Life under SOPA

In summary: someone claimed copyright over one of my holiday snaps on Zazzle. I just found out the hard way that there is no way to contest a copyright claim with Zazzle, despite owning the original image.

I was going to write a long rant, but frankly the above speaks for itself.

Anyone supporting SOPA or ACTA should consider carefully what it means for the web. Images, Videos, Articles, Ebooks, even your holiday snaps can be claimed by third parties. And you have no right of appeal.

Given this I've reacted as most content creators will: I've pulled the rest of my aircraft and dinosaur content off Zazzle - even the model shots, which I set-up, snapped and photoshopped - simply because there is no way to defend against this type of claim. The cat photos are still there, but I own the cats as well as the images, so if Zazzle accept an unproved copyright claim the issue of model releases comes up, which means I have every right legally to find out who claimed to own them.

Sadly there won't be any more Vulcan images, since the model I used to pose them was donated to the Vulcan to the Skies charity at the Salute wargames convention where we sponsored them.

The other implication is for the games I was working on. Since a digital watermark and base psd files are apparently not proof, it is going to be nearly impossible to prove ownership of photoshop-created images. This severely affects merchandising, one of the major revenue streams for free games. Since there is one game where this is a major feature, we may need to re-think how that one works.

On the other hand I've got two more sites going live soon, one being a repurpose of the original SmashingReads ebook directory software we wrote. By the way, for anyone who is interested in running an ebook directory, this software is easily customised/tweaked, so let me know.

The other one? Lets just say it's my version of a very targeted social network.