[ot] someone apparently selling my maps
JimP
🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
I logged into my Dwarf Home sub site today to see what new, if any, visitors I have had recently.
Apparently blexhn25.webmeup.com has some links to my site and might be selling my maps. My maps are free. And they should take all links, and maps, to my site down. Now.
Their site claims they are just a web crawler site; however, they look like they are copying content and selling it:
Here is why I think that, its from my visitor logs.
19 Nov 2016 02:49:41 AM blexhn25.webmeup.com dwarfhome/articles/295/FrontProductSaleDetail-3207.aspx
There is a list of such links in my visitor logs.
I have added 2 sentences to the top of my site pages nothing that all my maps are free. I realize there is nothing I can do about people like that, but I wanted you to be aware that if you see my maps elsewhere, this might be how they got there.
Apparently blexhn25.webmeup.com has some links to my site and might be selling my maps. My maps are free. And they should take all links, and maps, to my site down. Now.
Their site claims they are just a web crawler site; however, they look like they are copying content and selling it:
Here is why I think that, its from my visitor logs.
19 Nov 2016 02:49:41 AM blexhn25.webmeup.com dwarfhome/articles/295/FrontProductSaleDetail-3207.aspx
There is a list of such links in my visitor logs.
I have added 2 sentences to the top of my site pages nothing that all my maps are free. I realize there is nothing I can do about people like that, but I wanted you to be aware that if you see my maps elsewhere, this might be how they got there.
Comments
I give stuff away for free because its nice sharing things - my textures for instance, so I would be pretty cross if I discovered someone was making a quick buck on them!
Have you found the page where its being sold?
If they aren't selling them, thats a rather odd web crawler link.
A few months ago I started seeing links to a site I decided to check on. Turns out that site said they could help with web design, and my site was getting page hits from their site. My impression ios they were pretending they had put my site together ansd were using that to sell site services to people. So I added on my site front page, Crest of a Star, that no one had helped me with my sites. And I used .htaccess to block them. My guess is that someone decided to sell my maps as punsihment for not letting them scam people into thinking they had helped me by building my site.
They put a special character in their url so when I went to do a lookup, for the IP address, it would say invalid. i got their iP address anyway.
It would be nice if their local government would stop them, but I don't see it happening.
Another huge scam that no one seems to realise is if someone pins an image from your webpage on their pinterest board. Apparently the reason pinterest has made its creators into millionaires is that whenever someone finds your site by clicking an image on a pinterest board, piniterest charge a commission on any sale that occurs on your site to anyone who has reached it through a pinterest hyperlink to one of your webpage images. I don't know whether the money comes from the vendor, or the purchaser, but basically, its stealing either way, since neither the vendor nor the purchaser are aware that its happening.
That's why, when I've finished my maps and get them up on my author's webpage, I'm going to include the message "Not for redistribution or resale. Hyperlinking to this image is prohibited" along with the copyright notice. Then when I see any of them on a pinterest board I will at least have a foot to stand on when I demand that it be taken down. I'm a realist - I know I'm not going to make enough to become a professional writer full time, but I certainly have no intention of allowing the pinterest fat cats to benefit from my writing!
"Not for redistribution or resale. Hyperlinking to this image is prohibited"
and put it on my sites ?
Well, I would say: "Not for redistribution or resale. Hyperlinking to my site is prohibited"
I also had no idea people were making money on pinned maps in Pintrest. That really sucks because I've never seen a penny for any of my maps yet every single map I've put up at the Cartographer's Guild has been pinned by multiple people to Pintrest.
I've put these maps up for free for people to use and look at but not to make money from.
EDIT: Oh sorry - I didn't see Tonnichiwa's comment
If you sell things on your webpage, and you get a customer who's come through someone else's pinterest hyperlink to an image on your selling page, they somehow make money out of it. Not sure if they charge the vendor, or there's some kind of tiny increase to the price the customer actually pays which is syphoned off. That isn't made clear - but they have admitted it.
I wonder if this same things happens on Facebook ? I think I'm the only one posting my maps there.
There is a welter of confusing and conflicting information out there about pinterest, but it seems that work can be pinned and re-pinned ad-infinitum - the original pinner acquiring the kind of kudos for themselves that should really go to the original artist, who is mostly forgotten. It works very much like FB in that sense... and anything pinned to a pinner's boards automatically ends up on their FB page, unless they specifically block the sharing!
The Wikipedia page on pinterest makes this comment about the way pinterest regards the copyright of the original author:
"Pinterest's system is in line with Nicolas de Condorcet's view that the public’s interest in knowledge trumps the author’s property rights."
There is a piece of code that you can put in your webpage to block pinners from pinning. I didn't copy it down for you (because I didn't think about it till after I'd already moved on to something else) but its easy enough to find if you just search for "block pinning".
Its a line of meta, but some browsers ignore that now due to bogus meta search info on a large number of sites.
I don't think that most of the pinners even realise the risk their taking whenever they pin stuff to their boards in that case. At least - I'd like to think of it that way, rather than allow myself to believe that they just don't care.
All we can do is make the copyright message nice and clear, and add that piece of code to the webpage - even if it doesn't always work. Surely it will stop some of them.
The pdf printer I use, bullzip, has the ability to add a watermark of my choice, text or picture, to anything I use to print to it. So I could just load up CC3 or CC3+ and print to png using bullzip. Output is my map with a watermark.
Anyway, I have come up with this. I had to use 'fit to page' for the map and 'foreground' for the watermark.
Subject to modification, etc.
I totally understand your anger and frustration, but I really think the watermark as it just proposed is really intrusive and makes the map much more difficult to read.
My thought earlier to day was to just go online, with an ftp program, and delete my map folders and add the maps back as I have time to add the watermark.
edit: A number of things, like moving the text to one side, requires a paid version, changing the font, lots of things it says I can do, but it requires a paid version.
It would be much easier for me to load the map, add the text using CC3 and CC3+, and exporting a new png.
When I saw my own map posted without my knowledge and no credit at all on someone else's FB Group site I was pretty furious (as you all know), and I reacted very badly to start with - experimenting with all kinds of techniques which... frankly... now that I look back on those threads only served to express my rage and went a long way to frightening people away and/or ruining my maps altogether.
The long and the short of it is that no matter how angry we feel at the time there really is very little we can do about it because of the way that people regard online images as common property, and there's nothing on Earth that's ever going to cause that to stop now that its there. Sites like FB and pinterest actually encourage people to take the view that stealing images is 'just what you do, because everyone else is doing it'.
Once I managed to calm down I settled on a legible but otherwise quite discrete little copyright notice along the bottom edge of the map - usually in the bottom right hand corner where an artist might be expected to sign a painting. It seems to be working, as I haven't found any of my maps anywhere else since then.
Another trick I've noticed a lot at the Guild just lately is the use of a map-maker's mark - a small graphic design that encompasses either or both the artists initials or an image that means something to the cartographer. Maps are suddenly instantly identifiable at a glance by the mark - a lizard is Ilanthar (one of the Community Leaders), an all-seeing eye is Bogie (I don't think I really need to introduce him!), the elegant THW tangle is 'The Hoarse Whisperer', the powerfully blocky MB tangle is Mixerbach... and so on.
For myself I'm thinking of designing a very small wood mouse to sit in the bottom left hand corner - my own map-maker's mark, because I am already very widely known at the Guild and to some extent here as 'Mouse', since the idea of my mark actually enhancing the quality of the image rather than detracting from it seriously appeals to me. I just have to be careful that it doesn't look like the mark of a certain rather famous steam locomotive painter (ironically I can't remember his name off the top of my head) whom my dad very much admired, and who always used to hide a tiny mouse somewhere in his painting. He was so famous for it that people would glance at the painting and then almost immediately start looking for the mouse. I bet that was really where the original idea for 'Where's Wally' really came from - did we but know it!