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Who Owns Your Face? DMCA and Reflexive Allegory

You may not like your face, but it belongs to you. You have an inherent, living, right to use your face as your face. You don’t need a Copyright or a Trademark on your face. You only need to wear your face and own it — warts, wrinkles, warps, and all!

This is the story of my face being stolen — for use in a ridiculous Star Trek revenge meme — and the right ending of someone on the internet who stepped forward to not just be a help to me, but to become a new friend as well.

Continue reading → Who Owns Your Face? DMCA and Reflexive Allegory

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How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.

One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!  Here’s why:

Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article.  Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions.  However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.

Continue reading → How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!