| Friday, December 2, 2005 |  |
| Jetsetters wants to sue everybody |
| As a webmaster I regularly receive requests to remove some kind of copyright-infringing material somebody has posted. I've never gotten anything for my own blog, but it has happened often for other's blogs. Usually it is an artist who objects to somebody posting one of their pictures. And typically is is stupid of them to object, as it usually is some kind of "Here's a lovely painting from ___ and here's a link to their site". Which really is excellent free promotion for the artist. But many artists seem to be not understand how the web works, so for inexplicable reasons they'd rather be unknown and in control than have lots of people freely mention their stuff. Anyway, typically they ask relatively nicely and the "offending" material gets removed quickly.
But now, I also have this Opentopia site, which has a lot of content that's copied from other places. Mainly places that have a license that allows it. Like, Wikipedia and Open Directory. And at some point I included a lot of articles from GoArticles. It is a site where people can upload articles in any of a number of categories, which are meant to be useful and informative somehow. They're posted with a license that says that anybody can repost them, as long as the footer with the author's information is included. Most of these articles aren't exactly great, but they're somewhat informative. The posters usually put them up for some self-promoting reason, to be able to mention their website, or book, or whatever. I hadn't really thought of all the people who would contact me based on this content. I was mainly focused on getting some free content, and then thinking about ways of adding value to it, when I got around to it. But quite a few people write to get things corrected. Or, a few suddenly decide they don't like their article to be used by anyone. Usually they include some kind of onerous wording about copyright infringement, but typically they ask fairly nicely, and I just remove their stuff, a little puzzled about why they bothered to post it in the first place, if they didn't want it out there. The latest one got my attention a little more than normally. A guy named "Kriss Hammond" sends a message with the subject line "Lawsuit against Opentopia.com", and which goes like this: Please remove all links or other refeence regarding Jetsetters Magazine back to your websites or blog. Please remove all feature stories from Jetsetters Magazine from your websites. Do not reference any of Jetsetters Magazine features within your websites. Ten MILLION dollars, wow, that's quite impressive. I'm really scared! Actually, I laughed out loud. At first I thought it maybe was one of those magazines you get in planes, and somebody had copied some article without asking permission. But then I looked at the articles in question, and I looked around a little on the web, and saw that it was something quite different. Kriss Hammond calls himself "The Travel Professor", and he runs some outfit that shows people how to get cheap travel, if they just pose as travel journalists and write articles about the sites and hotels and restaurants they go to. And each article must promote Hammond's site. And apparently they post these on any site they can think of that will take submitted articles. Which essentially that acts as his advertising. Why he then suddenly doesn't want the articles is a bit puzzling. I looked through my article database and found that there were 162 of his articles, all following the same model, all with the same ad for Jetsetters Magazine at the bottom. So, I deleted all of them. Good riddance. And I realized that the guy was just responding to Google listings. He sent me several identical messages, with a different Google listing in each one. He was threatening a 10 million dollar lawsuit to anybody who mentioned his own website. Strange. Usually that means one has something big to hide somewhere. And I think I'm getting it. Among highly placed entries in Google we find blogs presenting a little bit of an exposee of Hammond's possibly questionable business operation. So I think he decided to just write and threaten anybody who says anything about him, without even noticing that some of them were his own promotional articles. Not too smart. I would never have cared the slightest bit who he was if he hadn't done it in such a ridiculous manner. I'd still be providing him with 162 promotional articles, and I wouldn't have been writing this little thing here. Anyway, a professional travel writer named Carl Parkes had written in his blog a post originally entitled "The Jetsetters Scam". You can now find it in this version: The Jetsetters Story. Parkes changed a couple of words, because Hammond started sending his famous "10 million dollar lawsuit" thing to anybody and everybody. The company that made the blogger template he was using, to Google, and to who knows who. Read follow-ups: here, here, here, here, and well, there's more after that. Parkes wisely shifts over into posting general good information about travel writer scams, fake publishing houses, etc. Below you can see one of the letters Hammond sends out to people who're interested in his Travel Writers Network. And you can see his business plan at work there. You pay $300 for membership in his network, and he provides you with templates for how you can present yourself as a travel writer to hotels around the world, and, I assume, get cheap or free rooms, meals, etc. And then you promise to write those articles, mentioning Jetsetters Magazine as much as possible. Is that a scam? Not necessarily. It sounds kind of questionable. But, yes, for it to be a scam, there'd have to be some victims somewhere. The hotels maybe? But I'd say that nobody goes around threatening to sue everybody who talks about them unless they have something to hide. You be the judge. [ Diary | 2005-12-02 21:53 | 13 comments | PermaLink ] More > |