Copyright Infringer Tries To Shut Down Reporting On Her Infringement 418
An anonymous reader writes "Further to the previous story on Slashdot where attorney Candice Schwager threw threats to sue a photographer who reported a DMCA violation against her for infringing use of his photography: Candice has now made a DMCA threat of her own against Petapixel, a photography site that reported on her infringement. The kicker? She's sent the DMCA notice an apparent six times not to Petapixel's registrar or their hosting service, but to Godaddy, her own registrar."
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Texan, I somewhat resent this statement. Some of us were lucky enough to have parents who valued education, despite the State's constant de-funding of it.
Also, there are dumbasses everywhere in "amercia" it would seem.
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:5, Insightful)
how the fuck did that happen?
oh, wait.. she's from texas. never mind.
how the fuck did that happen?
oh, wait.. she's from texas. never mind.
I think somebody from texas, or several slashdotters from texas need to take copies of all this and send it to the texas state bar: Technically the:
State Bar of Texas Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, for their review, this woman if she is indeed a lawyer needs to be dealt with swiftly. Also the state congressmen and senator need to be contacted if the state bar doesn't do anything because she is giving the great state of texas a bad name.
Re:Paging the Texas Bar... cleanup in aisle seven. (Score:2, Insightful)
Excellent! Now off to complain away....
Clarification here (Score:5, Insightful)
Petapixel is reporting on her copyright infringement. As such they have a thumbnail screen shot of her site as proof. That thumbnail includes her logo, just barely readable. This woman needs to go back to law school and look up "fair use" and the difference between copyrights and trademarks. Next thing you know, she will be claiming copyright infringement for publishing her DMCA letter. If she really is practicing law then she ought to be disbarred for her behavior.
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:5, Insightful)
oh, wait.. she's from texas. never mind.
You might have just as well said something along the lines "she was black, that explains everything". It's the same fucking sort of bullshit.
Texas has produced a lot of brilliant engineers, scientists, leaders, and good regular people too.
Have states like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and etc. ever produced douchebags? Of course not...
Ironic her sight disables right clicking... (Score:4, Insightful)
It says:
Sorry right clicking is disabled, please respect copyright.
WTF? really lady? You didn't with that photo and go on some crazy rant. I can't even read some of what she writes without just rolling my eyes.
It's like raaaaain, on your wedding daaaaay (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else find it ironic that the actual infringer's sites [ http://chicksandpolitics.com/ [chicksandpolitics.com] , http://atty4kids.org/ [atty4kids.org] ] have an anti-right-click script that produces a smarmy message about respecting copyrights?
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:1, Insightful)
And I could say you guys gave us GWB, but then "someone" voted for him... twice.
I'm not from Texas. I'm a highly educated Yankee and I voted for George W. Bush twice. Like I was really going to vote for Al Gore or John Kerry. It would be nice if the Democrats would put up a candidate that doesn't make my skin crawl.
LK
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Suing herself? How you say .... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:2, Insightful)
I made the mistake of voting my conscience in both elections, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils like everyone else.
I assure you I won't be making that mistake again. As much as Obama pisses me off, I'd rather fall on a grenade then end up with Romney because I decided to vote the way we're supposed to, for the candidate we actually want to win (despite the fact that 99% of the rest of the voters sure as shit won't, and will vote for the guy who's commercial they saw last before they left the house)...
Go ahead and tell me I'm part of the problem, I really don't care. I'm not going to have another George W. Bush type president on my conscience, and that's exactly what Romney's going to be. It must have been hard to find someone more out of touch with reality than W., but damnit, the GOP sure as fuck managed to do so anyway. "Corporations are people, my friend." Yeah, sure thing, Mitt...
Fair use is still decided case by case (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And I'm done (Score:2, Insightful)
Waste of time? Maybe.
Absolutely unbelievably funny how stupid some people can be? Yes
Worth reading just for the giggles? Definitely.
Re:It's like raaaaain, on your wedding daaaaay (Score:4, Insightful)
I love (in the ironic sense) when websites do that sort of thing. I was trying to do the right-click "open in new tab" to check out one of the links she provided without leaving her site, but got the ridiculous "respect copyright" message. I even tried copy/pasting the link, but the page doesn't allow highlighting of text either. So I had no choice but to leave her site (and I won't return).
Re:Clarification here (Score:2, Insightful)
This woman needs to go back to law school and look up "fair use" and the difference between copyrights and trademarks.
Don't be so judgemental. Every test of Fair Use since SCOTUS got all those Bush nominations put on the bench has ruled in the most restrictive and compromising way about it. She might be making a crazy argument, but the law is crazy too. It has changed in the past decade or so much that crazy arguments are now normal. They think downloading an mp3 is right up there with murder -- there's tens of thousands out there right now who's lives are permafucked because of those changes to copyright law.*
Really, copyright law has been Poe's law for awhile.
.
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*) At least in my state, you can murder someone (not pre-meditated) and it has less of a long term impact on your life -- you only spend may 7 years in jail, and after that you can get a job, a halfway decent place to live, and enough creature comforts to not be miserable. Get a judgement for $250,000 against you, and you're spending the rest of your life in cheap apartments and driving a car worth less than $2,000. No matter how much money you make at work, you'll never get out from under that; You're a slave until the day you die, because they can take away any of your possessions at will and as much as their paycheck as the courts allow -- which you should go and look up how they calculate that. It makes fixed income senior living look downright luxurous. Oh, and also.. your health will go to shit, because in this country, you have to buy your own insurance... and sorry, but that's not necessary to keep you pumping out the benjamins so... suck it up.
Re:Suing herself? How you say .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any way you can mod the submission itself as "Funny"?
Seriously - for an alleged lawyer, not knowing what the DMCA is, how to use it, and doing so in a manner that simply boils over the ol' cauldron full of dumbass?
Umm, yeah. At this point, forget counter-suing. If I were the guy who inadvertently opened this particular can of crazy, I'd start loudly and openly asking the Texas State Bar to consider distancing themselves from Ms Schwager as quickly as possible, and with unabashed prejudice.
What the... (Score:5, Insightful)
From a post on her batshit insane rambling website.
Jay is a hacker and tech expert and knows everything imaginable about computers. He would certainly know how to take down 14 of Atty4kids’ websites with a single accusation. He would also know that images can be purchased through licensing, if he did not truly own the image motivating him to slice her jugular. He undoubtedly knows how to kill a server with a Trojan virus, though I’m not suggesting he did this to a mom of three little boys, one with special needs.
And SHE is suing HIM for libel. Holy shit.
This is why so many people hate lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Because lawyers think they have some God given right to be above the law.
This crazy woman thinks that just because she is involved in programs supporting disabled children, she should get a free pass at violating the law? It's entirely HER FAULT that she put these multiple sites together under one in which she infringed on someone else's copyright. If she wants them to go back online, then it's simple. Remove the infringing content (or agree to by a specified date). Or split the sites apart. But instead, she wants to use her law background to do the things that get lawyers hated by the public, and to even further extend her own misery on the internet.
Candice: just get a clue. Here's a free one (and feel free to copy it, too). Put your web sites back up elsewhere under other domain names. Just leave out the copyright infringements when you do.
Re:this woman is an attorney? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is perfectly true, but there's many conditions that can arise unpredictably or which can be triggered. I'd consider her closer to Borderline Personality Disorder, since Schizophrenia (as I understand it) alters the way a person's internal model of the world works but does so in a consistent manner. R. D. Laing exploited that to produce therapies based on the idea of having schizophrenics make the correct mappings at the conscious level.
However, this attorney isn't acting in a consistent manner. Too random. She's also able to function (to some degree) in law and that's not something you would necessarily expect from a Schizophrenic. What we're wanting to look for is a mental or neurological disorder that's very narrow in focus and domain in comparison to Schizophrenia.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would it be a perjury issue - fair use is a defence, not an exclusion so making the DMCA claim would not be false at all, and it would be up to the alleged infringer to make the case for fair use.
Re:Please stop trying to scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
Since this, like a lot of stories here at /. has gone political, let me weigh in...
President Obama's biggest mistake was trying to rescue the Republicans when they were at an all time low thinking he needed "bipartisanship" to get things passed. He had 3/4ths of the power (lacking only the Supreme Court) and he treated the opposition like they were equal partners. Like my dad always said, leave it to the Democrats to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Instead of using the Tea Party lunacy like a knife twisting it in the belly of the beast, they allowed the Republicans to set not only the tone of the argument but the agenda as if they were still in power.
Anyway, to try and bring this back around, this attorney is just about as batty as any Tea Party Patriot. I guess it is a sign of the times.
Re:You're all doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
She needs to hear the other point-of-view from someone she trusts and respects. Someone she will listen to and actually take it onboard when they tell her she's being pretty stupid and wasting her own time. Probably someone she works for at one of the sites she maintains. And if you locate someone, be nice. Real nice. I shouldn't need to say it, but distingush between Ms Schwager and her actions and also between her actions and these organisations. Point out how her idiocy is making them look bad.
Wade.
You are sooo wrong, sadly. This woman has gone far beyond being an idiot. Even an idiot at some point would know to just shut up. This is much worse. She is full-blown narcissistic paranoid-delusional loony-bin material. There is no person left on this planet that she will listen to, because EVERYONE who says anything negative to her or about her is automatically assumed to be in cahoots with the EEEVIL Sheriff Garcia. This includes all kinds of random internet people on Twitter, the commenters on the photographer's original article (the initial "lynch mob"), as well as the commenters on the PetaPixel article. According to her all of these random people are part of a conspiracy run by this Sheriff Garcia that she's trying to get rid of. If she ever finds out about Slashdot we'll all be included in the conspiracy too, I'm sure.
Even if you got the Christ-figure in this drama, her immaculately-conceived hero Louis Guthrie, to speak to her about this, it wouldn't make any difference. In fact, the next article on her blog afterward would be something like, "Guthrie Sells Soul to Garcia, Satan Wins!" And it will be yet another extensive, zig-zaggy, rambling diatribe about how the whole world is trying to destroy her (and by extension, how the world is trying to destroy the disabled children she has supposedly dedicated her life to serving).
This woman seriously needs to be put in a padded room and given some intense psychological help before she ends up living on the streets arguing with imaginary people. It may be as simple as a dose of lithium to even out a manic episode. I'd hate to think she's been this crazy her whole life and nobody's noticed, but that's not unheard of either. Witness Michelle Bachmann.
P.S. It's really interesting going through the comments on the PetaPixel article. With her odd writing style it's quite easy to identify the dozen or so comments she made in support of herself WHILE PRETENDING TO BE OTHER PEOPLE. Hint: She's the only one who keeps harping about Jay Lee (the photographer) "taking down her websites" and slipping in references to "Garcia". Oddly she never says a word against her beloved web host GoDaddy, the ones who actually took her sites down.
Re:Please stop trying to scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
This presumes that Obama wanted single payer or financial reform or peace. That's a big presumption.
Re:Please stop trying to scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
failing to take advantage of the brief period of Democratic control of Congress by getting his health care plan passed
It's not his fault; he's naive and inexperienced, and never should have been put up as a nominee
I have a somewhat different view of this. It seems that Obama actually got the health care that he wanted. Sure he paid lip-service to a public option for political reasons, but maybe you don't remember or didn't know that he negotiated away the public option in private meetings with the insurance companies early on [1] [nytimes.com] [2] [wikipedia.org]. There's also the fact that Obama decided to personally scold [washingtonpost.com] Kucinich for trying to stick up for the public option. So I don't really buy the argument that Obama has good intentions but is just too powerless, inexperienced, good-natured, etc. to stand up to the Republicans.
Re:Please stop trying to scapegoat (Score:4, Insightful)
That explains why prior to his election and campaign promises, he either voted every for full funding of the Iraq war or did not vote (not the same as coming out against, especially when the votes came closer to the presidential election) and of course voted to extend the PATRIOT act.
I voted third party for the first time last election because I believed his campaign was a lie based on his record. Turns out I was right and made the correct presumption.