What do you call the cadet who graduated dead last from West point in 1861, bombed the cavalry course, had almost enough demerits for dismissal, and was under arrest for stealing test questions?
General GA Custer (make blonde joke of your choice)
W.W. CarlislePlayed since January 20, 2019Captain Level- 99 (May 9, 2022)VIP 14Crew Quarters: 485/485Most recent/Lowest- Anbo-jyutsu Kyle Riker (1/5* Lvl 30) 5/29/23Immortalized x-866 5* x184, 4* x 490, 3* x91, 2* x62, and 1* x27Most recent Immortal - Tearful Janeway 4* 5/25/23Current non-event project- Improving my Science base skill. Retrieval Project- Mestral 1/5*
What do you call the cadet who graduated dead last from West point in 1861, bombed the cavalry course, had almost enough demerits for dismissal, and was under arrest for stealing test questions?
General GA Custer (make blonde joke of your choice)
Off topic but a factoid I love to bring up about Custer: he was a general of the volunteers during the Civil War, which was the equivalent of a captain. Which is also why he died a lieutenant colonel at Little Bighorn.
And I would agree that he is fascinating @&$* up. 😃
First rule of Star Trek.. don't talk about Star Trek?
It doesn't make sense that CBS wouldn't want people talking about the series, listing favourite eps, making funny video mashups, fan art. It all adds to Trekdom and interest in watching new series.
Is OpSec Security even working for them?
Maybe they just need to file a certain amount of complaints to prove that they're doing what they're being paid for. It's not like anyone will go and check what the complaints were about anyway.
Or they just comb the web for stuff that has the general appearance of a copyright infringement and they don't use actual people to review the results. Or they do and they pay them 5 cent per reviewed item.
I wonder though it cites imdb - is it possible that they think material was taken from the imdb website and that is the copyright issue I find it hard to believe they would go as far as to remove a list of titles that are in the public domain and on other sites like wikipedia.
Personally I would contact google to ask the specifics on the claim as you have the right to remove/correct the infringement before they remove it as far as I am aware.
On another level I'd sell my story to the local tabloid. It's about time they spent decent money on decent writers rather than going on the witch hunt of fans.
If anything this lockdown has provided it's actually made me think whether I need this streaming subscription or not and steadily the answer is becoming a no. Instead I'm enjoying good old fashioned pulp science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s and yes while some of it is bad there's also some really great lost texts of forgotten authors out there too. Give it another week or so and I'll be back to writing my own stories on a jotter pad. Good luck to them taking that away from me.
[was on Sabbatical/Hiatus] Currently a trialist at Galaxy SquadronSTAY SAFE and KBO
I made it public, so I could easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, and with folks on another forum. I think I shared the link here at some point. It's been up since 2017. Theoretically, everyone could have seen it, but I think only a half dozen of my close friends humored me and even bothered opening it long enough to glance at it. It didn't exactly attract a lot of attention. Until OpSec, anyway!
I wonder though it cites imdb - is it possible that they think material was taken from the imdb website and that is the copyright issue I find it hard to believe they would go as far as to remove a list of titles that are in the public domain and on other sites like wikipedia.
I am entirely baffled by how IMDb fits into this. I had no links whatsoever in that list, the other lists, or anything else in my Drive. I got the episode titles off the Blu-ray box set, since I was adding them to the list as I went through it. It's not like they're the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices. Plus, you'd think IMDb would be involved with filing the complaint if the issue had to do with swiping something from them. I can't see what any of the other 655 Drive files caught up in all this had in them, so maybe some of them featured pirated content and links galore. I dunno. I just know that my little list did not, and that didn't stop OpSec from filing the complaint and having Google take down my list and warn me about the serious consequences of infringing on copyright.
Personally I would contact google to ask the specifics on the claim as you have the right to remove/correct the infringement before they remove it as far as I am aware.
Oh, I tried. I don't want to get us too caught up in that hassle, but the short version is that their support system is just one big, frustrating "Choose Your Own Adventure" where your adventure leads to being told to click things that don't exist.
And what would they do if you didn’t take it down? Throw you in irons?
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
I made it public, so I could easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, and with folks on another forum. I think I shared the link here at some point. It's been up since 2017. Theoretically, everyone could have seen it, but I think only a half dozen of my close friends humored me and even bothered opening it long enough to glance at it. It didn't exactly attract a lot of attention. Until OpSec, anyway!
Strange, it must have somehow turned up in a search somewhere probably through Twitter and got flagged. Still so bizarre. Have you contested it?
And what would they do if you didn’t take it down? Throw you in irons?
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
Well @Travis S McClain i can say with supreme confidence that alot of people on this forum have appreciated what you have done and the time you have put in for the benefit of everyone. Your efforts have been very valuable to many.
I made it public, so I could easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, and with folks on another forum. I think I shared the link here at some point. It's been up since 2017. Theoretically, everyone could have seen it, but I think only a half dozen of my close friends humored me and even bothered opening it long enough to glance at it. It didn't exactly attract a lot of attention. Until OpSec, anyway!
Strange, it must have somehow turned up in a search somewhere probably through Twitter and got flagged. Still so bizarre. Have you contested it?
Here's the relevant troubleshooter and here's the counter notification form. You'll notice that the way it's written is a lot less "We'll get this sorted out if there's been a mistake", and a lot more "I'd definitely get a lawyer if I were you because it's real easy to screw this up." Some of y'all would be confident enough to stand right up to all this, and the certainty you knew what you were doing. That ain't me, and my whole purpose for starting this thread was to give a heads-up to anyone else here who might be caught in this same widely cast net and just as intimidated.
And what would they do if you didn’t take it down? Throw you in irons?
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
Well @Travis S McClain i can say with supreme confidence that alot of people on this forum have appreciated what you have done and the time you have put in for the benefit of everyone. Your efforts have been very valuable to many.
That's kind of you to say, @Banjo1012. Thank you. When I found my way to the old forum, there was a clear sense of players learning the ins and outs together. I benefited from the four months of analysis that others had already conducted. I wanted to contribute something. I don't have the resources to be one of the first to do anything, and I'm not a statistician who knows how to whip up formulae to suss out the numbers. My background is in history, so I've tried to use that training in ways that I've hoped have helped contextualize whatever is taking place today with what has gone before. And I hoped to be accepted into this community. Still do.
And what would they do if you didn’t take it down? Throw you in irons?
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
Well @Travis S McClain i can say with supreme confidence that alot of people on this forum have appreciated what you have done and the time you have put in for the benefit of everyone. Your efforts have been very valuable to many.
That's kind of you to say, @Banjo1012. Thank you. When I found my way to the old forum, there was a clear sense of players learning the ins and outs together. I benefited from the four months of analysis that others had already conducted. I wanted to contribute something. I don't have the resources to be one of the first to do anything, and I'm not a statistician who knows how to whip up formulae to suss out the numbers. My background is in history, so I've tried to use that training in ways that I've hoped have helped contextualize whatever is taking place today with what has gone before. And I hoped to be accepted into this community. Still do.
I’m a huge history guy myself. I spent the last three years of an awful marriage in libraries researching and writing a book called Histories Loudest Memories. When I get home today I’ll take a picture of the table of contents and PM it to you. I think it may spark great discussion between us
I made it public, so I could easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, and with folks on another forum. I think I shared the link here at some point. It's been up since 2017. Theoretically, everyone could have seen it, but I think only a half dozen of my close friends humored me and even bothered opening it long enough to glance at it. It didn't exactly attract a lot of attention. Until OpSec, anyway!
Strange, it must have somehow turned up in a search somewhere probably through Twitter and got flagged. Still so bizarre. Have you contested it?
Here's the relevant troubleshooter and here's the counter notification form. You'll notice that the way it's written is a lot less "We'll get this sorted out if there's been a mistake", and a lot more "I'd definitely get a lawyer if I were you because it's real easy to screw this up." Some of y'all would be confident enough to stand right up to all this, and the certainty you knew what you were doing. That ain't me, and my whole purpose for starting this thread was to give a heads-up to anyone else here who might be caught in this same widely cast net and just as intimidated.
Honestly I believe if I were in your shoes I would just forget about it. If they already took your stuff down what more is there for them to do. Don’t lose sleep over it. They aren’t going to come after you
And what would they do if you didn’t take it down? Throw you in irons?
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
Well @Travis S McClain i can say with supreme confidence that alot of people on this forum have appreciated what you have done and the time you have put in for the benefit of everyone. Your efforts have been very valuable to many.
That's kind of you to say, @Banjo1012. Thank you. When I found my way to the old forum, there was a clear sense of players learning the ins and outs together. I benefited from the four months of analysis that others had already conducted. I wanted to contribute something. I don't have the resources to be one of the first to do anything, and I'm not a statistician who knows how to whip up formulae to suss out the numbers. My background is in history, so I've tried to use that training in ways that I've hoped have helped contextualize whatever is taking place today with what has gone before. And I hoped to be accepted into this community. Still do.
I’m a huge history guy myself. I spent the last three years of an awful marriage in libraries researching and writing a book called Histories Loudest Memories. When I get home today I’ll take a picture of the table of contents and PM it to you. I think it may spark great discussion between us
If Bobby Thompson isn't in the book, then you're not done writing it.
I get hit with a DMCA complaint by CBS's hired goons for having a simple list of TNG episode titles, try to give a heads-up to my fellow forum members who have created numerous publicly shared documents pertaining to this game, and this whole thing gets banished to the Holodeck sub-forum for being "off-topic".
So much for my hope that TP would say, "Hey, we're gonna talk to CBS and make sure everyone is on the same page about what our players and forum members can post without being threatened with potential legal problems." Guess the company line is instead "Hey, shut up. Keep your being bullied by the company we license this from to yourself."
Nothing wrong with Holodeck. Frankly, I only use the forum on the "most recent" setting, do it never matters. That might make an interesting poll. Anyway, this has been fascinating to read. My wife uses Google Docs all the time, but I prefer Word and having a saved copy in my control. This just makes me that much more paranoid. If they do this, who else might?
This board got an activity boost thanks to the ‘rona PSA but let’s be honest...The Bridge is where the vast majority of people spend their time here. It’s the difference between the center of the dance floor at a nightclub and, well, the coat closet.
Copyright law, patent trolls and content/copyright trolls are the worst. Sorry you have to experience that.
Your assumption is correct - at least in the US - the system is 'broken', to say it was established eons before the digital world we all live in was thought of. Because of vaguely worded rules, people can, on commission, go out and 'protect the IP' of their choice (and get a commission) and they are protected by the team of lawyers of the IP itself, not their individual counsel. The only way for you to challenge things of this nature is to consult and retain an atty that works in that sphere and let them arbitrate it out. Usually it would resolve in a 'no harm, no foul' type thing and your doc would be returned to you, and (hopefully) Google would forget the whole thing happened. All gravy....except for those pesky hourly lawyer wages. That's what stops 99.9% of people, and thus the trolls win.
Outside of that path, your only other course of action would be to somehow engage CBS via social media, hoping that someone will internally pass it along and fix it that way. In today's world, a popular method of 'fixing problems' is to put the dirty laundry of a company on blast and let the public see it. Given that almost the entire world is at home in front of a screen, it's a bad time for dirty laundry to be aired.
The only saving grace for most of the player-created tools out there is that they don't call them "Star Trek Timelines xyz", but rather "STT xyz" - so hopefully most of it will fly under the radar whilst the trolls are about.
This board got an activity boost thanks to the ‘rona PSA but let’s be honest...The Bridge is where the vast majority of people spend their time here. It’s the difference between the center of the dance floor at a nightclub and, well, the coat closet.
That's been my experience as well. Holodeck and Make It So are where things die. I've seen some fun ideas, but once they are posted/moved to Make It So, they die. There's few conversations that thrive in those threads.
Hmm...I admit to being rather hot-headed. It is one of the less endearing family traits, but, if it had been me, I would have already complained on social media to CBS, hit Google and OpSec with a self-filed defamation lawsuit (It is entirely legal to discuss copyrighted material in an academic way. That is how universities can have Harry Potter or Tolkien courses. I took one that watched movies of an era to see the social commentary on it. They say you broke a law, but it is really harassment on their end.), and, me having an admittedly sadistic streak when angry, I would look into the federal, yes, federal statute. Conspiring to commit a crime via wire (phone or internet these days) is punishable under the RICO Act. I'm sure a federal prosecutor would love an easy win on anything media related these days. They would have to prove you did something wrong to save themselves and they can't do it. The bad pr alone would likely bankrupt OpSec. No one would use them out of fear of scandal.
W.W. CarlislePlayed since January 20, 2019Captain Level- 99 (May 9, 2022)VIP 14Crew Quarters: 485/485Most recent/Lowest- Anbo-jyutsu Kyle Riker (1/5* Lvl 30) 5/29/23Immortalized x-866 5* x184, 4* x 490, 3* x91, 2* x62, and 1* x27Most recent Immortal - Tearful Janeway 4* 5/25/23Current non-event project- Improving my Science base skill. Retrieval Project- Mestral 1/5*
Hmm...I admit to being rather hot-headed. It is one of the less endearing family traits, but, if it had been me, I would have already complained on social media to CBS, hit Google and OpSec with a self-filed defamation lawsuit (It is entirely legal to discuss copyrighted material in an academic way. That is how universities can have Harry Potter or Tolkien courses. I took one that watched movies of an era to see the social commentary on it. They say you broke a law, but it is really harassment on their end.), and, me having an admittedly sadistic streak when angry, I would look into the federal, yes, federal statute. Conspiring to commit a crime via wire (phone or internet these days) is punishable under the RICO Act. I'm sure a federal prosecutor would love an easy win on anything media related these days. They would have to prove you did something wrong to save themselves and they can't do it. The bad pr alone would likely bankrupt OpSec. No one would use them out of fear of scandal.
I get hit with a DMCA complaint by CBS's hired goons for having a simple list of TNG episode titles, try to give a heads-up to my fellow forum members who have created numerous publicly shared documents pertaining to this game, and this whole thing gets banished to the Holodeck sub-forum for being "off-topic".
So much for my hope that TP would say, "Hey, we're gonna talk to CBS and make sure everyone is on the same page about what our players and forum members can post without being threatened with potential legal problems." Guess the company line is instead "Hey, shut up. Keep your being bullied by the company we license this from to yourself."
Me, as admin on these forums, moving a thread to another category does not equate to a "company line/decision", and as I have stated in another thread, I would appreciate it if we could all take a step back and pause before making assumptions and stating things as facts.
Let's pause for a second, are forums the correct avenue/channel to discuss legal matters? No, they are not.
Furthermore is it logical to expect that in the few hours that I have been at work, I would have been able to check where to forward this, and assuming legal teams had everything they needed with the amount of information provided, that said team(s) would have gotten back to me with any kind of advice/recommendation. No, it is not.
I get this is an unpleasant situation to find oneself in, and that there are a lot of reasons to be on edge lately. All the more reasons to take the time to take a step back and reflect before lashing out.
And as much I would like to say that this will get sorted out, realistically in copyright matters such as these, I very much doubt that any licence holder will provide an itemized list of what is allowed or not.
To me it feels like a case of overzealous algorithm, but I am no expert, and sadly I do not have the time to research it more.
If you want to submit a ticket for this, please feel free to do so, but I cannot guarantee that we will be able to get a better answer/explanations as to why this happened.
I'm not pleasant when angry. Most of my family isn't. Most people will tell you we are funny, kind, generous, helpful, hard-working, but they will also warn you never to make us mad.
We are the folks that donate time and money to good causes, always help a friend, and generally trying to make things better. I've spent part of quarantine working on a few projects for my church (redoing some seasonal decorations and doing a cookbook for the Ladie's Aid) and guiding one of my cats through her first kitten. (She plays a little rough with her still.)
I also tried to cave in the head of a teenage thief caught in the act with a shovel about seven years ago. The girl driving screamed and he turned his head. I cracked the paver sidewalk instead. Ever seen a teenage boy make a Pete Rose style dive into the backseat of a Buick with a lit cutting torch while screaming "drive, drive, drive!"?
The trick with this sort of lawsuit is filing it youself. Most of the time big guy vs. little guy cases fail because of money. The little guy can't keep paying the lawyer. The others count on this and drag it out. It is all billable hours for them and they figure it will never make it to court, meaning no verdict against them. No lawyer = no fees. It is just filing papers and meeting deadlines. It is the same as a military siege. They wait for the defenders to run out of resources. Being your own lawyer is one less vulnerable resource.
This forces a change in their tactics.
If they can't get you to give up, they must prepare for court or settle. Something as idiotic as this means they they will be desperate to stay out of court. The initial complaint screams bot to me. They had a bot sift the web using certain parameters and it found a good match. Either it was never checked by a person (likely) or some one figured no one would argue with it or do anything about it, so filed it anyway. They WANT you to do nothing. It's easy money for them. Make it cost, time, money, reputation, things a business needs.
They will want to settle. That would come likely with a NDA and no admission of wrongdoing. The lawyers are tasked with saving the client's bacon and will be out of work if they lose.
Frankly, I'd push for a judge or jury. A legal judgement is public record and can be admitted as precedent. That opens the doors to lost clients and more lawsuits. Imagine a judge looking at the case. The first issue is due diligence. How did this happen in the first place? Yeah, not pretty. Someone is looking for a new job. Google would freak out. They are getting a LOT of flack from certain area. They would probably restore it, apologize, make some vague reference to "review of policy", and blacklist OpSec like the boy who cried wolf.
Then, there is the issue of whose copyright is being infringed. We jumped on the CBS wagon, but it looks like it says you copied content from IMDB.COM, which is owned by Amazon. They are taking hits from so many corners right now. Personally, I like them a lot. I have never had a problem they haven't gone over and above to fix. They might not have even looked at what OpSec actually did, only what they said they did. They would probably be as quick to toss OpSec under the bus or worse than Google. A genuine scapegoat is a rare thing.
This the company? https://www.opsecsecurity.com
They have a lot to lose if it gets ugly and it is ripe for it. I'd go on the warpath, but I'm a hothead with a lot of anger issues. There is a lot of recourse here though.
As for the issue of the game, the developers surely know about most of the fan powered resources out there and make no effort to restrict them. It encourages play, gives good foundation for our feedback, and is no competition to them unless they want to market a strategy quide.
Personally, I think someone at OpSec got lazy or arrogant and you suffered for it. Google acted on what they thought was reliable intel, but wasn't.
W.W. CarlislePlayed since January 20, 2019Captain Level- 99 (May 9, 2022)VIP 14Crew Quarters: 485/485Most recent/Lowest- Anbo-jyutsu Kyle Riker (1/5* Lvl 30) 5/29/23Immortalized x-866 5* x184, 4* x 490, 3* x91, 2* x62, and 1* x27Most recent Immortal - Tearful Janeway 4* 5/25/23Current non-event project- Improving my Science base skill. Retrieval Project- Mestral 1/5*
I got the episode titles off the Blu-ray box set, since I was adding them to the list as I went through it. It's not like they're the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices.
Good grief Travis, are you trying to get Sony and KFC to come down on you too!
Comments
General GA Custer (make blonde joke of your choice)
Off topic but a factoid I love to bring up about Custer: he was a general of the volunteers during the Civil War, which was the equivalent of a captain. Which is also why he died a lieutenant colonel at Little Bighorn.
And I would agree that he is fascinating @&$* up. 😃
It doesn't make sense that CBS wouldn't want people talking about the series, listing favourite eps, making funny video mashups, fan art. It all adds to Trekdom and interest in watching new series.
Is OpSec Security even working for them?
~· Fly with the Subspace Eddies! ·~
Or they just comb the web for stuff that has the general appearance of a copyright infringement and they don't use actual people to review the results. Or they do and they pay them 5 cent per reviewed item.
Anyway, it's sad
Personally I would contact google to ask the specifics on the claim as you have the right to remove/correct the infringement before they remove it as far as I am aware.
On another level I'd sell my story to the local tabloid. It's about time they spent decent money on decent writers rather than going on the witch hunt of fans.
If anything this lockdown has provided it's actually made me think whether I need this streaming subscription or not and steadily the answer is becoming a no. Instead I'm enjoying good old fashioned pulp science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s and yes while some of it is bad there's also some really great lost texts of forgotten authors out there too. Give it another week or so and I'll be back to writing my own stories on a jotter pad. Good luck to them taking that away from me.
I made it public, so I could easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, and with folks on another forum. I think I shared the link here at some point. It's been up since 2017. Theoretically, everyone could have seen it, but I think only a half dozen of my close friends humored me and even bothered opening it long enough to glance at it. It didn't exactly attract a lot of attention. Until OpSec, anyway!
I am entirely baffled by how IMDb fits into this. I had no links whatsoever in that list, the other lists, or anything else in my Drive. I got the episode titles off the Blu-ray box set, since I was adding them to the list as I went through it. It's not like they're the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices. Plus, you'd think IMDb would be involved with filing the complaint if the issue had to do with swiping something from them. I can't see what any of the other 655 Drive files caught up in all this had in them, so maybe some of them featured pirated content and links galore. I dunno. I just know that my little list did not, and that didn't stop OpSec from filing the complaint and having Google take down my list and warn me about the serious consequences of infringing on copyright.
Oh, I tried. I don't want to get us too caught up in that hassle, but the short version is that their support system is just one big, frustrating "Choose Your Own Adventure" where your adventure leads to being told to click things that don't exist.
I had no say in the matter. They'd already taken it down before they notified me of anything. Their correspondence and "legal troubleshooter" page advised getting legal counsel. On a less judicial note, repeat offenses will get your entire Google account terminated. I've been stressed over whether OpSec has taken notice of any of my other ranked Trek lists and would classify them as "repeat offenses". Or any of the various Timelines things I've shared, which are full of character names.
I immediately disabled the sharing of everything in my Drive folders and turned off my blog. I dunno what all's in there, but I am certain I've talked about Star Trek in it at times. I've spent the last two days downloading and migrating things. It's proven far more complicated than I anticipated. Auto-sync means I have a ton more pictures than I would have kept had I given any thought to having to spontaneously retrieve everything because my account was threatened by an overzealous goon. Downloading albums is easy, but there's no way to identify what isn't already in one without just checking the albums. Selecting multiple pictures requires checking each one individually. Plus, in what is surely one of the top ten most baffling tech decisions of our generation, there's no scrollbar.
I get that piracy is apparently spiking because people are spending more time at home right now, but I would counter that living through a pandemic is the wrong time to heap this kind of stress on someone for posting a mothersmurfing list of episode titles. There's surely no way that any of what I've done has been outside the scope of fair use, but that doesn't mean this can't get messy until it's resolved.
Strange, it must have somehow turned up in a search somewhere probably through Twitter and got flagged. Still so bizarre. Have you contested it?
Well @Travis S McClain i can say with supreme confidence that alot of people on this forum have appreciated what you have done and the time you have put in for the benefit of everyone. Your efforts have been very valuable to many.
Here's the relevant troubleshooter and here's the counter notification form. You'll notice that the way it's written is a lot less "We'll get this sorted out if there's been a mistake", and a lot more "I'd definitely get a lawyer if I were you because it's real easy to screw this up." Some of y'all would be confident enough to stand right up to all this, and the certainty you knew what you were doing. That ain't me, and my whole purpose for starting this thread was to give a heads-up to anyone else here who might be caught in this same widely cast net and just as intimidated.
That's kind of you to say, @Banjo1012. Thank you. When I found my way to the old forum, there was a clear sense of players learning the ins and outs together. I benefited from the four months of analysis that others had already conducted. I wanted to contribute something. I don't have the resources to be one of the first to do anything, and I'm not a statistician who knows how to whip up formulae to suss out the numbers. My background is in history, so I've tried to use that training in ways that I've hoped have helped contextualize whatever is taking place today with what has gone before. And I hoped to be accepted into this community. Still do.
I’m a huge history guy myself. I spent the last three years of an awful marriage in libraries researching and writing a book called Histories Loudest Memories. When I get home today I’ll take a picture of the table of contents and PM it to you. I think it may spark great discussion between us
Honestly I believe if I were in your shoes I would just forget about it. If they already took your stuff down what more is there for them to do. Don’t lose sleep over it. They aren’t going to come after you
If Bobby Thompson isn't in the book, then you're not done writing it.
Also, Voyager was best. Don't @ me.
PM for details.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
So much for my hope that TP would say, "Hey, we're gonna talk to CBS and make sure everyone is on the same page about what our players and forum members can post without being threatened with potential legal problems." Guess the company line is instead "Hey, shut up. Keep your being bullied by the company we license this from to yourself."
Your assumption is correct - at least in the US - the system is 'broken', to say it was established eons before the digital world we all live in was thought of. Because of vaguely worded rules, people can, on commission, go out and 'protect the IP' of their choice (and get a commission) and they are protected by the team of lawyers of the IP itself, not their individual counsel. The only way for you to challenge things of this nature is to consult and retain an atty that works in that sphere and let them arbitrate it out. Usually it would resolve in a 'no harm, no foul' type thing and your doc would be returned to you, and (hopefully) Google would forget the whole thing happened. All gravy....except for those pesky hourly lawyer wages. That's what stops 99.9% of people, and thus the trolls win.
Outside of that path, your only other course of action would be to somehow engage CBS via social media, hoping that someone will internally pass it along and fix it that way. In today's world, a popular method of 'fixing problems' is to put the dirty laundry of a company on blast and let the public see it. Given that almost the entire world is at home in front of a screen, it's a bad time for dirty laundry to be aired.
The only saving grace for most of the player-created tools out there is that they don't call them "Star Trek Timelines xyz", but rather "STT xyz" - so hopefully most of it will fly under the radar whilst the trolls are about.
That's been my experience as well. Holodeck and Make It So are where things die. I've seen some fun ideas, but once they are posted/moved to Make It So, they die. There's few conversations that thrive in those threads.
I like this comment!
Me, as admin on these forums, moving a thread to another category does not equate to a "company line/decision", and as I have stated in another thread, I would appreciate it if we could all take a step back and pause before making assumptions and stating things as facts.
Let's pause for a second, are forums the correct avenue/channel to discuss legal matters? No, they are not.
Furthermore is it logical to expect that in the few hours that I have been at work, I would have been able to check where to forward this, and assuming legal teams had everything they needed with the amount of information provided, that said team(s) would have gotten back to me with any kind of advice/recommendation. No, it is not.
I get this is an unpleasant situation to find oneself in, and that there are a lot of reasons to be on edge lately. All the more reasons to take the time to take a step back and reflect before lashing out.
And as much I would like to say that this will get sorted out, realistically in copyright matters such as these, I very much doubt that any licence holder will provide an itemized list of what is allowed or not.
To me it feels like a case of overzealous algorithm, but I am no expert, and sadly I do not have the time to research it more.
If you want to submit a ticket for this, please feel free to do so, but I cannot guarantee that we will be able to get a better answer/explanations as to why this happened.
We are the folks that donate time and money to good causes, always help a friend, and generally trying to make things better. I've spent part of quarantine working on a few projects for my church (redoing some seasonal decorations and doing a cookbook for the Ladie's Aid) and guiding one of my cats through her first kitten. (She plays a little rough with her still.)
I also tried to cave in the head of a teenage thief caught in the act with a shovel about seven years ago. The girl driving screamed and he turned his head. I cracked the paver sidewalk instead. Ever seen a teenage boy make a Pete Rose style dive into the backseat of a Buick with a lit cutting torch while screaming "drive, drive, drive!"?
The trick with this sort of lawsuit is filing it youself. Most of the time big guy vs. little guy cases fail because of money. The little guy can't keep paying the lawyer. The others count on this and drag it out. It is all billable hours for them and they figure it will never make it to court, meaning no verdict against them. No lawyer = no fees. It is just filing papers and meeting deadlines. It is the same as a military siege. They wait for the defenders to run out of resources. Being your own lawyer is one less vulnerable resource.
This forces a change in their tactics.
If they can't get you to give up, they must prepare for court or settle. Something as idiotic as this means they they will be desperate to stay out of court. The initial complaint screams bot to me. They had a bot sift the web using certain parameters and it found a good match. Either it was never checked by a person (likely) or some one figured no one would argue with it or do anything about it, so filed it anyway. They WANT you to do nothing. It's easy money for them. Make it cost, time, money, reputation, things a business needs.
They will want to settle. That would come likely with a NDA and no admission of wrongdoing. The lawyers are tasked with saving the client's bacon and will be out of work if they lose.
Frankly, I'd push for a judge or jury. A legal judgement is public record and can be admitted as precedent. That opens the doors to lost clients and more lawsuits. Imagine a judge looking at the case. The first issue is due diligence. How did this happen in the first place? Yeah, not pretty. Someone is looking for a new job. Google would freak out. They are getting a LOT of flack from certain area. They would probably restore it, apologize, make some vague reference to "review of policy", and blacklist OpSec like the boy who cried wolf.
Then, there is the issue of whose copyright is being infringed. We jumped on the CBS wagon, but it looks like it says you copied content from IMDB.COM, which is owned by Amazon. They are taking hits from so many corners right now. Personally, I like them a lot. I have never had a problem they haven't gone over and above to fix. They might not have even looked at what OpSec actually did, only what they said they did. They would probably be as quick to toss OpSec under the bus or worse than Google. A genuine scapegoat is a rare thing.
This the company? https://www.opsecsecurity.com
They have a lot to lose if it gets ugly and it is ripe for it. I'd go on the warpath, but I'm a hothead with a lot of anger issues. There is a lot of recourse here though.
As for the issue of the game, the developers surely know about most of the fan powered resources out there and make no effort to restrict them. It encourages play, gives good foundation for our feedback, and is no competition to them unless they want to market a strategy quide.
Personally, I think someone at OpSec got lazy or arrogant and you suffered for it. Google acted on what they thought was reliable intel, but wasn't.
Good grief Travis, are you trying to get Sony and KFC to come down on you too!