unauthorized use of copyrighted material

Palmlix.com’s Thieving Owner also owns A-GC.com

By Mia McPherson, on March 22nd, 2013%

A while back I did a post titled More on Image Thieves: Palmlix.com Wallpaper site because of the difficulties that I was having trying to get the owner; one Muhammad Farhan, to remove images of mine that he had stolen then placed on his w a l l p a p e r site for free download without my permission, consent or authorization.

After that article was written Muhammad Farah used a service to hide his contact information called domainsbyproxy.com, but I contacted them and this email series is the result of that exchange (read from bottom up for chronological order):

Dear Mia McPherson,

As we have not received proof that our customer attempted to contact you, we are disclosing our customer’s non-public contact information for the limited purpose of this complaint. We will not cancel our proxy service unless the registrar advises us that they are in receipt of a pending UDRP dispute or lawsuit.

Registrant Contact Information (identical for both domains):
Paul Davidson
Address removed because Paul Davidson is listing a mailing address that does not belong to him, the owners of the home are distressed that he has not updated his mailing address
PH:+44.07796225022
paul@splodgemarketing.com

Please be advised that this information was provided by the customer. As such, Domains By Proxy cannot guarantee its accuracy. If any of the information proves to be invalid, please let us know and we will take steps to request updated information from our customer.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Very truly yours,

L. Villeneuve
Office of the General Manager
Domains By Proxy, LLC

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: PALMLIX.COM::627300
From: Mia <>
Date: Fri, March 01, 2013 5:20 am
To: generalmanager@domainsbyproxy.com

Your client did not contact me within the time period you specified nor did they remove the images from their web site that they have stolen from me. I request that you disclose the registrant’s contact information.

This person is using your services to hide from the people who have complaints about his illegal use of our images and his copyright violations which is in violation of your terms of service.

Mia McPherson

Bird, Nature and Wildlife Photography
OnTheWingPhotography

On 2/21/2013 10:00 AM, generalmanager@domainsbyproxy.com wrote:
>
> Dear Mia McPherson,
>
> Thank you for your message concerning the domain name PALMLIX.COM.
>
> Domains By Proxy (“DBP”) provides a proxy registration service that allows its customers to register domain names without listing their contact information in the public WHOIS database. Since DBP is listed as the registrant of all domain names for which it provides service, it may appear that DBP operates or has an interest in the domain name or website. That is not the case; DBP is neither a domain name registrar, nor a hosting provider.
>
> We have forwarded your complaint via email to our customer. In this email we requested that our customer contact you no later than close of business on February 28, 2013. If our customer fails to respond to our request, we may then disclose the registrant’s contact information.
>
> As Domains By Proxy does not have the ability to remove content from any website for which we provide our proxy service, you will need to contact the hosting provider. Generally the operators of the DNS name servers and the hosting providers are the same. For your convenience, we have listed the hosting provider below. Please note this is the information from the DNS records:
>
> CloudFlare, Inc.
> abuse@cloudflare.com
>
> Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
>
> Very truly yours,
>
> Jeffrey Renoir
> Office of the General Manager
> Domains By Proxy, LLC

I have dealt with CloudFlare.com repeatedly about the owner of this site and find it a waste of my time to contact them, I still have never had a reply from the hosting providers that they have given me. I believe a complete whois should always be made available even when people are using a cloud service that lists the hosting provider. It is a misnomer to say a cloud service is a hosting provider when no files are stored on their servers and it is just a pass through service.

Note that the contact information provided to me by domainsbyproxy.com does not match the whois information of the screen shot I created for Palmlix.com prior to Muhammad Farhan using their services:

In case you are wondering why I am writing about Palmlix.com again I came across a referral to my site today from a post titled “Good wallpaper bad wallpaper” on http://eddyandreuben.blogspot.com that mentioned the issues I had been having with the thieving owner of Palmlix.com.

I had not checked the site in some time because I have been extremely busy but after reading the post I went on a search for my stolen images on Palmlix.com and found that all of my images were removed, the pages either go to a generic IE error page or to a “404. Whoppppss NOT FOUND ” page on the site itself.

However; in my search I found another site using some of the same images stolen by Muhammad Farhan, who had changed the files names on my images to names which always included “mia-mcpherson39s”. That site is A-GC.com and when I did a whois to find out who owned the site this is the result I found:

Note that the Administrative contact and Registrant are exactly the same for the whois on Palmlix.com and A-GC.com

Registrant:
arkana
maguwo
bantul, Yogyakarta 55198
ID

Administrative Contact:
dzifa, shofa mbah_sastro07@yahoo.com
arkana
maguwo
bantul, Yogyakarta 55198

This person, whether they are Muhammad Farhan as he claimed in his first email to me or if he is dzifa, shofa, or the name Paul Davidson given to me by domainsbyproxy.com this person knows full well he has stolen my images and used them illegally on Palmlix.com and now he has several of my images on his other scraper site, A-GC.com.

This image is mine, it even shows my name in the file name and it was one that this thief had used before on Palmlix.com and was removed the first time I wrote to Muhammad Farhan due to his infringements.

This is a close up of the “downloadable” version stored on the A-GC.com website ILLEGALLY. It says my name, it lists my web site so the ignorant statement on Palmlix.com of:

All wallpapers and backgrounds found here are believed to be in the “public domain”. All of the images displayed are of unknown origin. We do not intend to infringe any legitimate intellectual right, artistic rights or copyright.

Is quite frankly a load of Horse Manure. My images are not “Public Domain” he knew where he got them and as such purposely infringed on my rights.

And on his other scraper site A-GC.com disclaimer:

Please do not ask for permissions to use these images in your projects, as we do not own the copyrights for them. All images displayed on the site are provided only for personal use as w a l l p a p e r on computers, cell phones and other personal electronic devices. In case of an error where you are the owner of an image and feel it is used unknowingly, please contact us so we can immediately remove it from our website. We do not intend to display any copyright protected images. a-gc.com is an online service provider as defined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We provide legal copyright owners with the ability to self-publish on the internet by uploading, storing and displaying various media utilizing our services. We do not monitor, screen or otherwise review the media which is uploaded to our servers by users of the service. We assume copyright violation very seriously and will vigorously protect the rights of legal copyright owners. If you are the copyright owner of content which appears on the a-gc.com website and you did not authorize the use of the content you must notify a-gc.com in writing in order for us to identify the allegedly infringing content and take action. For any problems or questions please email to: mbah_sastro07@yahoo.com

Color emphasis is mine to make points about those statements.

Muhammad Farhan admits that they do not own the copyrights (for these images) – Yet he used MINE again even though this infringement crap has been going on since November of 2012.

feel it is used unknowingly - Muhammad Farhan KNOWS he has used my images KNOWINGLY and he knows he is using the rest of the images knowingly too.

We do not intend to display any copyright protected images. a-gc.com is an online service provider as defined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. - They do use the images on this site without the authorization of the copyright owner and they do not give a damn about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

We assume copyright violation very seriously and will vigorously protect the rights of legal copyright owners. – Vigorously?? That is freaking laughable, they are doing quite a lot of vigorous THEFT. Protect?? What a stupid statement when NONE of the images on Palmlix.com or A-GC.com belong to Muhammad Farhan.

All images displayed on the site are provided only for personal use as w a l l p a p e r on computers, cell phones and other personal electronic devices. – Muhammad Farhan does not have my permission or authorization to OFFER any of my images for download for ANY reason or device. It is an infringement of my copyrights, it is THEFT.

And this statement: We provide legal copyright owners with the ability to self-publish on the internet by uploading, storing and displaying various media utilizing our services.

This is patently false. There isn’t a place ON A-GC.com to register to self-publish, upload, store or display images. This is just crap put on the site to mislead people into thinking that the legitimate owners of all the stolen images have uploaded them to this server themselves and it is a damn lie.

This is theft, pure and simple. Below are two more of my stolen images that are being used without my permission on A-GC.com

I have had several people email me asking for this thief’s contact information because he has used their images without permission and that is why I felt it was important to write yet another post about copyright infringement on Palmlix.com and now A-GC.com so that the owners of images used without permission on these two scraper sites will have the information I have about this copyright offender.

Administrative Contact:
dzifa, shofa mbah_sastro07@yahoo.com

When I find out who the original hosting provider is I will post that information too on every post I have mentioned Muhammad Farhan, Palmlix.com and A-GC.com in.

I have added a WordPress plugin called “iQ Block Country” to block Indonesia which is where Yogyakarta is located to prevent this infringer from gaining access to my images, the images he has currently posted on A-GC.com he had downloaded before and must have stored on his computer.

I will pursue every legal step I can to get my images removed from A-GC.com.

In case you hadn’t noticed, scraper sites like these tick me off. Our images are copyrighted the moment we take them and they are not to be used without our permission or authorization. This is theft. This is copyright infringement.

This thief is making money through advertisements on those sites and the ONLY reason people visit them is for the images, that is money that he does not deserve because he does NOT own our images.

And that is disgusting.

Mia

Standing up against Google’s new Image Search and the copyright issues involved – Class action lawsuit

By Mia McPherson, on February 26th, 2013%

No photo for this post but it is important to any one who photographs and posts their images to the web. It is important to artists and graphic designers.

Please feel free to pass on the link to anyone you know who is a photographer or an artist.

Since Google made changes to its Image Search on January 25th many photographers and artists have voiced complaints about the drop in visitors to their sites, for those that have ads they have had a drop in income from those ads and one of the other complaints is about Google hot linking to the full sized version of the images which allows infringers to easily illegally download those images to their computers.

I have written two posts about the changes Google made to their Image Search and many other photographers/webmasters have too because Google has over-stepped with their new UI.

Is Google’s New Image Search Violating Their Own Policies? The Law?

Google needs to remove the hotlinks on Image Search to our files immediately, remove the “View Original File” button and stop facilitating the unauthorized distribution of our Copyrighted work. Anything less is criminal.

Google has become the biggest image scraper of the Millennium

You might wonder why I have used this title but since the 25th of January changes have been made to Google Image Search that have infuriated webmasters, photographers, artists and many more.

From a friend and fellow photographer’s blog: NOT cool, Google! Google Stealing Online Photos

NOT COOL, GOOGLE. I have no doubt there will be a legal challenge here, as I simply can’t understand the legality of Google itself effectively distributing CONTENT from other people’s websites.

I’m still riled up, I’ve been searching out other blog posts, following a thread that Google started themselves on Google Groups and watching the traffic to my blog and web site drop while seeing the rates of infringement of my images increase. Last week alone I sent in over 100 DMCA takedown requests to Pinterest. That is JUST Pinterest.

WE have to stand up to Google to make this stop.

I said I would be happy to take part in a Class Action suit against Google and due to a recent conversation with an attorney I realize that class action suit is entirely possible and I want to inform as many photographers as I can about it.

I had a very interesting conversation today with attorney William R. Restis of Finkelstein & Krinsk LLP that was very informative about the possibility of a class action law suit against Google with the focus being on the copyright issues that their new image search raises.

What do we need to do to become involved with a class action law suit against Google for the changes they made to their Image Search?

Contact William R. Restis of Finkelstein & Krinsk LLP. This is the same firm that filed a class action law suit against Instagram in December of 2012 for their change in Terms of Service, a suit that forced Instagram to reconsider those changes to their TOS.

I urge you to contact William R. Restis and hear what he has to say.

William R. Restis
Finkelstein & Krinsk LLP
The Koll Center
501 W. Broadway, Suite 1250
San Diego, CA 92101-3579
Email: wrr@classactionlaw.com
TEL: 619.238.1333, Ext. 25
FAX: 619.238.5425

We do have to stand up against Google on this matter to protect our copyrights.

Have visits to your site decreased dramatically since Google made the changes to their Image Search?
Have you seen a decrease in revenue from ads on your site since Google made the changes to their Image Search?
Have you seen an increase in image theft and copyright infringements since Google made the changes to their Image Search?

Please send this URL to other photographers, let’s join together and let Google know we aren’t taking this laying down.

Mia

Is Google’s New Image Search Violating Their Own Policies? The Law?

By Mia McPherson, on February 4th, 2013%

I have been doing more research about Google’s update it its Image Search and have come across a few things that I find of interest. I will be providing links and telling my viewers which paragraphs to look for and adding a short quote from the pages which I believe falls under “Fair Use” since I will not be grabbing the entire content of a page or making screen shots which might be in violation of copyright laws.

Let’s discuss the first question in my title: Is Google’s New Image Search Violating Their Own Policies?

I believe they are, take a look at Google’s Terms of Service for people who have Blogger Blogs on a page called Blogger Content Policy: http://draft.blogger.com/content.g?hl=en

One paragraph on that page; outlining what Google expects from the users of their free blogging platform, stands out in clearly written language.

Copyright: It is our policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. More information about our copyright procedures can be found here. Also, please don’t provide links to sites where your readers can obtain unauthorized downloads of other people’s content.

I made that one sentence red so it would also stand out clearly. So; let me get this straight, according to Google’s terms of service for the people who publish blogs on their Blogger platform tell those users to not provide links where other people can download our content without our authorization.

But Google is providing links to our content and facilitating unauthorized downloads of that content.

Does Google apply or follow the same terms of service to themselves as they do to their users? It sure looks like they don’t, doesn’t it?

I recently discovered one of my juvenile Red-tailed Hawks in flight on a Google Blogger blog, the image was “hot linked” to my web site galleries and I sent in a DMCA Copyright Infringement Notification to Google to have the image hot link removed. This is their reply and response to my notification:

Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement notice. We are in the process of disabling access to the content in question at the following URL(s):

http://birdsflyingpictures.blogspot.com/2013/01/mvscience-tailed-hawk.html

The content will be removed shortly.

Please let us know if we can assist you further. If you would like to file additional requests, we ask that you contact us by using the online forms at: www.google.com/support/go/legal as we do not accept add-on requests.

Regards,
The Google Team

I went to the offending URL to make sure that my image was no longer displayed on a Google Blogger Blog and this is what I saw:

Not only did they remove the hot link to my image they removed all of the content on that blogger’s post.

But wait; isn’t Google doing the exact same thing this blogger was doing by hot linking to my image files on Google’s new Image Search engine?

Yeah, they are, they are infringing in the SAME manner as the owner of this Google blog had been.

Shame on Google for not following their own terms of service in regards to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, shame, shame, shame.

Next question: Is Google’s New Image Search Violating The Law?

It sure looks that way to me.

Let’s visit the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s pages on Intellectual Property theft and read the statements on their Anti-piracy Warning Seal page: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/download-the-fbis-anti-piracy-warning-seal#unauthorized

Warning language specifying current penalties

FBI Anti-Piracy Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Okay, see the word “distribution” in the FBI’s warning language? Google’s update to their Image Search pages DOES distribute our works without our authorization. Is hot linking considered “reproduction” when our images show up full size on their Image Search pages? Well, I sure didn’t authorize them to have my image “reproduced” on their pages. Did you?

This page on the FBI’s website about Intellectual Property Theft is a VERY interesting read regarding Google’s update to their Image Search: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/anti-piracy

Additionally The FBI has a partnership page about Intellectual Property Rights which is also very informative: http://www.iprcenter.gov/

It appears to me that artists, photographers and other content providers whose works show up on Google’s Image Search results have the option of reporting Google to the FBI through their partners at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center for Copyright Infringement. http://www.iprcenter.gov/referral

I am seriously considering taking that action, Google isn’t listening to the artists, photographers and other content owner’s feelings on how wrong the changes are to Google’s Image Search, they think they are bigger than we are, but are they bigger and stronger than the FBI and its partners?

I wonder how many complaints through the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center for Copyright Infringement against Google it would take before the hot linking to our original files would be removed from Google’s update to their Image Search and that “View Original File” button would be removed?

Isn’t what Google is doing Criminal? Sure feels that way to me.

What Google has done isn’t “Fair Use”. If in accordance to the DMCA they have to remove our content that is hot linked on their Blogger blogs then in accordance with the DMCA Google needs to remove the hotlinks on Image Search to our files immediately, remove the “View Original File” button and stop facilitating the unauthorized distribution of our Copyrighted work.

Anything less is criminal.

Mia

See my previous post about this Google issue: Google has become the biggest image scraper of the Millennium

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and none of the content above is to be considered legal advice, the opinions are my own and nothing more.

Google has become the biggest image scraper of the Millennium

By Mia McPherson, on February 1st, 2013%

Close up Chukar in the snow – Taken January 31, 2013

You might wonder why I have used this title but since the 25th of January changes have been made to Google Image Search that have infuriated webmasters, photographers, artists and many more.

It used to be that when you did an image search on Google you would see a page full of thumbnails and when you moused over the image it would show the link to where the image was stored on a server, for instance on mine http://www.onthewingphotography.com, and if you clicked a thumbnail it would load with the web site in the background. If the viewer wanted to see the full-sized image they would click the X and be on the web site.

The image above is a screen shot I made after searching in Google images for “mia mcpherson onthewingphotography Chukars” and I clicked on the image outlined in red. Then an image pops into a dark screen with some buttons on the side. Noticed that my site has not loaded in the background like it used to so the viewer could click the image and be on my site. Now to go to the site one must click the “View Page” button outlined in blue.

If you click image details (outlined in yellow) you would expect to read the EXIF information, for instance; the name of the copyright holder, contact information and camera settings. Not so, not so at all. Instead you go to a page that looks like this:

And if you click on any of the images the cycle is repeated again, you’d go to a page that looks like the one above where I have outlined key features in different colors.

Notice the tiny, almost unnoticeable, “Image may be subject to copyright“. Google fell flat on their faces with that one, there should be a sterner warning stating that “All images are copyrighted at the moment of creation, do not use without contacting the person who created it for permission” in a color that stands out to the viewer. People already think if they swipe an image off of a Google search that it is okay to use it. See my post on Palmlix.com and how the owner of that stinking wallpaper site thinks it is okay to steal images. It IS not okay to steal images from any search engine. Period.

Lets look at the button I outlined in green that says “View Original Image”, if you mouse over that button this is what you will see on your browser window’s status bar:

The changes Google have made since the 25th of January now hot link directly to your full-sized version on your server which increases the load on YOUR band width. I have unlimited bandwidth but some webmasters do not and this change could end up costing them more money and I don’t believe that Google has the right to do that. Not only that but I have no right-click protections set up on my blog and while I know that won’t stop ALL image theft it does deter some, GOOGLE has by-passed my protections and now offers up a hot-linked full size version of my file so viewers/scrapers/thieves do not even have to go to my site to swipe my images. Google has the right to display small-sized version of my images in searches but they have now taken it a step further and show the full image on a page where anyone can right-click and download my images.

I have routinely sent requests to Google when I find one of my images “hot linked” on a Google Bloggers blog and Google is obligated to take the image down or limit the Blog owners access to their site until it is according to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) so why does Google think that THEY can hot link to our images? I do not believe this “hot linking” to be ethical or legal. They are no better than the image thieves we file DMCA Takedown Notifications on when we find our images being infringed upon. This is from Wikipedia on the DMCA:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works.

Google is circumventing the program I have on my site to limit access to my copyrighted works. They are disseminating our copyrighted works. How is this NOT criminal?

With our images so easy to download we are facing even worse issues with copyright infringement.

Webmasters are furious because of these changes. Look at what has happened to my own stats:

This graph represents viewers that have come to my blog view Google referrals, the red dot is shown for the date of January 25th which is when this asinine change Google made was done. I had 86% fewer referrals from January 24th thru January 29th through JUST Google searches. Google is saying this change is good for the webmasters. How can that be? Does Google think we are all that ignorant?

I do not have ads that generate income on my sites but many webmasters do and now they are losing money because people don’t even have to go to your site to view all the “pretty pictures”. Even Google is losing money for the sites that have Google Ad Sense ads on them, how stupid is that?

Google has made a serious mistake, they are looking at class action lawsuits being filed against their company. As a photographer and copyright holder I’d be happy to join any and all of those class action law suits against Google.

The way I see it Google is crapping on our rights as artists, creators and photographers. And I am furious about it.

More information can be found here about these changes:

Google Updates Image Search, Artists to See Changes

An article in the LATimes (I commented, they have not approved my comment at the time I am writing this)

Google’s own Blog Post about this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/01/faster-image-search.html (Yes, I commented there too) The people that do like the changes seem to be the viewers (and some image thieves) but all of the “publishers” are angry about it. Even the sleazy wallpaper site owners who steal OUR images.

Google’s post about this on G+

NaturePhotographers.net: Google “Images” change hurting websites and photographers

Is Google’s New Image Search Increasing Or Decreasing Your Traffic?

DPReview.com: Google updates Image Search with preview panel

Notice that Google has NOT responded to people’s questions about this change.

It is my opinion that Google has crossed the line and that they have become the world’s largest scraper site. They have sunk lower than the nastiest image thieves.

I am checking into ways I can prevent Google from offering my full-sized images up to the image thieves right on Google’s Image Search pages and I am NOT alone. Webmasters, photographers, artists and more are all seriously considering blocking Google’s robots from indexing our images. I am considering activating a WordPress plugin to prevent hot linking for images on my blog. I may have to go back and re-upload much smaller versions of all of my images on this blog and put huge copyright notices on each image.

You bet I am upset. Google has gone too far and I am simply not willing to take a back seat about this issue.

Mia

Changes to On The Wing Photography

By Mia McPherson, on January 11th, 2013%

Antelope Island mountains covered in snow

Because of image theft I have made some changes to my blog, one of the first that will be noticed by people who have subscribed to my blog is that I will only be using a summary for my published posts from now on. The reason for that is that content scrapers can access my images through my RSS feed. It pains me that I feel that I have to do this because there may be some of you who read my posts in your RSS feed rather than on my site.

Another things I have done is removed the link I had up at the top to my Bird and Nature W a l l p a p e r s and I removed those images from my site entirely. What started off as a gift from me to my viewers may have caused the image thieves to find my site and begin lifting my images from it.

I also changed or removed the word w a l l p a p e r everywhere so that the content scrapers don’t pick that up on a Google search. If you have a blog really consider not having the word w a l l p a p e r anywhere on it and don’t use it as a tag or a category.

I found a plugin that can block access to my blog by country and I have blocked a few countries from being able to see my blog because some of the content scrapers live there. It won’t stop all of the pukes that steal images but it will slow down some of them.

I am particularly fed up with w a l l p a p e r sites that steal our images to get money from advertisements that the rotten jerks place on their sites and how difficult it can be to get the images removed.

Seeing how rampant copyright infringement is on the web is disheartening at times. This is one of them.

Mia