But, do you remember when someone advertised 0.0.0.0/0, and that ended up sending everything in the wrong directions?:) That was... ummm... around 1997 sometime, I think.
I haven't been on a residential provider yet, where their DNS worked properly.
I'm not rude enough to run my own nameserver at home. I piggy back off of my work networks, with finely tuned nameservers.:) It's amazing how much nicer they work, when there are a million people checking out youtube, myspace, and facebook. (oh, and the wonderful world of pron).
Actually, that's a lot of the reason that they made some of the root nameservers multicast. Have a look at F, and I through M. It's not perfect, but it moved the root servers away from a handful of central points.
Back in the day, the MAE's had their bandwidth graphs online. You could see the aggregate for all ports, and (if I recall correctly) utilization by port. Ports were listed out on another page, so you knew the port names, IP's and providers.
It would have been a pretty simple matter to flood traffic towards a few specific ports in a couple MAE's, and watch things break.
Now there are a lot more peerings, and those peerings are significantly more robust. It was one thing to kill a 100Mb/s interconnection (oohh, and that was fast then too), but filling up an OC192 will take a lot more work. To overwhelm a MAE, it wouldn't just be one or two OC192's, it would be a significant number of them.
Have a look at the 1998 MAE services description. If you dig around a little bit on there, you'll see that they used to publish the IP's of each customer interface. "Ahh, lets knock down provider X", sure, you see the IP's of every interface. Flood them to death.:) Of course back then, most people were sitting on 56k dialups, which never really saw 56k, and those frequently connected through modem servers on a T1. You may be able to support 28 dialup modems on a T1, but they'd oversubscribe them like crazy.
Now, people have bandwidth to do more damage, but it's much less likely to do damage to the core of the Internet. The real damage can occur on small sites, with single servers up on relatively slow lines.
I was actually surprised there hadn't been a successful attack on some major peerings. I always assumed someone would manage a sustained attack that would do damage. Now it's than much more complex, where you don't get the luxury of bandwidth graphs on the target.:) The only real successful large scale "attacks" I've seen lately were where one provider got annoyed by another provider, and cut off their peering on short notice.
That really depends on where you are, and what is available.
I found This Reference at the USGS. Los Angeles uses groundwater (river), and I know they have reservoirs, but they also use groundwater to supplement the groundwater.
If you happen to be sitting on a nice mountain, with a good sized lake, fed by snow melt, and the snow level remain enough to keep the lake fed, then you'd be doing very well.
If you look around, a lot of airports and power plants are situated very close to sea level, on the waterfront. Airports use this for noise abatement (the planes can take off over the water to keep from annoying people). Nuclear plants require lots of sea water for cooling.
So, ports, sure they could be rebuilt. But have you ever watched what happens around the planning of new facilities? Years upon years of arguing points. People would argue about the environmental impact of the new facility, and the remains of the old facility.
I don't know what the thresholds are, but I'm sure once you reach a critical point (say 10'), more cities will have problems quicker. Say between 10' and 15', there could be not only one or two, but dozens of major coastal cities that would need to be rebuilt simultaneously.
Don't forget about fresh water reserves too. Water wells would start becoming contaminated with sea water too. You could rebuild the city near by, but can you restore their essential supplies like drinking water?
Not to argue the point, because it's always a holy war with folks, but there's some logistics to that, which you failed to see.
If the seas rise by 10 to 20 feet at the coastlines, coastal areas will flood. That means the ports will be under water, and nothing will come in by sea. International imports will be severely hampered. Pretty much, if you can't bring it in by plane, it won't happen.
If coastal areas flood, major highways, bridges, and train tracks will become unusable.
People will migrate from the flooded areas to higher ground (like, your 900 feet up), but food supplies will be very limited, and transportation will be very difficult without oil coming into the country.
So, even people living on high ground that won't be flooded will be affected.
In my warm fuzzy utopian world (it's all in my head, don't worry, I know it doesn't exist). The buyers would be paid back, with the option to license from the real owner or stop using the images. The pimp... err... stock photo folks, would be held liable. The thief would be liable. And the asshole lawyers, well, they would get what we all hope of lawyers.
(bringing on the lawyer jokes)
What do you do if you see a lawyer drowning?
Throw him a brick.
How do you get a lawyer down from a tree?
Cut the rope
What do you call one lawyer thrown off a bridge into a river?
Pollution.
What do you call all the lawyers thrown off a bridge?
Solution.
What do you have when 100 lawyers are buried up to their neck in sand?
Not enough sand.
How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?
His lips are moving.
And finally, a story.....
An lawyer dies, and goes to heaven... oh, who am I kidding.
The covert operation worked. We sent in an agent under the cover of darkness to snip the fuse cord between stages. I don't know who they were fooling, no one uses solid fuel, and centuries old fuse cord in between them.
Your operation was taken down with fingernail clippers smuggled through customs! HAHAHA!
Now you know why the TSA had such a hard on for banning fingernail clippers. It was to reduce the number of clippers in circulation, for the protection of North Korea! Little did they expect that we'd hide them in a bag of Doritos! Not only great for smuggling, but they made a nice munchie snack afterwords. Did I forget to mention, these were our Dutch operatives?:)
I still feel sorry for the guy with the Bic lighter that had to light the first stage. It brings a new meaning to "light it and RUN".
BTW, this is all classified, so don't tell anyone else, ok?:)
Actually, you don't have to answer anything. It's fair enough to answer, like you said, name, rank, serial number. When they look at your drivers license and say "Mr. Smythe", I can answer "yes". Well, and other tidbits, like "is this your car?" "yes". "do you have insurance?" "yes"
Outside of that, it is strongly suggested that you don't answer anything.
I REALLY upset a police officer once. I answered simply and honestly. I did not elaborate, to avoid making mistakes that could be used against me. I swear to god, this was the conversation.
"Do you know how fast you were going!?"
"Yes sir. To the best of my knowledge, I was doing the speed limit, the same as all the other vehicles around me?"
"NO! How fast were you going a few miles back when I saw you?!"
"I don't know where you saw me sir, but to the best of my knowledge I've been doing the speed limit, except when driving slower."
"NO! I saw you doing at least 85! You were flying past the other cars like they were standing still!"
"Sir, I don't know what you are referencing."
"You're really starting to piss me off. I'm going to walk away for a second, and then come back up here. When I come back, I want you to tell me the truth!"
"Yes sir."
[takes my license, walks to his car, walks back]
"Ok, how fast were you going?!"
"Sir, to the best of my knowledge, I was doing the speed limit, the same as the other cars around me."
He then proceeded to tell me to get out of the car, walked me to the back of my car, had me spread, patted me down, and told me "You're going to jail!" It was all a tactic to get me to confess.
He continued for a few more minutes, all the while I'm thinking "This sucks, I'm late to work now."
He had nothing on me. No evidence I was speeding. My testimony that I was doing the speed limit. Even if I was wrong, it was "to the best of my knowledge". Not a lie, just a misperception. Maybe my speedometer was wrong. Maybe the other cars were going faster than the speed limit. Maybe I didn't really care. The truth was, for the last two or three miles, I had been doing just under the speed limit. Traffic had slowed to well under the speed limit, and then back up to about 5mph under the speed limit. I was following traffic. He was bored, and wanted an easy ticket. I was in a convertible with the top down. Maybe I was busy listening to the radio, and hadn't paid any attention to my speed.
After he realized I wasn't going to confess to anything, he calmed down a lot, and we had a nice chat. Of course, his lights were on, on the side of a busy road, so other drivers saw this and slowed down. Having a car pulled over does more for traffic control than writing hundreds of tickets.
There's a good video from a defense attorney, who says never say anything. You'll screw up. If I were to tell him this story, I'm sure he'd say I was just lucky. Watch the video, and you'll understand. Name, rank, serial. That's all that you say. Otherwise, use your 5th amendment rights, regardless if you're innocent or not.
Well, IANAL, but I've never heard of anyone going to court for receiving/possession of stolen goods, when they believed they were purchased legitimately in good faith.
From what I've seen, if you go to the guy who's selling TV's out of the back of his van behind the mini-mart, then you have no reason to believe that he's legitimate.
The Internet is a huge gray market though. Even "professional" appearing sites can be straight con jobs. You may or may not get your product. You may or may not get stolen products. You may get your credit card charged all the way to its limit. etc, etc, etc.
I'd almost feel safer shopping at a flea market.:)
Well, "C" has an invoice and a receipt (or they should), so they have documented the purchase of the images. If I were in their shoes, I'd believe I was in the right too. Of course, I wouldn't go after clients. All it can do is hurt one or both parties.
You are right though, with the big picture in view, their legitimate claim is suddenly the belief of a legitimate claim.
What is more entertaining is when they use a subset of the picture, thinking it's the whole thing. "I have this." Well, I have the original photo, uncropped, plus the other 500+ pictures shot during that shoot. What do you have?:)
My other pictures have always been my proof. Of course, I thumbnail them if I ever want or need to show someone, so they get a little 320x240 picture, and I'm still sitting on the full resolution picture.:)
Oh, that's a whole other story.:) Once he's proven innocent of the charges, he can then go after the company for lost work, blah, blah, blah. Hopefully he has a very sympathetic jury.
Just because you think someone is a thief, it's a bad idea to hunt down everyone he knows and tell them so, especially where there's an economic impact.
I can't believe their lawyers let them do that. It's usually a matter of STFU until court. I would guess they know they're on shaky ground, so they're trying to pressure him by hitting his clients, but that's really going to hurt them.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's the way it will probably work out.
Here's how I understand the case. If you step back a little, it will all be clear.
"A", the artist, created the work.
"B", the 3rd party thief, posed as an original artist, and submitted them to "C" for sale.
"C", the stock photo site.
"C" purchased the images from "B", probably under an exclusive license. "C" therefore has legitimate claim to the images. They found out that "A" has the same images on his site, so they filed the complaint. This is perfectly legitimate.
"A" countered the claim saying that he was the original artist.
"C" is still sitting on an invoice, a paid receipt, a signed (electronically, probably) contract saying that they own the photos.
Who do you believe? The person that you've done business with, or a third party?
This unfortunately happens all the time. I was talking to someone who showed me their "original web site, created by a local graphics art firm." I immediately recognized several images as stock photos, and the layout looked like a template. A few days later while doing unrelated work, I found the template on templatemonster.com. Ahhh, it was a template, that the local firm populated with their specific details (we do.. our number is.. email us at..). They confronted the local firm about it. They insisted that it was all original work, even though it was easy to see otherwise. The site owner chose to believe the local firm. Why? Because they had done business with them, and I was just a new guy in the picture.
I could copy down a handful of photos from a stock image place, upload them to somewhere that I had cooperation with, that would put whatever timestamps I wished on, and then say "Oh no, I made those last year". Does that make me right? Nope.
A good thief wouldn't turn around and say "oh ya, I stole it, sorry 'bout that." They would defend their story until it was proven completely wrong. I worked in a jail once (long long ago), and I was told on day 1, "every person in here will tell you how they're innocent." Either the legal system is really screwed, or liars and thieves are frequently one in the same. Heck, even in a traffic stop, people lie.
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"ya, about 55."
"no you were doing 85. 30mph faster than the rest of the cars on the road."
Is "C" really liable for damages on property that they bought in good faith? No. They can be sued. They will probably agree to remove the copyrighted images and turn over the contact information "B". That won't necessarily get you very far though. What if the only contact information on "B" is a Hotmail address, and a PayPal account, which indicates the owner is in Russia? Good luck suing him.
Good faith goes a long way in court, especially where there is a paper trail.
The same applies to other things.
If you go online and buy say a new computer. It's 20% less than retail, so you assume you're dealing with a legitimate wholesaler. As it turns out, that person worked in a computer store, stole the computer, and sold it online. Do you believe you are criminally or civilly liable? Because it is stolen merchandise, you may have to forfeit the property, but you likely won't be criminally liable because you bought it in good faith. On the other hand, if you knew the person was a thief, you'd run into a long list of legal problems.
Another way to look at it is, go buy something at a pawn shop. How do you know that "B", the person who sold it to the pawn shop, was actually the owner of that property? You don't. You do hold onto the receipt, just in case. It proves your innocence (or at least helps to establish it).
It wasn't Slashdotted. It was already hit by several other big sites. Slashdot's a day behind on knocking his site down.:)
There's a link for the cache in the comments here. A blog posting, and lots of comments most of which saying the same thing. Get a good lawyer.
They probably bought his images from a 3rd party, so they believe they own them. They'll hold onto that belief until it's gone through court. It'll probably turn out that it's almost impossible to track down the 3rd party, so all he'll eventually get is for the stock photo site to take down his work.
He'll have to just get used to giving higher numbers to explain other pains so he can get the proper treatment. He'd probably rate something like a gunshot wound as a 7 or 8, while other people would pass out or rate it as an "OH MY GOD IT HURTS!"
I have a very good tolerance for a lot of drugs. Probably not as good as yours though. I'm normal and functional on normal dose of things, where most people would be lethargic, or taking a nap.
The funny one is that I have a very high tolerance to nitrous oxide. My dentist has my file marked so there's no question on this. They turn it on, I barely feel anything, and can hold a coherent conversation with it up to "max". The first time I went to him, we went through the drill of "this is how you breathe" two or three times before he realized that I really had a high tolerance for it. I guess it's a really good thing too.
When I moved across the country once, I put everything in a moving van. I unpacked all my household stuff, and then brought my tools and stuff to a friend's place. My car stuff included my 15 pound NOS tank. It fell over just before I got to his place, and the release valve cracked. I went in to get it and my tools out, and noticed I was feeling a little lightheaded just as I walked in. The whole back of the truck was full of NOS that had been released over the last couple minutes. I turned and got out real quick into fresh air and waited for my head to clear. I took a deep breath of fresh air and held it to go back in to remove the tank.
I've heard of people suffocating by releasing NOS tanks in enclosed space. Usually they were attempting some recreational use, and the next person to find them is the one who calls the coroner. Hey kids, anesthesia is best left to the professionals, who can stay coherent when you're not, and have you hooked up to a blood oxygen sensor.:)
On your idea, have you ever paid attention to the audience at a movie. Sure, some will flinch when the big bad gruesome monster rips the head off the innocent girl, and proceeds to munch on her body like an ear of corn. (speaking of which, I'm hungry.) Every guy in the theater will react, somewhere between flinching and downright crying if a character gets kicked in the balls. For some reason, the girls will smile or laugh. I guess it's all on which side of that action you've been on in the past.
I've confused a few people. I've both donated blood, and had IV's put in. They always say to look away, but I watch, so I can understand what they're doing. The worst was, when I had eye surgery, I was the first patient of the day, and the stuff in the IV (I don't remember what they administered first) was really cold. They apologized, but there wasn't much choice. Use it, or make an appointment for another time. The IV felt weird, as they slid it into the vein. The feeling of my hand and arm chilling from the inside out was disturbing. Not enough for me to react weird, just enough for me to talk about it. They were entertained.:)
But can you mandate no wedding rings, no hair clips (usually women only), no pocket change, no pens with metal clips. No... well, run them through a high sensitivity metal detector before they go into the DC?
I've actually been bad about the drinks. One facility didn't care, since I only drank in my own cage. It was my problem, not theirs. We had plenty of screws that would inadvertantly bounce off of the top of live servers, and rattle their way down to the floor, but my worst drink incident got my table (in my cage) wet, and almost (almost) got my laptop wet. The biggest problem was, I didn't have anything else to drink until after I left. You'd have to be just plain dumb to put an open drink container on top of a server.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much better now. Not perfect, just better.
But, do you remember when someone advertised 0.0.0.0/0, and that ended up sending everything in the wrong directions? :) That was ... ummm ... around 1997 sometime, I think.
Oh please god, don't make those suggestions.
I haven't been on a residential provider yet, where their DNS worked properly.
I'm not rude enough to run my own nameserver at home. I piggy back off of my work networks, with finely tuned nameservers. :) It's amazing how much nicer they work, when there are a million people checking out youtube, myspace, and facebook. (oh, and the wonderful world of pron).
Actually, that's a lot of the reason that they made some of the root nameservers multicast. Have a look at F, and I through M. It's not perfect, but it moved the root servers away from a handful of central points.
Back in the day, the MAE's had their bandwidth graphs online. You could see the aggregate for all ports, and (if I recall correctly) utilization by port. Ports were listed out on another page, so you knew the port names, IP's and providers.
It would have been a pretty simple matter to flood traffic towards a few specific ports in a couple MAE's, and watch things break.
Now there are a lot more peerings, and those peerings are significantly more robust. It was one thing to kill a 100Mb/s interconnection (oohh, and that was fast then too), but filling up an OC192 will take a lot more work. To overwhelm a MAE, it wouldn't just be one or two OC192's, it would be a significant number of them.
Have a look at the 1998 MAE services description. If you dig around a little bit on there, you'll see that they used to publish the IP's of each customer interface. "Ahh, lets knock down provider X", sure, you see the IP's of every interface. Flood them to death. :) Of course back then, most people were sitting on 56k dialups, which never really saw 56k, and those frequently connected through modem servers on a T1. You may be able to support 28 dialup modems on a T1, but they'd oversubscribe them like crazy.
Now, people have bandwidth to do more damage, but it's much less likely to do damage to the core of the Internet. The real damage can occur on small sites, with single servers up on relatively slow lines.
I was actually surprised there hadn't been a successful attack on some major peerings. I always assumed someone would manage a sustained attack that would do damage. Now it's than much more complex, where you don't get the luxury of bandwidth graphs on the target. :) The only real successful large scale "attacks" I've seen lately were where one provider got annoyed by another provider, and cut off their peering on short notice.
It didn't start with a nuclear strike. They had operatives on the ground already. Watch the 1st episode again. :)
Funny that. I knew a porn company who someone had put the word "Nintendo" in the meta tags. They did receive a C&D from Nintendo. :)
If I hadn't seen it myself, I would have assumed it was just written for the comic.
That really depends on where you are, and what is available.
I found This Reference at the USGS. Los Angeles uses groundwater (river), and I know they have reservoirs, but they also use groundwater to supplement the groundwater.
If you happen to be sitting on a nice mountain, with a good sized lake, fed by snow melt, and the snow level remain enough to keep the lake fed, then you'd be doing very well.
Aw, come on, you have to laugh once in a while. It was a joke.
No (obviously), but it would depend on how fast the water rises.
Besides just the pesky problem of the port, there's the infrastructure that goes with it.
For just one example, at 10', Manhattan would start looking like Venice. Tunnels, railways, and 3 major airports would become useless. There's a lot of infrastructure to rebuild elsewhere.
If you look around, a lot of airports and power plants are situated very close to sea level, on the waterfront. Airports use this for noise abatement (the planes can take off over the water to keep from annoying people). Nuclear plants require lots of sea water for cooling.
So, ports, sure they could be rebuilt. But have you ever watched what happens around the planning of new facilities? Years upon years of arguing points. People would argue about the environmental impact of the new facility, and the remains of the old facility.
I don't know what the thresholds are, but I'm sure once you reach a critical point (say 10'), more cities will have problems quicker. Say between 10' and 15', there could be not only one or two, but dozens of major coastal cities that would need to be rebuilt simultaneously.
Don't forget about fresh water reserves too. Water wells would start becoming contaminated with sea water too. You could rebuild the city near by, but can you restore their essential supplies like drinking water?
Not to argue the point, because it's always a holy war with folks, but there's some logistics to that, which you failed to see.
If the seas rise by 10 to 20 feet at the coastlines, coastal areas will flood. That means the ports will be under water, and nothing will come in by sea. International imports will be severely hampered. Pretty much, if you can't bring it in by plane, it won't happen.
If coastal areas flood, major highways, bridges, and train tracks will become unusable.
People will migrate from the flooded areas to higher ground (like, your 900 feet up), but food supplies will be very limited, and transportation will be very difficult without oil coming into the country.
So, even people living on high ground that won't be flooded will be affected.
I would hope so.
In my warm fuzzy utopian world (it's all in my head, don't worry, I know it doesn't exist). The buyers would be paid back, with the option to license from the real owner or stop using the images. The pimp ... err ... stock photo folks, would be held liable. The thief would be liable. And the asshole lawyers, well, they would get what we all hope of lawyers.
(bringing on the lawyer jokes)
What do you do if you see a lawyer drowning?
Throw him a brick.
How do you get a lawyer down from a tree?
Cut the rope
What do you call one lawyer thrown off a bridge into a river?
Pollution.
What do you call all the lawyers thrown off a bridge?
Solution.
What do you have when 100 lawyers are buried up to their neck in sand?
Not enough sand.
How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?
His lips are moving.
And finally, a story.....
An lawyer dies, and goes to heaven ... oh, who am I kidding.
This is going to be messy, isn't it? :)
I hope it comes to the courts attention, rather than just all us geeks on Slashdot.
The covert operation worked. We sent in an agent under the cover of darkness to snip the fuse cord between stages. I don't know who they were fooling, no one uses solid fuel, and centuries old fuse cord in between them.
Your operation was taken down with fingernail clippers smuggled through customs! HAHAHA!
Now you know why the TSA had such a hard on for banning fingernail clippers. It was to reduce the number of clippers in circulation, for the protection of North Korea! Little did they expect that we'd hide them in a bag of Doritos! Not only great for smuggling, but they made a nice munchie snack afterwords. Did I forget to mention, these were our Dutch operatives? :)
I still feel sorry for the guy with the Bic lighter that had to light the first stage. It brings a new meaning to "light it and RUN".
BTW, this is all classified, so don't tell anyone else, ok? :)
Actually, you don't have to answer anything. It's fair enough to answer, like you said, name, rank, serial number. When they look at your drivers license and say "Mr. Smythe", I can answer "yes". Well, and other tidbits, like "is this your car?" "yes". "do you have insurance?" "yes"
Outside of that, it is strongly suggested that you don't answer anything.
I REALLY upset a police officer once. I answered simply and honestly. I did not elaborate, to avoid making mistakes that could be used against me. I swear to god, this was the conversation.
"Do you know how fast you were going!?"
"Yes sir. To the best of my knowledge, I was doing the speed limit, the same as all the other vehicles around me?"
"NO! How fast were you going a few miles back when I saw you?!"
"I don't know where you saw me sir, but to the best of my knowledge I've been doing the speed limit, except when driving slower."
"NO! I saw you doing at least 85! You were flying past the other cars like they were standing still!"
"Sir, I don't know what you are referencing."
"You're really starting to piss me off. I'm going to walk away for a second, and then come back up here. When I come back, I want you to tell me the truth!"
"Yes sir."
[takes my license, walks to his car, walks back]
"Ok, how fast were you going?!"
"Sir, to the best of my knowledge, I was doing the speed limit, the same as the other cars around me."
He then proceeded to tell me to get out of the car, walked me to the back of my car, had me spread, patted me down, and told me "You're going to jail!" It was all a tactic to get me to confess.
He continued for a few more minutes, all the while I'm thinking "This sucks, I'm late to work now."
He had nothing on me. No evidence I was speeding. My testimony that I was doing the speed limit. Even if I was wrong, it was "to the best of my knowledge". Not a lie, just a misperception. Maybe my speedometer was wrong. Maybe the other cars were going faster than the speed limit. Maybe I didn't really care. The truth was, for the last two or three miles, I had been doing just under the speed limit. Traffic had slowed to well under the speed limit, and then back up to about 5mph under the speed limit. I was following traffic. He was bored, and wanted an easy ticket. I was in a convertible with the top down. Maybe I was busy listening to the radio, and hadn't paid any attention to my speed.
After he realized I wasn't going to confess to anything, he calmed down a lot, and we had a nice chat. Of course, his lights were on, on the side of a busy road, so other drivers saw this and slowed down. Having a car pulled over does more for traffic control than writing hundreds of tickets.
There's a good video from a defense attorney, who says never say anything. You'll screw up. If I were to tell him this story, I'm sure he'd say I was just lucky. Watch the video, and you'll understand. Name, rank, serial. That's all that you say. Otherwise, use your 5th amendment rights, regardless if you're innocent or not.
Well, IANAL, so consult a lawyer for proper advice in your jurisdiction, but...
They have proof it was published.
You don't have proof it was published.
Unless you can provide proof, you're probably out of luck.
Oh ya, if he can get a lawyer to work on contingency, they'll make some decent money.
I can't believe their lawyers let them do that. It was a stupid mistake only done by kids and newbie business people.
Well, IANAL, but I've never heard of anyone going to court for receiving/possession of stolen goods, when they believed they were purchased legitimately in good faith.
From what I've seen, if you go to the guy who's selling TV's out of the back of his van behind the mini-mart, then you have no reason to believe that he's legitimate.
The Internet is a huge gray market though. Even "professional" appearing sites can be straight con jobs. You may or may not get your product. You may or may not get stolen products. You may get your credit card charged all the way to its limit. etc, etc, etc.
I'd almost feel safer shopping at a flea market. :)
Well, "C" has an invoice and a receipt (or they should), so they have documented the purchase of the images. If I were in their shoes, I'd believe I was in the right too. Of course, I wouldn't go after clients. All it can do is hurt one or both parties.
You are right though, with the big picture in view, their legitimate claim is suddenly the belief of a legitimate claim.
What is more entertaining is when they use a subset of the picture, thinking it's the whole thing. "I have this." Well, I have the original photo, uncropped, plus the other 500+ pictures shot during that shoot. What do you have? :)
My other pictures have always been my proof. Of course, I thumbnail them if I ever want or need to show someone, so they get a little 320x240 picture, and I'm still sitting on the full resolution picture. :)
Oh, that's a whole other story. :) Once he's proven innocent of the charges, he can then go after the company for lost work, blah, blah, blah. Hopefully he has a very sympathetic jury.
Just because you think someone is a thief, it's a bad idea to hunt down everyone he knows and tell them so, especially where there's an economic impact.
I can't believe their lawyers let them do that. It's usually a matter of STFU until court. I would guess they know they're on shaky ground, so they're trying to pressure him by hitting his clients, but that's really going to hurt them.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's the way it will probably work out.
Here's how I understand the case. If you step back a little, it will all be clear.
"A", the artist, created the work.
"B", the 3rd party thief, posed as an original artist, and submitted them to "C" for sale.
"C", the stock photo site.
"C" purchased the images from "B", probably under an exclusive license. "C" therefore has legitimate claim to the images. They found out that "A" has the same images on his site, so they filed the complaint. This is perfectly legitimate.
"A" countered the claim saying that he was the original artist.
"C" is still sitting on an invoice, a paid receipt, a signed (electronically, probably) contract saying that they own the photos.
Who do you believe? The person that you've done business with, or a third party?
This unfortunately happens all the time. I was talking to someone who showed me their "original web site, created by a local graphics art firm." I immediately recognized several images as stock photos, and the layout looked like a template. A few days later while doing unrelated work, I found the template on templatemonster.com. Ahhh, it was a template, that the local firm populated with their specific details (we do.. our number is.. email us at..). They confronted the local firm about it. They insisted that it was all original work, even though it was easy to see otherwise. The site owner chose to believe the local firm. Why? Because they had done business with them, and I was just a new guy in the picture.
I could copy down a handful of photos from a stock image place, upload them to somewhere that I had cooperation with, that would put whatever timestamps I wished on, and then say "Oh no, I made those last year". Does that make me right? Nope.
A good thief wouldn't turn around and say "oh ya, I stole it, sorry 'bout that." They would defend their story until it was proven completely wrong. I worked in a jail once (long long ago), and I was told on day 1, "every person in here will tell you how they're innocent." Either the legal system is really screwed, or liars and thieves are frequently one in the same. Heck, even in a traffic stop, people lie.
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"ya, about 55."
"no you were doing 85. 30mph faster than the rest of the cars on the road."
Is "C" really liable for damages on property that they bought in good faith? No. They can be sued. They will probably agree to remove the copyrighted images and turn over the contact information "B". That won't necessarily get you very far though. What if the only contact information on "B" is a Hotmail address, and a PayPal account, which indicates the owner is in Russia? Good luck suing him.
Good faith goes a long way in court, especially where there is a paper trail.
The same applies to other things.
If you go online and buy say a new computer. It's 20% less than retail, so you assume you're dealing with a legitimate wholesaler. As it turns out, that person worked in a computer store, stole the computer, and sold it online. Do you believe you are criminally or civilly liable? Because it is stolen merchandise, you may have to forfeit the property, but you likely won't be criminally liable because you bought it in good faith. On the other hand, if you knew the person was a thief, you'd run into a long list of legal problems.
Another way to look at it is, go buy something at a pawn shop. How do you know that "B", the person who sold it to the pawn shop, was actually the owner of that property? You don't. You do hold onto the receipt, just in case. It proves your innocence (or at least helps to establish it).
It wasn't Slashdotted. It was already hit by several other big sites. Slashdot's a day behind on knocking his site down. :)
There's a link for the cache in the comments here. A blog posting, and lots of comments most of which saying the same thing. Get a good lawyer.
They probably bought his images from a 3rd party, so they believe they own them. They'll hold onto that belief until it's gone through court. It'll probably turn out that it's almost impossible to track down the 3rd party, so all he'll eventually get is for the stock photo site to take down his work.
I only have one word. Ouch!
He'll have to just get used to giving higher numbers to explain other pains so he can get the proper treatment. He'd probably rate something like a gunshot wound as a 7 or 8, while other people would pass out or rate it as an "OH MY GOD IT HURTS!"
I have a very good tolerance for a lot of drugs. Probably not as good as yours though. I'm normal and functional on normal dose of things, where most people would be lethargic, or taking a nap.
The funny one is that I have a very high tolerance to nitrous oxide. My dentist has my file marked so there's no question on this. They turn it on, I barely feel anything, and can hold a coherent conversation with it up to "max". The first time I went to him, we went through the drill of "this is how you breathe" two or three times before he realized that I really had a high tolerance for it. I guess it's a really good thing too.
When I moved across the country once, I put everything in a moving van. I unpacked all my household stuff, and then brought my tools and stuff to a friend's place. My car stuff included my 15 pound NOS tank. It fell over just before I got to his place, and the release valve cracked. I went in to get it and my tools out, and noticed I was feeling a little lightheaded just as I walked in. The whole back of the truck was full of NOS that had been released over the last couple minutes. I turned and got out real quick into fresh air and waited for my head to clear. I took a deep breath of fresh air and held it to go back in to remove the tank.
I've heard of people suffocating by releasing NOS tanks in enclosed space. Usually they were attempting some recreational use, and the next person to find them is the one who calls the coroner. Hey kids, anesthesia is best left to the professionals, who can stay coherent when you're not, and have you hooked up to a blood oxygen sensor. :)
On your idea, have you ever paid attention to the audience at a movie. Sure, some will flinch when the big bad gruesome monster rips the head off the innocent girl, and proceeds to munch on her body like an ear of corn. (speaking of which, I'm hungry.) Every guy in the theater will react, somewhere between flinching and downright crying if a character gets kicked in the balls. For some reason, the girls will smile or laugh. I guess it's all on which side of that action you've been on in the past.
I've confused a few people. I've both donated blood, and had IV's put in. They always say to look away, but I watch, so I can understand what they're doing. The worst was, when I had eye surgery, I was the first patient of the day, and the stuff in the IV (I don't remember what they administered first) was really cold. They apologized, but there wasn't much choice. Use it, or make an appointment for another time. The IV felt weird, as they slid it into the vein. The feeling of my hand and arm chilling from the inside out was disturbing. Not enough for me to react weird, just enough for me to talk about it. They were entertained. :)
But can you mandate no wedding rings, no hair clips (usually women only), no pocket change, no pens with metal clips. No ... well, run them through a high sensitivity metal detector before they go into the DC?
I've actually been bad about the drinks. One facility didn't care, since I only drank in my own cage. It was my problem, not theirs. We had plenty of screws that would inadvertantly bounce off of the top of live servers, and rattle their way down to the floor, but my worst drink incident got my table (in my cage) wet, and almost (almost) got my laptop wet. The biggest problem was, I didn't have anything else to drink until after I left. You'd have to be just plain dumb to put an open drink container on top of a server.