share this email account, so he'll check this out later in the day and I'm sure if he has anything to add, he'll do so. No harm, no foul.
While I was not pissed, exactly, I was a tad offended with the throw traffic our way bit, because well...ya' know...the whole ego issue I deal with on a daily basis. But I responded anyway.
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
I have read your emails in regards to the fit you had in regards to the pictures you had hosted on your site of the Caffey family. I am going to ignore your tone and the fact that you basically called us thieves and illiterate and be as laid back as possible as I am having a good day today.
I really don't have much to add that Imp didn't already state, but I do have a little.
First off, congrats on your site. I hope it doesn't take four years to get the traffic we now get, like it did us. But let us get something out of the way. I have never heard of you until you got linked in our comments section. We have been doing these stories for a looong time. We are well seasoned on getting images, tracking down and getting into Myspace pages (including the private ones).
We also have users that do the same and will post whatever they find. The images we had\have on our site of the Caffey family very well may have come from you, but they were not taken from you by us. I do not have the time to track down the origins of every Shacked picture a user posts, and as long as they are not hot-linked to someone else's page, I am not going to. If you have that kind of free time, well, it must be nice. If somehow a copyrighted picture is being displayed by us, and we are contacted nicely about it (which is normally the procedure), I have no issues taking it down if it is true.
I would suggest you use a watermark in the future. It may save you from a future aneurysm the next time someone takes your "exclusive" pictures and shoves them up to Imageshack for everyone else to use, or if your exclusive pictures also seem to be given to local news agencies. We used to do that, but quit giving a fuck about it.
Lastly, we know damn well how hard it is to get recognized, especially with the clique-ish nature of true crime sites and their readers, and we know how shitty it is to have stuff stolen from you. We have blog sites out there right now as we speak, who do nothing but copy us, down to our titles, with no link back. We have learned to deal with it as it is part of the game. Get one to stop, two more pop up. But through OUR hard work and busting our ass to deliver day after day, we are now a recognizable site with the
numbers to prove it.
I have no clue how long you have been doing this, or how many sites you have run before this one, but I am telling you this as one site admin to another, we don't need anyone's thunder, as we create our own, and we don't burn bridges (which includes theft and telling other site admins that they are illiterate thieves). It's a code that has helped us get to where we are today.
I hope that we are able to help each other out with future stories, but if you contact us again in the way you did the first time you contacted us, it will go ignored and unanswered.
Good luck with your site.
Morbid
I am only posting this now because I had forgotten about the entire thing until yesterday when I was cleaning up our mailbox. I figure it answers some questions some people were asking in that particular thread....even though the answer is a month late. I removed the site name and admin name as Imp states that was what we would do and after all, she is the Queen and we are men\women of our word.
Other Admin wrote, with tears streaming down his face:
What bothers me is that I leave specific messages, you cannot host the mage you ripped off our site. Sad thing is, you take credit, as if it's your own. Let me reiterate the copyrights for the site: © 2008 | OtherSite.com. OtherSite.com, it's logo, articles, & images, unless otherwise noted, are the property of OtherSite.com. Articles may be shared for personal use, content may not be published without permission from OtherSite.com. All opinions are those of the author & do not reflect the views of others. This site is not appropriate for those under 18.
I am pissed because this shows me you don't read, adhere to the warning, remove the image from this site, it is NOT yours. You may provide links, but you need permission BEFORE you post shit.
Imp caught it and emailed him back:
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
Dude, what? Are you even serious? C'mon.
OtherSite... one of our posters linked to you on the Erin Caffey thing, but the only graphic we even used that you had wasn't taken by us. In fact, it was sent to me by another poster, so we had it before I ever looked at your site, and when I checked out your site, it wasn't even in the same form as the Erin pic you posted, which was part of a larger picture, so I didn't use your larger file - I wasn't aware you had a copyright on a picture you didn't own to begin with. It's an Imageshack link.
The family pics were definitely not from your site originally, as I grabbed those myself from the Tyler paper among various other public record news sources. Had I gone in, stolen graphics you personally made, and used those, you'd have a beef and a legitimate one. Photos of people you didn't take are in the public domain, so even had I gone in and ripped it, cropped it myself, and posted it as my own, there wouldn't be shit you could do about it unless you personally took the pic of Erin and had a photo release from a parent, which I seriously doubt.
Tell you what though. I'll remove any mention of your site from ours, since it was sending you traffic. Kinda sucks, though, that you had to immediately start in all pissy, because I think that had we really had time to get to know you and peruse your site we would have liked it. The we might have added it to our blogroll which sends a fair amount of traffic to the blogs on it. Oh, and I know libel's kind of a bitch, but that Court Myspace? Not Erin. Just sayin'. Erin's dad deleted her Myspaces. We've been around for four years now. We do our homework, don't steal original content, and don't assume the worst about other bloggers. Be nice if you did the same.
ImpQueen
Dreamin' Demon
He then responded back, offering to through some traffic our way and even throws us a bone:
You can tell the Erin pictures if from the site. Listen, I respect what you do. Cover your ass, if I lifted something from you, I'd be more than happy to provide credit, where credit is due. You can keep it up, I'm trying to prove a point. We cover news, problem is, everyone took the pictures off the site the family sent us and hosted them on ImageShack. Someone mentioned it was your site, so I got heated. We're covering the same story, keep it up, to be honest, read as many e-mails as I have, you'd be upset too.
I haven't stolen anything, pictures were sent by friends & family, we just cleaned them up, but I will be more than happy to provide a link of sorts, later in the day, to draw traffic your way. I'll discuss more later, maybe we can collaborate on a final article together...The least I can do.
So Imp, being in an extremely good mood that morning responded:
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
Not to worry. We're probably talking to a number of the same people - we get family contact on about 50% of our stories. We have no need to steal your readership and don't want to do so. We get buttloads of email. I understand your being upset, and it's cool, as I did remove any pics that looked like they might have come from your site and replaced them with the same pics that were provided to us and to news outlets.
Morbid and I share this email account, so he'll check this out later in the day and I'm sure if he has anything to add, he'll do so. No harm, no foul.
While I was not pissed, exactly, I was a tad offended with the throw traffic our way bit, because well...ya' know...the whole ego issue I deal with on a daily basis. But I responded anyway.
Thu, 6 Mar 2008
I have read your emails in regards to the fit you had in regards to the pictures you had hosted on your site of the Caffey family. I am going to ignore your tone and the fact that you basically called us thieves and illiterate and be as laid back as possible as I am having a good day today.
I really don't have much to add that Imp didn't already state, but I do have a little.
First off, congrats on your site. I hope it doesn't take four years to get the traffic we now get, like it did us. But let us get something out of the way. I have never heard of you until you got linked in our comments section. We have been doing these stories for a looong time. We are well seasoned on getting images, tracking down and getting into Myspace pages (including the private ones).
We also have users that do the same and will post whatever they find. The images we had\have on our site of the Caffey family very well may have come from you, but they were not taken from you by us. I do not have the time to track down the origins of every Shacked picture a user posts, and as long as they are not hot-linked to someone else's page, I am not going to. If you have that kind of free time, well, it must be nice. If somehow a copyrighted picture is being displayed by us, and we are contacted nicely about it (which is normally the procedure), I have no issues taking it down if it is true.
I would suggest you use a watermark in the future. It may save you from a future aneurysm the next time someone takes your "exclusive" pictures and shoves them up to Imageshack for everyone else to use, or if your exclusive pictures also seem to be given to local news agencies. We used to do that, but quit giving a fuck about it.
Lastly, we know damn well how hard it is to get recognized, especially with the clique-ish nature of true crime sites and their readers, and we know how shitty it is to have stuff stolen from you. We have blog sites out there right now as we speak, who do nothing but copy us, down to our titles, with no link back. We have learned to deal with it as it is part of the game. Get one to stop, two more pop up. But through OUR hard work and busting our ass to deliver day after day, we are now a recognizable site with the
numbers to prove it.
I have no clue how long you have been doing this, or how many sites you have run before this one, but I am telling you this as one site admin to another, we don't need anyone's thunder, as we create our own, and we don't burn bridges (which includes theft and telling other site admins that they are illiterate thieves). It's a code that has helped us get to where we are today.
I hope that we are able to help each other out with future stories, but if you contact us again in the way you did the first time you contacted us, it will go ignored and unanswered.
Good luck with your site.
Morbid
I am only posting this now because I had forgotten about the entire thing until yesterday when I was cleaning up our mailbox. I figure it answers some questions some people were asking in that particular thread....even though the answer is a month late. I removed the site name and admin name as Imp states that was what we would do and after all, she is the Queen and we are men\women of our word.