What Happens on a Slow Blogging Day

I'm sure everyone reading this blog thinks I sit writing blog posts daily. Well sorry but I don't. I woke early in the morning a few days ago with an awesome idea for a blog template design. So I made my coffee then sat down to check my stats as I do most mornings that I'm home. I immediately noticed a traffic anomaly on one of my blots with the day before's traffic at almost triple but for no apparent reason. So I dug a bit further and found that another blogger has scraped one of my images despite a very clear copyright warning. What really ticked me off about this is the blogger was a former teacher so I'm sure had some comprehension that copyright infringement was wrong. At the same time she did give a link back to my blog that for the day gave me quite good traffic. Now I was faced with the dilemma as to let this copyright infringement slide in favour of increased traffic or to act. I chose to act for the simple reason that if you want to be taken seriously about copyright infringement you have to act on every one you find otherwise you will get the reputation of not standing behind your word. Besides I would have known that without saying anything I would have condoned stealing someone's content.

I edited my blog post to indicate the image had been used without my permission so anyone coming from her blog would see this. Yes all my images do have a copyright on them but how do they know who I am so I'm now considering adding the blog link to each image along with copyright. I went to the blogger's blog and left a comment issuing a cease and desist as per the DMCA and indicating that copyright infringement was also against Blogger's (her blog host) TOS. Then I waited fully prepared to file a complaint with Blogger if necessary. Less than an hour and my image along with the comment were removed from her blog. In place was another scraped image but at least it wasn't mine. Nothing was said, no comments let so problem was solved.

In the meantime I played in Photoshop designing what I think I want to use for an updated template for one of my blogs. I can't believe how the idea came to even be. I just woke up with let's do this, this and this and see what happens yet had the finished version already in mind before I started. I have to say I like the results and it will be a nice change but I will likely wait until after Easter to try them on. I did have a lot of fun creating the template so perhaps will spend a bit of time customizing title headers as well.

So went the day. I did no actual writing. I dealt with a problem and worked behind the scenes and so it goes most days of the week :)

Garden Gnome
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