By now you have have noticed that From The Trenches World Report is no longer allowed to post at WRH. Given that they have threatened a smear campaign against me for banning them, I figured it would be best to put the story out and let the readers decide what is going on

It started with the following email from a copyright holder.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/content/department-justice-has-six-ongoing-investigations-jpmorgan

You are running, unauthorized, the full text of copyrighted articles from Wall Street on Parade.

Our web site, clearly and distinctly, shows both a trademark and a copyright notice.

Our Editor, Pam Martens, holds the copyright to these articles. We allow approximately one-third of the article to be reposted, providing there is a link to the original (stating, "link to original," or "Read the rest of the article"), no change in title or text, no insertions of links of any kind or any other changes, additions or deletions. In other words, nothing whatsoever can be changed about the article.

This is common practice among alternative media under fair use standards. Taking copyrighted material and placing the full article on one's own web site without permission is abhorrent to journalistic ethics.

Please immediately cease and desist from your prior practice and conform to the above terms of use.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Publisher, Wall Street on Parade
WallStreetOnParade@gmail.com

Now the material in question was not actually copied in its entirety to whatreallyhappened.com. The policy here is to provide an excerpt (under Fair Use) with a link back to the original source, so that the original copyright holder gets the readers and has audience numbers to satisfy their advertisers.

I replied..

Actually, what was on my page was a link to a different website that had copied your article in full. I have already contacted that webmaster to ask him to cease full copying and not to link to offending pages from my website any more.

If he does it again I will block his posting privileges on my site.

This has been an ongoing problem with some of the members, who use their membership privileges to post links to their own sites to draw readers away from WRH. I generally don't make a stink about it because getting the information out is the priority.

The copyright holder replied back..

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

So far, so good. I then forwarded the original complaint from the copyright holder to the webmaster at From The Trenches World Report with a request that if he was going to violate the copyright laws by posting full articles at his site that he not implicate WRH by linking to the violating page from my site. This was in fact the second time I had received a complaint regarding full articles copied to his site and linked from mine. I was rather startled to get back what seemed a very angry reply.

You say you have asked us not to do this before. I would ask when. We do not repost anything wherein the copyright protection is asserted in plain sight. This is no doubt just another attempt to cause us problems. I am doing this for a free flow of information. We don't make shit. Of the tens of thousands of articles we have posted on our website, two have caused a problem and I believe one of those problems was caused on purpose via a false complaint. A proven false complaint and I could get no redress because I am civilly dead, because I am risking my life in service to our Republic. And again, you have never warned me. You have the right to protect your site, but if you think I'm going to put up partial articles, which would end discussions on my site as all I would be doing is rerouting traffic to other sites, well that is not going to happen. To be quite frank with you, as I have always treated you with complete respect, I do not like the way you approached this situation in talking down to me. You do what you have to do and I will do the same.

My, my; are we not getting defensive! I sent back ...

I repeat, if you post complete copies of copyrighted articles on your site, then link from my site to those pages, I will be forced to end your posting privileges.

Best (legal) way is excerpt and link back to the source.

To which From the Trenches replied ...

If I see a copyright with "do not republish" I do not republish. Many authors from other sites send us their articles to be posted on From the Trenches because they want to know what the real people think about what they are saying. Like I said, out of tens of thousands of articles, there have only been two instances. The fact is I do not want anyone's article on my site that does not want it there because that shows me that they are not doing this for the same reason that you and I are. We make an absolute attempt to trace every article back to its source to make sure that the author has not declared that he or she does not want it republished. I appreciate what you and your site have done to help up, but I am only human and I cannot promise you that this will not happen again. But, considering the tens of thousands we have published without incident, I can say that we do the very best we can. And I will do this. If I cannot trace an article back to its source and clear it, I will not post it on What Really Happened. But even at that, I cannot guarantee that someone who did not post a copyright protection will not try to attack From the Trenches and I think this is something you understand, as was the case with Off Grid Survival.

My reply..

All I am saying is that I do not appreciate being contacted by copyright enforcers because of pages you have with the full story linked from my page. In this particular case, you were not doing the due diligence about whether or not copying was legal.

The safest approach is to presume content is copyrighted and go the "excerpt plus link to source" approach. That is what we do at WRH (except for original content of course).

If I get another complaint, I will pull the plug.

At which point From the Trenches sent me ...

You don't have to pull the plug. I'm pulling it right now and I'm going to let every patriot across my country know why.

So, here we are. I cut this guy a lot of slack, plugged his website on the radio show, tolerated his use of my site to build readership for his site, and when I forward a complaint from the holder of a copyright From the Trenches is clearly violating, I get threatened.

So I pulled the plug.

This is why.

And I guess it is time I start cracking down on some members who also use my site to build readership for their site, especially with stories about space aliens, 300 million year old gears, and other assorted trash better suited to the Midnight Sun or Coast to Coast than WRH!