Finding pirated intellectual property - is there a suitable Trisquel-compliant application ?
Someone graciously alerted me today about intellectual property of mine that was pirated by a third party and used to promote an eBay listing. I can use eBay's procedure for correcting this OK, but in the process I discovered that neither my ISP nor the usual search services (e.g. Google or DuckDuckGo) appear to have a mechanism that can be used to look for URL's in the eBay ads so that I can find ones that have my website name in them. Consequently, all I can do is search for items similar to my website's content and then scan them for familiar images, or depend on the good will of my audience for heads-up alerts.
eBay's affiliates program has a finding API which can be programmed to look for URL's, but the last programming that I did was about 25 years ago.
Is there a libre way of searching the source code (i.e., the text of the html) of webpages ? There appear to be several commercial sites that provide such a service.
I can easily prove that plagiarism has occurred by doing a text search of eBay (and other websites, of course) but the direct embedding of my website's images in others' websites is inaccessible with the search methods that I'm aware of.
My ISP has a so-called "webalizer" but that service has stopped showing referring links from eBay ads.
Piracy is not a good word to use https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
Look at your web server's logs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
Neither is "intellectual property" :P https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty
By way of explanation of the problem, cleansed of political terminology:
Digital material that I authored has been posted in an eBay ad. It was taken without permission from me and is being used to promote the sale of an item which incidentally may or may not resemble the object that I described. Those unauthorized uses are forbidden by U.S. copyright law and by eBay's policy against misrepresentation; both eBay.com and the auction listing service have copyright policies against such use, and I have registered formal complaints under penalty of perjury to the authorities for both domains. It is OK to refer to my webpage as a source of information for personal use; that is permitted by U.S. copyright law; one personal copy is allowed. Lots of folks do that, and some even ask me for permission (normally freely granted; I am not selling that information) to post specific digital material of mine on their own websites.
I'd like to find the inappropriate instances wherever they occur. There are many that are logged by my ISP's "Webalizer" application, but no specific accesses have been logged from this particular eBay ad. My ISP keeps archives of the raw access logs that are in .gz format, and which can be extracted, but that has produced a file which cannot be opened by any application that I know of in the Trisquel repository, and it can't even be opened by my version of Windows. The various search services do not freely help, insofar as I have been able to tell.
I am a member!
I'm not sure how to do exactly what you're asking, but I do have a question:
Is it so bad that the person is borrowing your content? I'm not sure of the exact details, but is the content something that could easily be published under a CC or GNU FDL (Not sure if that would be a good license for digital content, so it may not be the best choice.) license? Is the context in which the content is being published unethical or misrepresenting you? Maybe I'm a lot more lax with content I create but I believe it is good to use a CC license or even donate it to the public domain so others can benefit.
tdlnx asks:
"Is it so bad that the person is borrowing your content? I'm not sure of the exact details, but is the content something that could easily be published under a CC or GNU FDL (Not sure if that would be a good license for digital content, so it may not be the best choice.) license? Is the context in which the content is being published unethical or misrepresenting you? Maybe I'm a lot more lax with content I create but I believe it is good to use a CC license or even donate it to the public domain so others can benefit."
In this particular instance, the user was using my photographs and description to represent his item and to promote higher bids than he might otherwise get. This has happened before, and for the same model item but by a different seller. As you ought to know, condition matters a great deal to the bidders, so my data, left on my website for information purposes (item sold long ago) was used for a commercial purpose and to misrepresent the seller's item, which he could have just as well photographed with his own camera.
In another instance, my company sold a large instrument, which the buyer had taken apart and packed by a reputable third party. Years later, the buyers attempted to auction the instrument, but they used pictures which we had made for the original sale, that showed the instrument assembled and in working condition, to represent that instrument in the auction, when they actually had never reassembled the instrument. I objected, and they cancelled that auction. We would have suffered criticism if an unsuspecting bidder found that he had bought a pile of boxes of parts instead of what he saw in our photographs.
Free S/W is another matter. It's created and used by one person and donated with the appropriate license for others to use freely, even for commerical purposes, but it cannot be sold without including that same sourcecode and appropriate license. Trisquel/GNU DVD's are good examples of this laudable practice. With the all important sourcecode, every copy can be evaluated by subsequent users.
In an Internet auction, all there is for the bidder to rely on is the seller's representation of the item, and if that representation is false (for another item that is different from the actual item in the bid sale) then I will object to the use of my copyrighted material. U.S. copyright law and the internet auction sites support me on this.
I'm still looking for a way of detecting those copyright transgressions.
Perhaps this is a weak work-around, but have you tried Google's "search by image" feature? I'm not sure if it'll search ebay ads, but it's worth a shot, right?
I am a member!
Ah, in this case you're totally right I agree. It's unethical to misrepresent an item you have for sale and treat potential buyers badly. I was originally under the impression they had copied a review/opinion/article for example.
"It's created and used by one person and donated with the appropriate license for others to use freely, even for commerical purposes, but it cannot be sold without including that same sourcecode and appropriate license."
I think that maybe you misunderstand free software. Whether or not a program is "sold" (i.e. money changes hands) has no bearing on whether source code needs to be available and what license it's under. If you read the Free Software Definition, ..."you may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software..." The whole "sold" thing you mention has no bearing on that aspect of it. So whether a person paid $1,000,000 or $0 once they have a copy of the program (notice I say "once they have a copy", which leaves open options for people to use it privately without sharing and also to put it behind a paywall if they decide to) they also need to have the source code. "Sold" has nothing to do with "including that same source code and appropriate license" because it needs to be provided to those getting a copy regardless of it it's "sold" or not. :)