Month: July 2009

Scofflaw motorists

Everybody’s doin’ it.

You know those motorists who complain that cyclists never obey traffic laws? You should read their whiny comments about “speed traps” and “quotas,” along with the requisite links to sites to help you break the law. Por ejample:

They are indiscriminate in who they stop and stop people for the most trivial of reasons just for practice.

CHP cruiser that sits on 19Th Ave and East Cliff at the four-way stop waiting for someone to fail to come to a complete stop, at an intersection where there has never been a serious accident. Or the CHP Officer that sits in the driveway of private property on the corner of Sims Rd and La Madrona at another non-dangerous three way stop. Or the one that sits at Paul Minnie and Rodriguez St yet another low priority three way stop.[ — Personal note: I saw a really nasty injury collision at Sims & La Madrona just last weekend when somebody failed to stop at this “non-dangerous three way stop” which is actually a two way stop. ]

I don’t understand why the American Automobile Association doesn’t control these maniacs. They make all motorists look bad, especially since they stop at stop signs only 22% of the time. If they can’t respect the rules of the road, I can’t respect their right to be on the road.

See also: Warren’s blockbuster movie Stop and the sequel Stop 2.

DMCA and plagiarism

I broke the law and the law won.

A lot of you noticed that Cyclelicious was down for about three hours earlier today. The reason? A DCMA takedown request for the “Bicycle Taxonomy” page.

I had some licensed copy and artwork on my site that belongs to a website design company. I didn’t know it belonged to them, but it is still plagiarism. American hosting providers are required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to take down sites with infringing content.

My feelings were hurt because I know some of the guys involved with this company, including, it turns out, the author of the article. I sent my DMCA response to my host provider with a note that I would remove the offending content, and also contacted my friends at the software company.

The product from this software company is website design software for bike shops to help bike shops create somewhat unique content. This software includes a large library of articles that the bike shop can use.

My friends recently discovered there are a huge number of websites that use their content without permission. A large number of stores are building entire websites based on content they steal from their legitimate retailers. They used to try to work things out with offending sites by sending letters, but nobody ever responded and it proved ineffective. Playing nice, apparently, means you lose out. They now use an automated service that searches for their content online and sends out takedown requests when it finds the plagiarized content.

Since the people at this service want to get paid for their efforts and so their paying customers get value out of their product, they work to keep their copyrighted information limited to whoever pays for it. It was one of their articles that made its way onto my website, hence the takedown. Mea culpa!