breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[kitz]

I have recently been alerted to the fact that some tutorials have been copied and posted to this site, that have not been authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

As the original author of the tutorials listed below in appendix A, I therefore without predujdice wish to inform the owners of techwatch.co.uk that it is allegedly in breach of copyright infringement laws and being liable to website plagiarism.

Objections of unauthorised copy of the original works have been made on the grounds of:

(a) Without having contacted the original author to obtain permission to copy.
(b) Without giving due credit to the orignal author.
(c) Without crediting the source site of where the information has been copied from.
(d) Brian (Realist) having prevously been warned by me on one of his former sites about copyright theft and pertaining to be the original author of "tutorials".
(e)Hotlinking of images is considered bandwidth theft.


You have 28 days from today's date to make amends to avoid further action being taken.
Adaptation of the tutorials without acreditation to the orginal source will NOT be considered acceptable.

[lincsat]

To which tutorials are you referring and are they simply being relayed whilst already in the public domain?

[brian]

Hi kitz, and sorry to hear about the concerns you've raised.

A couple of pointers -

1. The original Brian no longer has anything to do with Techwatch, the forums having been sold on in December 2006. Techwatch is now owned by Britecorp Ltd - and my name is Brian Turner, the director of the company.

2. You don't appear to have tried to contact myself directly. There is actually a contact link at the bottom of the forum, but if that doesn't work for you, please use any of the details on this page

3. A DMCA violation is obviously pretty serious, but you don't really give any information on this to allow your claim to be properly ascertained. This is especially as the link you provide for reference does not appear to work, and you also fail to provide *any* details of where these violations may occur on Techwatch, and what their original source may be. Please send any such details to me, as described above.

4. I'm very much under the impression that the hotlinking of images is not illegal. There are simple ways in which you can prevent your images being linked to from other servers. However, if you could please provide a URL to where any such hotlinked images are, I would be happy to remove any such hotlink process.

5. You use legal terminology in your original post. Please note that if you feel that legal proceedings are required, Britecorp Ltd (the owner of Techwatch.co.uk) is a company registered in Scotland. Therefore please ensure for your sake that any legal submissions are made with a clear understanding that your representatives will need to have a sound understanding of Scottish Law, and that the jurisdiction for Techwatch is Scotland.

7. I'm happy to try and resolve matters amicably, and appreciate your concerns. The manner in which you have raised them - ie, not using the contact link at the foot of the forums, and posting a warning on the forums - are not the most ideal ways to resolve any such matter. In fact, you are required by the terms of a DMCA to make proper efforts to contact the site owner where a DMCA may apply, and provide information on the location of the alleged offence. Therefore please ensure you make a proper approach via the contact channels provided, substantiating your claims so they can be properly considered.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

[mtatum4496]

My, my, this does seem to be an odd way to attempt to notify someone of possible issues. Hopefully, this can be resolved offline and not become something that is posted for the whole world to see. Personally, I do not believe any of this should be available to me for viewing.

[kitz]

test post to see if I yet have posting rights

---
edit seems I still need approval for some posts?
There should hopefully follow another post by me.

[kitz]

Update on this.

My original post didnt go through correctly due to what would appear forum restrictions for new users.. and one of my posts was actually deleted.

There should have also been an appendix to the above post showing the full list of tutorials that were directly copied from other sites.

I can repost them if you like - but what it surmounts to is that virtually every sticky under http://www.techwatch.co.uk/broadband/ posted by Realist is someone elses hard work.

Nowhere on those stickies does it give due credit to the original author for the time and effort that they may have made writing those tutorials in the first place.

Now bear in mind my position - I have previously very nicely warned Brian (Realist) on his other sites about using tutorials or page content from other websites in a way that it looked like he was the original author.

He didnt obtain permission to copy, nor did he even give credit to the original authors.
Writing some of these tutorials can take a great deal of time - therefore why should someone else be able to take the glory?

The confusion in this case has come about now is that the current site owner Brian is not the same Brian [realist] that set up tech-tronix forum.

I ask you - how you would feel if you saw hours and hours of own work posted up on a site by someone else, without any due credit to orginal source. Particulary so when you had in the past nicely warned the same person about making tutorials look like his own work.

I have been in correspondence with Brian and it is being sorted in an amicable way.

[brian]

Just to let you know this is sorted out.

[tater03]

I am great to see that this is sorted out considering you are not the person he contacted before about this problem. But I would have to agree that when I seen this I was somewhat surprised that they actually posted in the forum. Glad to see it all worked out in the end.

[mtatum4496]

I really do not see what there was to gain with the later posts. I can understand the frustration when he got no response (probably due to using information that was in place to contact the "old" Brian), but it seems to me that when "our" Brian stepped in and let the guy know that the site was not being ran by the same Brian as of old that he would have then worked directly with "our" Brian and not posted anything else.