vagabonddaniel:

i-want-my-iwtv:

devilsfool:

lestatdelight:

oh my god what the heck is happening someone fanmailed me saying that im violating anne rice’s copyright what the heck what what oh my god im deleting this blog bye

//Okay, babies, first of all: 

We are all violating Mater’s copyright by having RP blogs. That is true. But unless you receive a C&D from Mater herself, you aren’t in any trouble. 

i-want-my-iwtv can probably clear this up a bit more, as they have more knowledge of this. 

But, as a fan who went through the entire “Oh God the fandom is gone because our writer is Some Crazy Bitch Who Sues Her Fans” thing, I’m pretty sure that a random person sending you fan mail doesn’t mean you are going to jail. Tumblr will delete your blog before that happens. 

Anyone want to correct me on this?

People Off the Page:

I’m looking into this. I have no idea if it’s legit or not, whether that was a real Cease & Desist message Lestatdelight received. I’m researching it.

Fairly certain that everything devilsfool​ wrote above is correct. Tumblr can pull your blog at the request of the copyright holder. You’re not going to jail. If it’s a legit C&D, all they want is the material removed. Little do they realize that it’s been reblogged all over the damn place and downloaded, and copied and pasted into documents offline, there IS NO COMPLETE REMOVAL of a blog’s output!

I happen to care immensely about the issues of copyright, fair use, intellectual property, etc. and also about the rights of fanartists to make fanworks. Because I adore fanworks. Because I adore the fandom who creates and enjoys fanworks.

And because I make fanworks, too. If this is legit I’m actually surprised they didn’t go after me first, this blog is far more offensive than lestatdelight’s. Anyone who knows this person, please help me get in touch with them so I can get more info about the whole situation from them. If anyone receives messages like that one, requesting you take down your blog, let me know because:

We need to know if this is going to spread to all the VC RPs and fandom blogs. 

Save things that you want to save. My blog is not immune. Download whatever you want, I may not be able to give warning before it’s taken down.

In the event that my blog is ever taken down, look for the tag #iwantmyiwtvRIP *cries*

HTTrack: This is a great website copier. You can download a site and then view it offline as if it was online, frozen at the time of download. You can even update an existing saved website, once you’ve downloaded it.

ooc: I highly doubt lawyers would send anything via fanmail. Last time the C&Ds came via registered mail, so… They might contact tumblr to get contact information, and tumblr might decide to delete blogs to cover their own butts, but it’s just sort of ridiculous for lawyers to send legal correspondence via such an unreliable method. They’d at least email and let you know a physical copy was being forwarded. Plus, it would be more wide-spread. Attacking one Lestat blog out of 500+ RP blogs makes no sense. So it’s probably just really, really cruel hate mail, and that really, really sucks. But I guess we’ll see.

So I just did a little research, more still to do. I still hope it’s really, really cruel hate mail and not legit.

What you’re describing is probably what Etsy would do, after receiving a Cease & Desist they would forward along a physical copy to the potentially infringing Etsy seller. Sellers provide addresses for Etsy to forward mail to.

In this case, it does make sense for the in-house attorneys at Knopf (and/or AR’s personal lawyers)  to send messages through Tumblr’s messaging system and not via physical mail, bc I don’t think Tumblr required an address to create a blog. All they have is a login email and an IP address to trace our locations.

Sending a Cease & Desist message to Tumblr might mean waiting a long time for a response, as there are probably tons of other messages going to them daily re: copyright infringement for other  blogs. Sending a message directly to the potentially infringing party and scaring the bejesus out of them can get the content removed immediately, which is what happened in this case.

It seems that the thrust of the issue was that the URL had “Lestat” in it explicitly. If your blog has a copyrighted character name, be wary of similar notices.

However, I take issue with the idea that “Daniel” or “Armand” or pretty much ALL of the other more generic VC names are really copyrightable unless you’re using the full name “Daniel Molloy,” which could be more of a problem since it would clearly indicate that character, as opposed to being any other Daniel.