The Takedown

Okay so a bit about the DMCA Takedown Notice I received a couple of days ago and mentioned on Twitter.

First of all, if you are unsure what I mean by “DMCA Takedown Notice”, or even if you think you are sure what I mean by “DMCA Takedown Notice”, I urge you to read Devanshu’s overview of it on DeepBackwardPoint.com. It is succinct and clear, even if it is in specific reference to the BCCI and Twitter and not, in my case, Destination360.com and WordPress.

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Here is the text of the e-mail I received from a “Ryan M.” at WordPress:

“Hi there,

We have received a DMCA Takedown Notice (http://automattic.com/dmca/) for the following material published on your WordPress.com site:

https://limitedovers.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/st-kitts-and-nevis.jpg

As such, we were legally required to remove the material from our servers.

If you wish to challenge this notice we will be happy to provide you with all of the appropriate details.

Thank you.
—
Ryan M.
WordPress.com | Automattic (sic)”

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As you can see from the file name above, the picture was of the island of St.Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, the home of the Test ground, Warner Park.

After doing some digging, I found the post that included the offending picture. It’s of a beach, not the slightest bit cricket related, and it was lifted from a travel site called, as I mentioned above, Destination360.com.

I am not going to link the post, because it was from a million years ago and reading it made me cringe. Finding it should not be difficult, but I am not going to make it any easier for you.

It’s utterly random, however, a picture of a beach on a cricket blog from a two year old post finally ending up the radar screen of a lawyer somewhere who sets the wheels of the DMCA into motion. It all seems like such a waste of time and money.

The time and money of WordPress, and the time and money of Destination360.com.

All of that said: I should not have used the picture.

Again, from Devanshu’s post:

“DMCA is bad law. It’s been bad for 14 years. But your public link to pirated content? Let’s not pretend that was a great idea either.

Cricket rights around the world are a complicated matter. Being smart about what you post on the Internet is not complicated at all.”

Like I said: I should not have used the picture.

Unfortunately, it was not the only time I have violated copyright with an image. I do it more often than I care to admit. Sometimes, quite simply, a story is better told when there is a photo included – and sometimes there just isn’t an image in the Public Domain that tells the part of the story that I need it to.

I don’t feel great about it. And that’s why I am going to stop doing it.

I will not be taking down old images, but from here on out, I will not be using pirated photos. That is my pledge to you, dear reader. And it is one that I feel pretty good about.

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