Steven Carr

So Tom's advice to Joel Watts is to rely on his screenshot of that email if it came to a legal matter?

And you call yourself his friend?

Toto

Hello Tom:

I think you are focused on the wrong issues here.

Neil has figured out that he missed the DMCA notice because of his Gmail configuration and reposted the content that he should not have. This is no longer an issue - the blog content has been restored except for the contested post. There are no damages that would justify hiring a copyright lawyer. Neil has administrative remedies through Wordpress procedures.

The real issues for the posters here are:

• Joel's initial claim of copyright infringement was bogus
• Joel did not follow Wordpress procedures and ask for the removal of the material as a comment on the blog post
• Joel appears to have faked an email to Neil to try to show that he had complied with Wordpress procedures
• Joel has been continually evasive on these issues

neilgodfrey

Actually I restored the post to "Public" Status sometime in the early hours of my morning -- before 6 am. I had no reason to consult my Gmail account for an explanation as to why it had suddenly appeared in Private status.

I could see no reason for it being in Private, assumed there was some accidental switch somewhere along the way, and restored it to Public.

When the blog itself went down I assumed it was a Wordpress stuffup and had no reason to think it was connected to my restoring that post to Public status.

I know this makes me look slack with keeping up with my Gmail -- but my Gmail is a very boring view, with only the few odd personal posts I look out for regularly. Most of it is subscriptions discussions and various sorts of advertizing that I only look at sporadically.

I am never inspired to check my Gmail between 2.30 AM and 6.00 AM.

When I thought there was a Wordpress glitch I emailed Wordpress and from that moment on the original DMCA notice was hidden by that series of exchanges. But by then the horse had bolted anyway so noticing the original at that stage would have done me no good.

Neil

neilgodfrey

No. Wordpress confirms nothing like that. They only confirm that the Take-down notice is complete and correctly submitted. Confirmation of a breach is up to a court of law. At the stage of take-down notices we are only at the point of claim and counter-claim, the equivalent of bailiffs serving court orders.

Wordpress only confirmed that Joel had linked to the offending material and that he had made a sworn statement about it.

They confirmed the same sort of information with my counter-claim.

If Wordpress confirmed a breach at that stage then there would be no point in allowing me the opportunity of a counter-claim -- nor would there be any need for provisions in the act for damages against someone who lodges fraudulent claims in a DMCA take-down notice, as Joel did.

Neil

Will Wiley

Yes that's how I understood it. Joel had the material under Creative Commons. As it was under Creative Commons, it was ok for anyone to reproduce it.
Later on after the complaint Joel removed the Creative Commons from the material.

neilgodfrey

Choice, Tom. I do not believe Joel ever deliberately set out to shut down my blog, let alone "silence me". I understand Joel wanted one blog post of mine removed. Unfortunately he did not send me any prior request as per the DMCA directive, and Wordpress sent me nothing more than an email to my gmail account -- leaving no indication whatever on my blog as to the reason they had changed the status of the post from Public to Private, or rather, they left me not a single hint it was "They", the "Company", who had changed its status! (I assumed my co-blogger had changed it for some reason or that he had done so by accident.)

That's a pretty flimsy way to issue a legal notice which held such severe consequences. (As I've said, that email notice came at 2:30 am, and since I am not given to poring through my personal gmail between that hour and 6 am, nor even till later if I am dashing off to work, I restored the status of the post to Public in good faith/naive innocence.)

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Now that I have been free to answer your innuendo implying that I have complained that Joel was deliberately trying to shut down my entire blog, will you kindly allow the various comments I have sent to your blog answering your other outrageous allegations against me to be made public? Alternatively, I invite you to write a post citing the evidence for the claims in your other personal attacks against me.

Roger Pearse

I think Tom is right.

I have not followed the details of all this very far, but it seems clear that things could have been better handled. However it also does seem quite clear that Joel never had any intention to take down Vridar, and that Neil accepts this. If so, much of what has been written is now unimportant.

It is equally clear that Joel did not want one of his posts to be used, not to comment but to subject him to personal abuse of a fairly aggressive kind, attacking him as dishonest etc. I should add that I have myself experienced that kind of knife-twisting malicious libel (although I don't suppose Neil intended that), and so I entirely understand his point of view. He did not write it for that purpose. Why should he assist his enemy, so he probably thought?

It is entirely understandable if Joel did not email Neil directly. I wouldn't email someone that I thought was doing that to me, because I wouldn't want to give my personal email address to a maddog troll. He asked the webhost to look after the matter. Again this is understandable: if I had some troll trying to "get me", hurling abuse at me, and I actually felt hurt (I have cultivated a layer of detachment, even indifference, these many years, and I recommend all sensible people do likewise), I might well do the same.

It is entirely understandable, though, that Neil would feel that such drastic action as actually happened might reasonably have been preceded with an email.

Wordpress don't seem very user friendly, PR aside. At this point it all went bad. Who did what and in what order is probably not constructive; what happened was not Joel's fault. The point we need to take away from that bit of the story is that we need to keep our own archives offline of our content.

The allegations of forged emails and the like all seem a bit extreme to me. People do what they do, but they rarely intend anything of this kind. Joel had no need to forge anything, remember. He probably merely uploaded whatever he had, when the question was raised, without worrying about it too much, and then found (if this is the case) that what he had put online wasn't correct. He wasn't under oath at the time.

Let's have a little understanding of human fallibility here. I dislike mob-lynchings, where every little thing anyone does is subjected to the most hostile examination possible, and the worst conclusions drawn from any inconsistency. Viewing this, I felt considerable sympathy for Joel.

I think we need to remember the cockup theory of human existence; that, while malice does exist, most of the bad things that happen do so because of carelessness or bad luck, rather than a conspiracy to do someone an injury. It can be hard to remember this, of course, if one feels upset or maltreated.

This is an over-statement which does the author no favours. All that happened was a blog was taken down. Nobody was harmed. Severe consequences are when a man turns up at your house and arrests you, or the like. Let's have some proportion here, hmm?

No doubt so. Such is the effect of Murphy's law in every area of human existence; and likewise, one can't help feeling that Neil has been on the receiving end of what must have felt like a beating. As has Joel. So ... would you stop hurting each other please? Just ignore each other henceforth, I suggest. Neil ... this means you.

I wouldn't make demands like this. If you were foolish enough to post stuff like this on his blog, and Tom has moderated your complaints, then he has done you a favour. Your tone here is one of whining self-entitlement. It's unmanly, to say the least, and does not attract sympathy from bystanders. Trust me on this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Steven Carr

So lots of personal abuse.

But to show the integrity of Roger , he didn't violate any copyright by actually quoting this alleged 'malicious libel' by Neil.

Neil's posts are for slandering, not quoting, it seems.

Asking for evidence is 'whiny self-entitlement'.

Robert Tulip

But the problem is that Watt should have posted a comment on Vridar to complain, as required by the WordPress system. He did not, making his action look secretive, wrongful and deceptive, suggesting a malicious hope of inflicting maximum damage in revenge at being exposed as a goose. At least google searches on vridar posts no longer go to the takedown notice.

The irony from my point of view is that I have crossed words with Neil on his blog on this question of whether history is a science, although not from the fundamentalist angle that Watt appears to advocate.

aa5874

If you have not followed "the details of all this very far" how in the world can you now state "things could have been better handled"?

The details are extremely important to determine whether or not Joel had intentions to take down Vridar.

Please, follow the details.

I am at a loss that you would make comments on Joel's intentions while admitting you have not followed "the details of all this very far".

By the way, what others have written on the matter is very important.