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Developer Exposes Copyright Infringers On Twitter

Posted by kdawson on from the better-than-paying-lawyers dept.

snitty writes "Wil Shipley, developer of Delicious Library, found some applications on the iTunes App Store that were using without permission some images from his popular desktop application. He outed them on Twitter. The team at Technically Legal broke down the story and the take-home messages for using other people's images."

9 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmm by Itninja · · Score: 4, Informative

    When the President does it, it's not illegal.

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  2. Re:Hmm by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Macbook, Starcraft, Peggle... Are those fair use applications?

    More to the point: did he try to pass them off as his own? No.

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    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  3. The Image by FornaxChemica · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The copyrighted image is actually the "woodgrain background", quoting Technically Legal. Is this a joke? The whole story is about a background texture being stolen? Some actual artists out there who've been ripped off must be feel pretty distressed right now.

    1. Re:The Image by WarwickRyan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bingo.

      Why didn't he just email them and ask them either not to use his pictures, or to pay him for them?

      Seems to me like the real reason for him being angry is that the iPhone application he's complaining about looks to be basically an iPhone version of his desktop application. Someone beat him to it on the iPhone and he's mad..

    2. Re:The Image by garcia · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why didn't he just email them and ask them either not to use his pictures, or to pay him for them?

      Because sometimes even when you do both of those things, you get nowhere fast. Twitter is something that a lot of people utilize and it's a good way to go about expressing your frustration and getting the word out to a lot of people (including the offender) quickly.

    3. Re:The Image by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Outing someone for infringing your copyright is akin to vigilante justice.

      WTF? No it's not, not at all.

      Vigilante justice would be breaking into his house and stealing stuff worth what you consider to be the value of a license to use your copyrighted work.

      Beating him up would also be vigilante justice.

      Do you even know what "vigilante" means? Holy cow man. Yelling "Stop! Thief!" is not vigilantism, and neither is calling someone who steals your picture a copyright infringer.

      If it does turn out it's similar but not his texture then he's opened himself up for law suits for defamation.

      Not really, do you understand what defamation is? It's damaging one's reputation, character, or good name by slander or libel.

      Now, slander is a false statement injurious to a person's reputation. Libel is essentially the same with print.

      All that to say, if the person saying/writing it believes it to be the truth, then it is not slander or libel and therefor not defamation. Slander and Libel, and therefore defamation, are notoriously difficult to prove. Else we would not have the political system we have.

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  4. Re:He's complaining about... by diamondsw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Delicious Library is one of the most popular Mac shareware apps, and is exceptionally well-designed. Those wood bookcases are central to its UI look and feel. And he's already written an iPhone app - except Amazon decided to yank all mobile licenses to their data. Yes, that's right, he pays Amazon for access to their data, so it is legal use and paid for.

    So your entire post is written like a true asshat who has no idea what's going on, and has contributed nothing. But that never stops Slashdot.

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  5. Re:He's complaining about... by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dude... thanks for telling.

    I though this was about the icons and glyphs, which in many high-quality applications are actually designed by external design studios for lots of money. I can imagine getting pissed about somebody taking something which you actually had to pay quite a bit for.

    But this is just a woodgrain texture, and a pretty ugly one at it.
    I mean seriously, it isn't hard to make a woodgrain texture lots better than that one:
    5 minute photoshop tutorial: http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/photoshop-wood-texture
    Free windows program for making wood textures: http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm

    Heck, for all we know he actually used one of these or a source image, in which case he couldn't even claim copyright over it since anybody who made it themselves using such methods would end up with an identical texture.

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  6. Priorities by Rocketship+Underpant · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wish he'd spend less time Twittering and blogging and more time fixing the bugs in Delicious Library 2 that have been there since the beta. There's like, what, one update a year for that application? I don't even bother running it any more.

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