Where is MTS?  How many times has he posted asking someone who only posted a link to post the whole story?

just a suggestion, but wouldn't it be easier to just file uo as a non-profit rather than go back thru all the threads? i think you can still be a non-profit if the ad money just covers operating expenses. not sure tho or if you guys had ever considered that at any point? also, i wouldnt worry about any lawyer's arbitrary time frames, because in brief legally good faith and going forward is the same thing for this (yes, i asked a lawyer friend informally about this today and yes he suggested becoming an "educational nonprofit website" as a workaround).

 

regardless, i'll try to go back into my own blah blah blah and change the postings and links. sigh, the internets has all grown up and now it needs to be done.

 

This is understandable, but from now on ALL content provided by Urban Ohio members including pictures, needs to be STRICTLY protected. There has been repeated use of original material by the media, without permission.

 

 

I believe that some solution other than asking all contributors to edit their articles will be necessary. I took a look around just now and the problem here is just enormous. The only fallback to this is mass deletion.

 

Particularly in the sections under the category "Projects And Transportation", there is a huge abundance of threads that consist primarily of cut and pastes of news articles with very little attribution. No other section relies so heavily on pasted news. And I saw pretty flagrant repeated "violations."

 

My advice - I run a message board that has had major issues with hatred, flamage and aggrieved outside parties:

 

- For the time being, take ALL of certain categories, like the one I mentioned above, private. Private to logged in users, or to users on request, I mean. I assume that SMF has the controls available to make some sections only available to logged in users, and also to further restrict access to a defined list of users. This would make the content in dispute inaccessible to search engines and to outside parties.

 

- Once again, as I said earlier, you probably need a more comprehensive copyright notice, one that acknowledges ownership of other party's content. This may be part of the core issue - that some users who were sloppy about cutting and pasting news articles are doing so on a board that claims global copyright. I personally believe that copyright should lay with the original author of each posting or article, not granted implicitly to UO with no compensation. As far as I am concerned, I own everything I write, even posted here, period. But I am happy to share it here. There may be "Creative Commons" language and insignias that you could use for this.

 

- I really like the idea of a non-profit if it removes the legal threats. A Paypal fund could be set up to finance the work. I'd chuck in a fiver. Once a non profit corporation is rolling, it should not take much to maintain it.

I've gone through all 13,000 of my postings, or 443 PAGES worth, of my postings and cleaned up or deleted those which included copyrighted articles.

 

That took me three days.

^ That's alot but what about members that has not logged on for months and sometimes a year or more? How can anyone search to see if they have posted such stuff in the past.

^ That's alot but what about members that has not logged on for months and sometimes a year or more? How can anyone search to see if they have posted such stuff in the past.

 

Go to the persons profile, click on  "show latest posts" and then you can click Notify (or Report to moderator if you see it in a thread you're actually reading) on any that violate the "Big Red Scary Box" rules.  Same thing if you want to check your own except you would use Modify or Edit.

Finished cleaning up my posts, and also tagged some that I was unable to modify.

I got one of these letters in 2004 for my website, so I wonder why it took 5 years for this to show up here.  I didn't change anything on my site and they never followed through with their threats. 

Mine's done -  either all edited or flagged.

 

One thought: What's the rationale behind the time frame the lawyers provided? They issued the letter on Friday and have set their deadline for the following Tuesday, which happens to fall over Labor Day weekend, where people are presumably away from their computers more than usual. Are they trying to hem UO in to their arbitrary deadline and get to appear magnanimous if they grant an extension? Are they just looking for a good faith beginning to correcting the problem in this shortened time frame? Or (and I'm guessing most likely) they just want to compress the process to freak people out and show them their place.

 

I get the copyright issues at hand, but four days to correct things over a holiday? That's disingenuous to the goal of protecting content. 

It's just establishing a timeline before a second letter (in which they would probably explicitly threaten a lawsuit). Nothing more.

 

It's far more interesting that they are just now attempting to enforce their copyright, despite years and year of their content being posted on this website. Again, it's a nice illustration of how poorly the newspapers are running their business.

I'll tell you this: I am never going to post by name or weblink an article or fragment from an Ohio newspaper again. From now on, I am simply going to say, there was "an article in a newspaper recently that said" and then paraphrase the relevant portion. I am not going to give these pathetic publications any credit for anything.

 

After going through many threads and many posts, I have discovered something: what do we need newspapers for anymore? There are many people posting who are in positions of knowledge of the subjects they are posting about. So we are getting news directly from the people who are making the news, or are close to the newsmakers.

 

That hurt for me to say because I'm a former staff writer for Sun Newspapers, and I still freelance for them. Also I like a lot of the reporters in Cleveland, including at the PD. But I do not like what has happened to the management and ownership of major media. They are closed-minded dinosaurs who have lost the meaning of pursuit of truth through journalism by getting lost in misguided efforts to be "fair and balanced" and end up quoting "the opposing viewpoint" even if that person has no expertise.

 

I think this forum does a much better job in pursuing truth.

^ Agreed... The mainstream media in general (not just newspapers, sadly) has given up any pretense of doing real journalism, and now just presents he-said/she-said false equivalencies as if that's news. If 20 people were in a room and 19 of those people thought the earth is round and one person vehemently insisted the earth is flat, most mainstream news outlets wouldn't bother to do any real investigation on their part, and they'd pretend that both viewpoints are equally valid and deserve equal time in the story.

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.  ...

Please don't delete thread that are idle for long periods.  The "Ferry to Canada" thread has gone without a new post for months.  However, I would hate for it to disappear, because the original content buy UO'ers is priceless. 

 

I also think that Rusty Shackleford is correct that the "newspapers" need to be more specific about what they are complaining about.  I also think that it is unreasonable that they only give UO a few days to work on this.  I was in Michigan from mid-August until last night at midnight.

 

A nod to KJP.  Newspapers really have failed in their role as key information providers in our democracy.  Reformers in Iran covered the election with just "blogs and cell phone cameras".

 

Hopefully, the mods can just "lock out" nonusers for a while: it will look like the site removed the "copyrighted material".  This will buy UO some time.

 

 

Hopefully, the mods can just "lock out" nonusers for a while: it will look like the site removed the "copyrighted material". This will buy UO some time.

 

Are you that naive to think they don't have someone registered who monitors this site?

Are you that naive to think they don't have someone registered who monitors this site?

 

OK, at that level you log accesses. Registered user XYZ is continually hitting a certain range of articles. Should be easy to detect and lock out.

 

At the level of activity that you are suggesting, this would look like someone spidering the site, and many sites define that as a violation of usage terms.

I'll tell you this: I am never going to post by name or weblink an article or fragment from an Ohio newspaper again. From now on, I am simply going to say, there was "an article in a newspaper recently that said" and then paraphrase the relevant portion. I am not going to give these pathetic publications any credit for anything.

 

After going through many threads and many posts, I have discovered something: what do we need newspapers for anymore? There are many people posting who are in positions of knowledge of the subjects they are posting about. So we are getting news directly from the people who are making the news, or are close to the newsmakers.

 

That hurt for me to say because I'm a former staff writer for Sun Newspapers, and I still freelance for them. Also I like a lot of the reporters in Cleveland, including at the PD. But I do not like what has happened to the management and ownership of major media. They are closed-minded dinosaurs who have lost the meaning of pursuit of truth through journalism by getting lost in misguided efforts to be "fair and balanced" and end up quoting "the opposing viewpoint" even if that person has no expertise.

 

I think this forum does a much better job in pursuing truth.

 

Well said.  As I don't support the PD any longer (and haven't for years), it's no problem for me to NOT post any more of their bush!t articles.  We learn so much from each other through discussion than we will ever learn from reading a biased news article.

They do. I know some of them personally.

I would guess they just want us to stop.  The warning at the top of the page, and the deletions of the offending posts should satisfy them.

I just edited my 1000 posts on 33 pages of UO.  It did not take long because I had already made a point of shortening newspaper articles "for copyright reasons".

 

 

There are likely 10s of thousands of potentially unsafe posts on this board. The administration needs to consider automated mechanisms to deal with the problem and needs to consider alternative means of coping with the issue, like negotiation, use of protected sections, and possibly non profit reorganization. Users will assuredly not be able to clean up their own posts in any short term.

 

I consider just deleting anything older than 2 years to be effectively caving in to economic bullying.

This always happens to useful things.  I like the free exchange of information and ideas this website represents.  To me UrbanOhio is a time capsule.  It details and documents not only the history of Ohio, but the current attitudes and views of today that will be useful information tomorrow.  While I understand revenue and the need to make money to be a business.  UrbanOhio is not evil, no one is getting rich off the information and the only reason I EVER visited any of these news papers websites (which was more often than not) was because of UrbanOhio.  I to plan on boycotting these news papers and never giving them a cent of my money personally.  Boooooooo the man, via la urbanohio 

I've cleaned up the whopping 5 to 10 articles that I've posted.

 

If it comes down to deleting threads, I would strong suggest creating a private forum (only accessible to moderators/admins) and moving the old threads there.  Down the road, once moderators get around to cleaning them up, the threads could be moved back into the public forums.  It would be a shame to have all the old conversations deleted.  At least preserve them for now, even if it will be a long time before they can be cleaned up.

OK done...time for a beer

Alright, I think that I am now clean...I may need to go back and clean up the trunacations but all have just Headline/byline, 1st paragraph and link.

 

I wondering about the non-profit angle on the way home on Friday. It's not like anyone is making money from UO, more than likely losing money.

If we were to try the non profit route which as been mentioned in the past, what benefits would we gain?

I'm not sure what would be gained by becoming a non-profit. AFAIK, that doesn't nullify copyright laws.

 

My biggest concern would be that some lawyer sends a strongly-worded letter to UO's hosting service, who might decide that it's easier to simply pull the plug on the site rather than get caught up in some potential legal battle.

I wonder if automation in SMF/Simple Machines can be enabled to search for and isolate any posts that have urls for those newspapers' websites.  The sites would be www.vindy.com, www.ohio.com, www.cleveland.com, etc.

 

The automation would need to make those posts "unviewable" until they can be reviewed. 

 

I agree with Living in Gin that "non profit status" will not help UO.

Btw folks, if you see a red checkmark next to a thread title, that means it's been cleaned up.

Btw folks, if you see a red checkmark next to a thread title, that means it's been cleaned up.

 

I was wondering what that meant, thanks.

 

T minus 55 minutes  :|

I cleaned up all of mine, with exception of a couple articles in locked threads (Obama Presidency, and US Housing = Recession).

 

If you want me to send links/whatever PM me and I'll let you know.

I'm done with my part.

 

BTW, the Obama Presidency Thread has been unlocked and KOOW was nice enough to scrub the first 58 pages of it.

Found that I didn't really have any articles posted from any of those publications, just the member blogs like UrbanCincy and building-cincinnati.

Done

So, I'm just reading this at 4:10 on September 8, 2009.  I don't have time to go through my posts and fix everything.

Im chipping away at the convention center/medical mart thread.  Should have more time available tonight

Okay, I went through all mine, it didn't look like I had much in the first place. 

Every bit helps :-)

Every bit helps :-)

 

Any word from the attorney's yet?

I am just now seeing this after the holiday weekend.  I can check tonight I guess.

Every bit helps :-)

 

Any word from the attorney's yet?

 

We have been given until Tuesday, Sept. 14th - that came from the folks who initially contacted us, and after we asked for more time. That said, that's very reasonable but it should be noted - if there are threads which don't follow guidelines, they'll be removed. Again - the red checkmarks next to each thread indicate that they've been cleaned up. Thank you all for helping us to resolve this - your efforts are appreciated.

 

"I will give you... two weeks for you and you and your gallant crew of moderators to remove the offending posts from your site."

"Weeks would seem like days..." ;-)

Wow.  I'm late to this game. Just checked this thread to see what's up.  I see I have 13 pages of posts to go through....

 

 

1. Mine is done. Sorry for the delay.

 

2. I also want to say thank you to the moderators for doing this. Just going through 53 pages was excruciating ... I can't imagine what it must be like to comb the site. Again, please let us know what non-moderators can do.

 

3. It was so sad to delete all that content. I understand the news outlets' positions, but many of them do not have any kind of publicly accessible archive of material. So now they still might pull ad content, but people will be forwarded to "Page Not Found". When deleting articles from 2006 (and, in some cases, articles from like a month ago), it was sad to realize that there is no longer any online versions of this information, unless you have access to a paid online news archiving service. It's just information that's largely lost forever. Frown-ey-face.

There is nothing against saving copies for yourself. I've put mine into an internal database.

That would have been wise, but I unfortunately did not think to do so ... gone, gone, gone, unless they're in an UrbanOhio file backup somewhere or searchable with the Wayback Machine :)

I  modified what i thought would offend, but I see I was already doing the summarize and link thing, with occasional extended posts.

 

 

There are likely 10s of thousands of potentially unsafe posts on this board. The administration needs to consider automated mechanisms to deal with the problem and needs to consider alternative means of coping with the issue, like negotiation, use of protected sections, and possibly non profit reorganization. Users will assuredly not be able to clean up their own posts in any short term.

 

I consider just deleting anything older than 2 years to be effectively caving in to economic bullying.

 

Given my work schedule, I don't think I can get it done until next week, but I have already made a dent. Some of the articles I posted were already summarized or just had a few quotes since I knew this was down the pike. Then I started listening to MTS too much and forgot about my media law classes in college! :wink: Still, it's possible for us to do this, just not in such a short time frame. Most of us have jobs and don't have a ton of time to edit news articles from 2007.

 

And I don't think it's unreasonable to delete threads that haven't had a reply in over two years. Then again, at the rate projects go in Ohio, you never know when a new update will come out...

this was my downfall. I actually think he threatened me if I didn't comply :police:

3. It was so sad to delete all that content. I understand the news outlets' positions, but many of them do not have any kind of publicly accessible archive of material. So now they still might pull ad content, but people will be forwarded to "Page Not Found". When deleting articles from 2006 (and, in some cases, articles from like a month ago), it was sad to realize that there is no longer any online versions of this information, unless you have access to a paid online news archiving service.

 

I thought of this too, so with most of mine, I just deleted the entire post to just say "EDITED" in big capital letters.  The links are dead so what's the point?  And if they don't want the publicity, I'm not going to give it to them.  I won't even refer to their papers by name on here anymore, I'll just keep it generic and say "some newspaper."  Of course, soon enough, we won't even have to do that, because SOME NEWSPAPERS are doing a great job of putting themselves out of business.  Sorry I contributed to them getting some more hits and attention, I won't do it again that's for sure.