Question:

You’re a troubled media dinosaur struggling to find your way on the Web. What steps can you take to actively discourage people from linking to you, thus reducing your pageviews and revenue?

Answer:

Send out DMCA takedown notices to popular blogs!

2 Comments

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I dug into this, and it’s not so simple… Apartment Therapy’s been taking every photo out of NYT slideshows, and reproducing them in their entirety on their own commercial blog. A list of the articles is here.

I think it’s worth noting that Apartment Therapy didn’t reproduce the DMCA notice, so we couldn’t see the Times’ complaint. (I contacted the Apartment Therapy editor, but he didn’t respond.)

If someone took hundreds of my photos and wrapped them with ads, even if they linked back to me, I’d be upset too.

After reading their post, I immediately contacted them and asked them to post the DMCA notice (given my success at doing similar). I’m a little perturbed that they haven’t posted it (afaik) and that they haven’t responded.

If someone took hundreds of my photos and wrapped them with ads, even if they linked back to me, I’d be upset too.

Would you by upset? Your site is licensed under at Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license…

Yeah yeah, the ads part. That’s one thing that’s bothered me about the “noncommercial” aspect of some CC licenses (I mean what isn’t commercial these days?) but I had it partially clarified for me by Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer. He says (in the comments):

FWIW, editorial use is not considered commercial use, whether the publication accepts ads or not.