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Copyright Infringement Reports (Review guidelines in post #1 before posting here)

Some of you may want to review this Facebook page's gallery for your images. It is gaining some prominence in the chase community, but few seem to be aware that the page's large following has been built primarily by stealing "viral" images from others. The site is popular, but it is ill-gotten gain no different from many of the ones we often see on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube that earn the ire of chasers. Notice how many images are uploaded to the page's gallery instead of shared from the source, ensuring that all of the traffic, likes, and shares go to this page and not the original photographer. I was hit by this page back in 2012 for one of my tornado images. Notice the numerous images copied from Twitter, chaser web sites and news media:

https://www.facebook.com/FollowMrTwister
https://www.facebook.com/FollowMrTwister/photos_stream

I see that some chasers are now voluntarily allowing their images to be posted on this page, apparently unaware of how its owner has built the following and continues to do so.
 
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Roger Edwards alerted me about this site (Mr. Twister per Dan's post immediately above). He has clearly used Steve Bluford's and my frame capture from Greensburg 5/4/2007 without seeking permission. I both sent him a PM and posted that he take it down but as of this morning, it's still there. Due to no response, I have filed a formal Facebook complaint. After doing some additional research, it appears FB does take copyright violations seriously although I'm not too sure how long they will take to act. Purportedly, they have snuffed several accounts that contained literally hundreds of unauthorized pictures. I encourage any of you that see your work therein to take the time to fill out a violation form on FB. It's a very quick process and will ultimately benefit all of us. These violators have got to account for their actions and it's a seriously growing problem.
 
More pirate Facebook pages. This first one is new, the last two have been online for at least a year (they've been posted here before). I see many chaser works stolen on these. All it takes is a few of those affected to file a DMCA report, and the page will likely be shut down:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Severe-Weather-World/834708056540523?sk=photos_stream

https://www.facebook.com/SuperCelula

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Destructive-Nature/365398036899485

Facebook's DMCA form is here:

https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/208282075858952
 
Not sure whose image this is, but it was passed off as the Sand Springs tor yesterday....another facepalm for Facebook. The poster removed the post after I said something about stolen pics and copyright laws in his comments amongst all of the "wow" comments. Can't believe we are among people who believe crap like this.
 

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This is a heads up regarding a network of Youtube channels (apparently run by the same individual/group) that has a long history of ripping viral tornado/weather videos from various sources. They post them to their monetized Youtube channels and send the links out on Twitter and possibly other social media accounts. The main Twitter handle I see doing this is "Nature Reporter" that posts links to videos from these four channels (there may be more):

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNNq8UcFB21znJheRvGM45A/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0rggbkdCvXIlyFCGtjUk_g

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2py1Iw--55m1-Gtgdi2nw

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUNDE_rGHp1yuaka7nDlCzw/videos

All of the channels are monetized with ads, and all videos have the strange, broken english "SHARE this video if you want to know the people" tagline in the description. Some of the videos have misleading thumbnails of different tornadoes designed to fool people into clicking. For example, this video of a weak tornado in England has a thumbnail image of what appears to be a high-quality chaser shot of the Langley, KS EF4 from April 14, 2012.


Briefly browsing through the channels, I did not see any chaser videos on there that I could identify, but you might want to double check. Again, I did see some thumbnails that looked suspiciously like chaser photos. They seem to target videos shot by the non-chasing public. Nonetheless, I see this account getting a lot of retweets from various people and media figures that probably aren't aware of the large-scale content theft going on.
 
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I came across this tornado compilation tonight that has stolen a bunch of chaser videos. It has reached over 1 million monetized views in 4 months (that's a nice payday for this thief).

 
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I discovered that there are many chaser/stringer clips, including some of mine, in the AP's own stock footage archives:

http://www.aparchive.com

Some of these are marked as "must be cleared for re-use" but some are not. Either way, I know none of my footage was ever authorized to be posted there.
 
I found a particularly egregious case today. This site has mass-uploaded thousands of images on a wide variety of subjects to a blog that is connected to high-following social media accounts. The owner is even cropping out watermarks and (not that it matters) not crediting or citing the sources. The Facebook page has 425,000 followers and the page is advertising with both Adsense and Taboola.

whitewolfpack.com

The site has taken so many images that it's impossible to just scroll through to find one. If you search for specific storm-related terms in Google Images, you can locate images. For example, I saw chaser images using these search terms:

whitewolfpack.com tornado
whitewolfpack.com lightning

Of course, the user is hiding behind an anonymous domain registrar and provides no contact information. The good news is that any one whos image was taken can report the site to Google Adsense and Taboola, if two or three reports are logged, the site may lose its advertising accounts:

For Adsense, visit:
https://support.google.com/adsense/contact/violation_report

For Taboola, email the URLs of the stolen image and the orignal to [email protected]
 
Searched through the thread and did not find this posted yet.

I recognized some of the clips in this video, but can't remember which chaser had posted them.

 
GIF creation sites are becoming one of the primary ways that Reddit users are sharing video content on the site - instead of posting a link to the original video, they rip it into a GIF using these services and post it:

http://imgur.com
http://gfycat.com
http://giphy.com

The end result is the GIF goes viral on Reddit with no attribution or traffic to the original.

These sites make it simple for users to steal content - they just have to paste the video URL into the GIf maker, and it creates the GIF automatically.

gfycat2.png

There are already hundreds of storm GIFs from chaser videos on the site, some with hundreds of thousands of Reddit views. In most of those cases, the original video was not linked.

https://gfycat.com/gifs/search/tornado
 
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I have been looking for a good way to deal with some of these that I receive as email messages from friends and family. I have been posting some of them on my blog, trying to determine in the photo is real, whether their explanation is real, (the "rainbow tornado" and hurricane flooded street ones come to mind), and crediting/linking to the appropriate photographer's website.

Unfortunately, when I do a TinEye search on many of these photos, I get links to Pintrest and other photodump sites. Do you guys have a better search engine for finding the proper owner of these photos?
 
Just remember to thoroughly document any infringements so you can take action when (and if) the new copyright laws become active. You should also make sure to document any request to remove the copyrighted material including the refusal by an individual to comply with your requests(s). Sending a registered letter is even better if you can get and address. You stand a far greater chance of success if you have a well-documented case. Don't forget to file a copyright on your work. You can submit a large collection of material from past years if you want. The new law may require that a copyright was actually filed.

Even if an infringement is removed you can still take action if the image or footage was used for profit, promotion, etc.

The infringers are going down!
 
I just stumbled on a big subset of stolen videos by searching with Arabic keywords on Youtube and Facebook, many with hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. These never come up for me using English keywords.

For example:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=إعصار

To do this, go to Google translate, type in tornado, hurricane, lightning, etc and translate into Arabic, then search Youtube with the Arabic words.

https://translate.google.com/
 
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