Mods,

 

I read it and will comply but what is going on?

 

Sincerly,

 

CBC

We received a nice love letter:

 

 

TO: The administrators of UrbanOhio.com

 

FROM: The editors of Ohio’s eight largest newspapers

 

Sept. 4, 2009

 

            We are troubled by the use of our stories and photographs on UrbanOhio.com. Your practice of cutting and pasting our content in total on your site goes beyond fair use, and is a direct violation of federal copyright law.

 

            It is fair for you to use our stories as a basis for your discussions. An accepted practice is for you to link to our web sites through a headline, summary or publication name so users can view the content where it was produced. This allows you to use our content while acknowledging that you do not have the resources to generate it.  Those hits are a source of revenue for us so we can produce the content that you so freely take. It is not acceptable for you to take our complete stories and post them.     

 

            We are unable to comprehend how you can display a copyright notice on your home page while stealing our content. Our stories and photographs are protected by the same laws, paid for by our news-gathering organizations and reported by professional journalists.

 

          We expect you to stop this practice and remove the offending material by noon on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009. We will weigh our options should you choose to continue taking our content.

 

We await your reply.

 

            Sincerely,

 

Akron Beacon Journal

The Repository

The Enquirer

The Plain Dealer

The Columbus Dispatch

Dayton Daily News

The Vindicator

 

cc:

 

 

Attorney

 

 

Yeah, so if you find a post that contains copyrighted content, please report the post. If you were the one who made the post, if you still can, please edit it :)

That said - going forward, we will strictly enforce this policy and offenders will have their accounts suspended. Regarding past posts - if each forumer could review their posts as soon as possible, and edit them to the following:

 

1. Headline of article, byline/author name

2. The first paragraph (or few sentences) or a summary

3. End the post with "More info at _____(News Site link)_____" with the link going directly to the article

 

At no time should anyone post photos that appear on any news site, unless you yourself have taken them.

 

Thank you for your cooperation.

Is there any way of just viewing my posts? I've gone through a few threads that i have posted articles in and fixed them, but it would be a lot less time consuming if i could view only my posts. Either way, I will edit every article of mine that I see.

Profile -> Show Posts

 

I just figured that out myself.

Profile -> Show Posts

 

I just figured that out myself.

 

Guess i didnt look hard enough, thanks!

Go to your profile on the left hand side you can choose "view posts' in the menu. I would suggest opening the link to the post that needs editing in a new window that way you won't loose your place...

I think I finished cleaning up all my posts

 

FROM: The editors of Ohio’s eight largest newspapers

 

 

            Sincerely,

 

Akron Beacon Journal

The Repository

The Enquirer

The Plain Dealer

The Columbus Dispatch

Dayton Daily News

The Vindicator

 

 

I assume the Blade is involved, but I thought that was amusing.

 

I've modified my posts, not that it's even a drop in the bucket.

Cleaned mine up, not that there were very many...

Thanks for helping out guys, we appreciate it.

I just cleared up my posts. 

 

Headline

Author/Date

Opening paragraph/sentance

More at cleveland.com:

Web link

 

I'll fix the other ones that were not included in the letter when i get home later tonight.

I intend to prune throughout the weekend. The Tuesday deadline is way unreasonable, though. But hey: I'm in marketing. I do unreasonable all the time.

Go to your profile on the left hand side you can choose "view posts' in the menu. I would suggest opening the link to the post that needs editing in a new window that way you won't loose your place...

 

There is a "Reply"; "Quote"; and "Notify" button on the post, can we add an "Edit" that would make things much easier

In case MTS ever wondered, this is why I starting ignoring his demands that people post entire articles and not just summaries/links... this day was kind of inevitable.

 

 

Ugh, looking back at some of my old posts, wish I had included the link and not just the article.

 

How far back do we go? 2004?

All the way. I'm serious.

I just cleaned up my Williamsport, PA Developments thread.  I know the articles are coming from a different paper, but still.  I didn't want the Sun-Gazette to send you guys a letter also.

Thanks everyone! I'm doing this over beer right now, so if anyone is in the Cinci area and wants in on my stash, come on over and we can clean articles all evening! :P

Who else feels really sorry for buildingcincinnati (aka grasscat) - it could take all weekend to edit all his old posts. :(

 

  Maybe it would be easier to archive the entire site and start over with a clean forum?

LOL Yeah I thought about Grasscat. With ... 22,000 posts.

 

  Maybe it would be easier to archive the entire site and start over with a clean forum?

 

That would indeed suck, but on the other hand I've just spent the last hour editing posts, and I've only gotten through about 3 pages out of 32.  Even Bud Light isn't dulling the pain of this task.  Luckily I only posted here 954 times.

 

I don't see how it's at all feasible to review/edit all this by Tuesday at noon:

369820 Posts in 11071 Topics by 3423 Members.

(from board statistics)

As an interim measure, is there a way to archive every thread that hasn't been posted on within a certain time period (say, six months) and concentrate on the active threads? The archived threads could be temporarily "quarantined" to a non-public area, edited as time permits, and then put back online when they're cleaned up.

Heh. I just proposed that, but you worded it much better than me.

I'm inclined to agree ... it took me almost 2 hours to get through 350 posts ... and I have about a thousand to go. So I think I can meet that deadline, but I can't see how the small group of moderators are going to be able to modify all the posts from people who aren't active on the board anymore ... Grasscat alone will take a week.

 

If there's anything us non-moderators can be doing to help with that process, please let us know.

 

If there's anything us non-moderators can be doing to help with that process, please let us know.

 

Yes, please let us know what we can do!

It took me just about the entire afternoon at work to clean up my posts and i didnt have a whole lot to fix. 

Shouldn't be too difficult if the board software works like other boards I've been admin on. What I would do is set up a non-public "quarantine" board for each "real" board, and simply move all the old threads to the quarantine. Threads are already sorted by the most recent activity, and hopefully there's a way to easily move multiple threads in bulk.

 

For example, there's the City Discussion board which would continue to host active threads. Create a new board called "ARCHIVE - City Discussions" and make it non-public, and move the older threads to it so they can be edited. When editing is done, move the threads back to the original board, and delete the archive board.

 

The biggest problem will be threads like the Cincinnati Streetcar thread which are still active and have about a billion posts.

I think if they see us giving an effort to stop doing what were were doing then they may take no other actions. Then again im no lawyer. lol

I will most likely prune(delete) any thread that has not had a reply in the past 2 years.  This should take a quarter of the workload from us having to go through them all. 

 

Living in Gin, I like your idea and we may go that route.

I think I am finished

I just cleaned all 157 pages of the Cleveland RTA thread. That took more than five hours.

I just cleaned all 157 pages of the Cleveland RTA thread. That took more than five hours.

 

Wow, you must be beat!!

I just saw this; I almost never go to this forum so I didn't know!  Sorry.  I will try to find time to edit my posts this weekend; thank goodness I rarely post articles. I agree the Tuesday deadline is completely unreasonable.

 

Edited to add: I think I got all mine but will double check in more detail later.  I don't post articles very often.  Q for mods - is a link by itself ok? Sometimes that's all I posted.  If not, I will go back and edit those this weekend.  I think the issue is having whole articles, right?  But a link should be ok, yes? 

 

Also mods, maybe we can post the big red box or a link to it at the top like a flashing/warning thing to direct people to this thread.

Holy crap.

Guys, I will not have access to a real computer until Tuesday (iphone).

If that is too late, I can go to a kinkos.

(there is also this little thing about Southern Decadance)

 

Let me know.

I bet I have posted 1000 articles over the years

Wow, the support we've gotten from this is amazing. Thank you everyone for the work you are doing to help us out!

Uhm... I will shortly review my own stuff.

 

Just a reality check: has anyone on the "management team" here attempted to make contact with this attorney in order to find out if this consortium of newspapers has a list of URLs of the most "offensive" posts? Asking users to help is alright, but the complaint should have specificity and you should indicate that fair use doctrine, as you understand it, applies to abstracted articles.

 

Also you might want to give some thought to amending your copyright language, if indeed it says something like a blanket "Copyright Urbanohio.com". You need to specify that all content authored by outside parties is their copyright. (Just as products will specify that trademarks referenced in their documentation will be indicated as "trademark Bla Bla Co.")

 

I believe it would be to your advantage to acknowledge the complaint and to attempt to buy some time and to get a list of specific complaints so that these attorneys don't force you to take a meataxe to the forum.

Ok, as a specific example.

 

Is this OK? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19732.msg411811.html#msg411811

 

How about this? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,14880.msg417412.html#msg417412

 

 

I just went through all my posts and I am pretty sure that I got everything.

Ok, as a specific example.

 

Is this OK? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19732.msg411811.html#msg411811

 

How about this? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,14880.msg417412.html#msg417412

 

 

That second one. They don't want any images out there. So you must delete that. I'm sure it's Gannett news that's bring this to our attention. They own 100's of newspapers.

 

FROM: The editors of Ohios eight largest newspapers

 

 

             Sincerely,

 

Akron Beacon Journal

The Repository

The Enquirer

The Plain Dealer

The Columbus Dispatch

Dayton Daily News

The Vindicator

 

 

I assume the Blade is involved, but I thought that was amusing.

 

 

What is the 8th newspaper?

OK I'm done, except for articles in locked threads that cannot be edited (e.g. 2008 Presidential Thread).  This sucked.  However, I'm willing to help the mods edit other threads if needed.

I second or third the idea of sandboxing any questionable content in an area that requires login in order to be visible.

I just cleaned all 157 pages of the Cleveland RTA thread. That took more than five hours.

 

Wow, you must be beat!!

 

Yes, I was. And now I'm even more tired having spent another 3.5 hours tending to 50 of the 443 PAGES of posts I've made. I haven't even made it back to articles from 2008 yet. At this rate it will take me 25-30 hours to go through all of my posts!

 

I may just delete the articles in the oldest half of my posts which go back to the forum's first year (2004).

I'm finished with mine.  Had a few questions/comments, though:

 

1)  I didn't have links for some of my posts.  Should I go back and totally delete the headline/author/source/summary?

 

2)  Two or three of my posts weren't editable.  I think that they were in development-related threads.

^

1. Nah, just leave up the headline, author, source and summary. It can be searchable in an online news database (e.g. America's Newspapers).

2. Just flag them for a moderator.

I noticed a lot of reposted articles from the Dayton Daily News and other papers in the

 

Restaurants & Entertainment Forums in the posts about "Closings & Relocations"

Haha ... I was wondering when this would happen.

 

Urban Ohio (and by extension the Ohio newspapers) was definitely behind the times in allowing people to post entire articles. Most forums I've visited haven't allowed that kind of thing in years. The "big red scary box" is pretty much standard policy for most forums these days.

 

This really kind of highlights how unbelievably slow the newspapers are to modernize. It's late 2009, and they finally realized that sites like urbanohio shouldn't be allowed to post entire articles. (and it's not like they didn't know about urbanohio, as many of their writers have clearly lurked here for years to find out popular discussion topics for stories)

 

 

Yes, we can't post their articles from freely accessible sites but their reporters can use our site for source information. Something's not right about that.