myspace sucks

You can read the rambling stuff below to find out what I'm doing and why, or you could just leap into the action here. If you want to email me comments/queries/abuse about this section, drop me a line.

I'M SURE my regular readers (both of you) have noticed that I've been having problems with MySpace users. I only realised this is happening when I checked my stats and noticed my dirtbiking directory was the highest entry point to Planet Mut. A quick look at the list of referring sites told me the truth: a bunch of wankers had hotlinked to my pics and were using them for background images.

For those of you who don't know why this is a bad thing, here's why:

1. It's using my bandwidth. If file transfers from Planet Mut go over a certain limit in any given month, I get charged.

2. It's screwing up my hit stats. I now have no idea how many of the 115,000 hits for this month (May 2006) are genuine and how many are caused by some 12-year-old twat visiting his equally moronic 12-year-old friend's MySpace page.

3. While I'll admit it's flattering that people like my pics enough to use them as backgrounds, the little bastards could have had the decency to ask.

4. I hate MySpace users in general; from what I've seen of the pages they're mostly stupid teenagers who can't spell and who think Nickelback are an actual band when in reality they're the first sign of the apocalypse.

So what can I do to stop this? My first thought was to contact MySpace direct and make a complaint. They have a way of reporting copyright abuse, so I thought that would be the way to do it. Then I saw what you have to do in order to make a copyright complaint. This is taken from MySpace's abuse page:

Q. How do I report a copyright violation?

A. If you believe that your copyright-protected work has been copied and posted on MySpace.com in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please provide our Copyright Agent with the following information: (i) an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest; (ii) a description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed; (iii) a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the Website; (iv) your address, telephone number, and email address; (v) a written statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; (vi) a statement by you that the above information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf. Please contact us here.

Wow, they really make it easy don't they? So the onus is on me to prove that my pics are being used without my permission and my bandwidth is being stolen. Great. I'm buggered if I'm giving these dickheads my phone number and address, and you just know that the "Copyright Agent" is going to be some crack-whore out on probation. I was also put off by this bit:

(vi) a statement by you that the above information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner[...]

I can prove the images are mine, and I can prove I hold the copyright. However, I'm me and MySpace is a faceless firm with more lawyers than Donald Trump who'll go out the way to disprove my claims. So that left me with this solution:

Never did I think I'd be so happy that Emric had crapped in the sink, or that I'd taken a pic of it. All I had to do now was find out who was hotlinking to me, discover which pic they were hotlinking to, and replace it with some good solid cat logs...