Frienditto

[rm]

From several of my friends -- all of this is via them, as I've had NO DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE SITE, but feel this meritted enough concern to repost here:

Watch out for Frienditto.

This site is an archive service that claims affiliation with Live Journal BUT DOES NOT HAVE IT.

There has been some concern over this site and security of LJ accounts. If you provide it with your login information for your Live Journal you give this service permission to archive your friends only entries and ANY locked entries of your friends for which you have access.

Please read the following answer to my support request regarding this site and be informed. More importantly, inform others.

Dear user,

Frienditto is not affiliated with LiveJournal in any way. As such, this website does not have access to any entries which are not publicly viewable. If someone provides them with their LiveJournal username and password, however, it gives this site access to all non-public entries that account would have access to. We can only recommend that you do not provide your username and password to any person or website to ensure the security of your account.

Additionally, if you believe anyone on your Friends list may have provided their login information to this website, we can only advise that you remove them from your Friends list. This website will have access to your Friends-only entries as long as any person on your Friends list has given the site access. If any content is present on Frienditto which you do not wish to be there, you will need to resolve the issue with that website.

Regards,

Scott
LiveJournal Abuse Team

(Emphasis mine)


If you are using this site I will remove you from my friends list. Additionally, I will be extraordinarily cross at you, either for being an idiot, or a malicious little freak.

Comments

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

Uh.

When did you get the bizarro idea that anything you put online is private?

Other than that, your dispensing of misinformation in this post is hilarious. FD does not claim any connection with LJ. No one needs your password to post your friends-only entries. Information is not cached by FD.

And FD will never delete anything that has been posted to them, so don't bother trying.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

If nobody needs your password to post FO entries, why do they ask for it?

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

Re-read what I said.

No one needs YOUR password to post YOUR friends only entries.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm pretty well aware of that. You reread my question, then, and tell me why this site is asking for it at all.

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

How else are they supposed to archive something from your friends list?

[aeslis]

She means that if someone on your friends list wants to copy your locked post, which they can see because they're friended, they can just.... well, copy paste. They don't even need to service for that.

[(Anonymous)]

6. Copyright infringement
The Service does not make any claim to copyright for any of the user entries submitted and will immediately remove any content with a proper request from the copyright owner. Users of the Service agree that at the time of submission they have proper permissions from the copyright owner. Frienditto does maintain copyright to all pages that it creates or generates, exclusive of the archived entry content.

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

Brush up on your copyright law. It takes more than a mere claim of "ownership" to prove same.

[kengr]

Go read the DMCA. A properly worded statement to a website owner *claiming* copyright requires removing the material until the matter settled. And there's a *short* time limit for the removal.

Failure to do so within the limit means you contact the company hosting the site. Which *will* remove it (and likely the entire site) since failure on their port makes them legally liable.

Also, since the mid 80s material is to be *assumed* copyright unless marked as public domain.

Proving copyright to a post in your LJ is trivial. Suing would require registering it, but that's not *that* hard.

[sebatical.livejournal.com]

Excellent summary.

And to add specificity to your last point, registering a copyrighted work allows you to sue for damages. One can still sue to cease/desist purposes without registration.

[kengr]

Last I heard the moment you want to take lewgal action, you have to register the copyright. I recall that from published legal advice to sysops and the like.

If you've got references that say differently I'd be interested in seeing them.

[sebatical.livejournal.com]

You can sue to prevent the continued infringement, but you cannot sue for punitive damages.

[sebatical.livejournal.com]

This is worded really poorly, as it appears their new site design was not for the better. I'm looking for it in easier terms, but I'm also working at the same time..

If I recall, the wording previously was that a violation complaint could be filed in court, but an infringement suit (one involving the seeking of punitive or infringement awards) required registration.

Like I said, this is worded horribly, so I'll find the part of their site I had used before, but it may take me a bit!

---

COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION
In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection. Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration. Among these advantages are the following:

Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.

Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin.

If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.

If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.

Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U. S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies. For additional information, request Publication No. 563 "How to Protect Your Intellectual Property Right," from: U.S. Customs Service, P.O. Box 7404, Washington, D.C. 20044. See the U.S. Customs Service Website at www.customs.gov for online publications.

Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright. Unlike the law before 1978, when a work has been registered in unpublished form, it is not necessary to make another registration when the work becomes published, although the copyright owner may register the published edition, if desired.

[sebatical.livejournal.com]

This is from patents.com:

"The registration of a U.S. copyright offers many benefits to the owner of the copyright. For example, it creates a presumption that ownership of the copyright is as set forth in the registration. In addition, if you happen to have the good luck that you registered the copyright on a date earlier than the date of an act of unauthorized copying, or under certain other circumstances set forth in the copyright law, then if you prevail in court against the unauthorized copier, you may find yourself eligible for statutory damages and for recovery of attorney's fees."

[sebatical.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm going to have to say that I'm now interpreting the copyright law information to say that you can register a complaint, but to actually file a lawsuit requires registration.

I stand corrected.

:)

[redbird]

The point is that the site says that they will remove things on proper request. So either the statement that they will never remove anything, "so don't bother" is mistaken, or they're lying.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Since it is all supposed to be anonymised, their is some difficulty in the inituial request, since they can allege they have no word other than yours that you hold such copyright legitimately.

I can think of several ways to hinder such a claim, and the promised removal.

TK

[njyoder.livejournal.com]

Where did you get the bizarro idea that anything you put offline is pirvate?

OH shit, your whole argument defeated with a single question!

Oh and yes, FD has deleted archived entries already and according to their own ToS they said they will. Stop spreading lies and misinformation.

[(Anonymous)]

Your counter-argument makes no sense. There are many avenues of privacy that one can ustilize offline. May I suggest the most effective: keeping your fucking mouth shut.

Stop trying to be famous, honey. You're gauche and not in the good way.

[njyoder.livejournal.com]

You mean my counter-argument where I exposed your blatant lie about FD not deleting entries?

Or the one suggesting the absolute truth that nothing in real life is 100% secure either? What "avenue of privacy" offline is 100% secure? I don't expect you to reply to this since you won't be able to come up with a single example. Does it hurt to be disproven with your own poor logic that easily?

This is the point where you respond with purely emotive arguments and lose all objectivity.

[(Anonymous)]

No, this is the part where I imagine you with your truncated limbs trying to climb into an Amish buggy with a margarine-smeared buttplug protruding from your puny anus.

And then I laugh heartily and remind you that Thought Police don't exist.

[njyoder.livejournal.com]

Exactly the kind of emotional response I expected. I'll remind you that people don't keep everything in their heads. People will speak or write down private things. Now you've delved off into the realm of insanity (that of extremely delusional paranoid schizos) since you're suggesting that everything private be kept in a persons head and never be spoken or written about anywhere, ever. This, of course, being something that no one actually does, yourself included.

Care to present a a sane argument or are you still going to resort to hormonally induced moronic emotive responses? You can't and won't come up with an example of anything remotely sane that's totally secure, you'll just keep repeating the same "advice" to keep everything in your head which absolutely no one except the most insane paranoid schizophrenics follow.

I think it's funny that at first when you LJD sycophants come in to do damage control you present an argument based on grade school logic in all seriousness. When it gets shot down very quickly, you go back to stupid jokes and pretend like you don't care when the reality is you're sitting their red in the face that even the stupidest people on LJ can see through your transparent logic. It's fun to watch you wet yourselves over this, your reactions are even more hysterical and illogical than those of the people against frienditto.

[(Anonymous)]

And through all this, you keep making submissions to LJDrama.

Your desperation for infamy will always bring such mirth to the world. Keep up the good work.

[(Anonymous)]

FYI you're NEVER getting on LJ Drama. No matter how hard you try. Sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

i thought you hated frienditto. yet here you are defending it?