As our case against the art thieves at Cretaceous Studies builds (we've identified over half their victims!), I've been looking into our options for going after them on an overall site basis. While the pictures that feature stolen palaeo-art only make up 7-10% of their overall image content, I'd say nine (at moment) separate violations of different people's copyrights should be sufficient cause for at the very least severe sanction by their host server (and this is not mentioning the other 70-80% that feature no doubt equally illegal movie stills). I'm kind of hoping for an outright shut down of the site myself.
Now in looking into what Cretaceous Studies' host server Tripod has to say on image copyright, I'm actually very encouraged. According to my reading on the Tripod site's terms of service, all Tripod users must tick a box in their image uploader stating they own the copyright to anything they upload. Therefore our thieves at Cretaceous Studies have violated their terms of agreement with Tripod. This also means they should not be able to hide behind satire of parody claims when we go after them.
All I need to do now is contact and rally the affected artists, and once I have them all confirming their copyrights were violated, we can inform Tripod. Hopefully, based on what I've read, it should be a pretty clear cut case with this number of substantiated violations.
That said, this is all only in writing. For all I know Tripod is going to disappoint by not actually actively or diligently acting on its terms of service. So for now I'm on the fence, but soon I hope to have many praises for Tripod and its copyright policies soon!
