I would prefer to contact the alleged violator personally, but I have yet to find a method to do that. I cannot contact anyone through the comments unless a user contacts me first. I find no comment button on my desktop browser, Safari on my iPhone or in the Facer app on my iPhone.
DMCA requires the IP owner to make the complaint about a violation. Third parties have no legal say in the matter. As this may seem unfortunate in this particular circumstance, it does protect us creators from groups or individuals who may simply want to harm others by making false claims.
I am also bothered by the plethora of obvious copyright infringement that ends up at the top of lists promoted on this platform. As @mikeoday said, however, it is highly unlikely that any one of those violators will become a Facer partner.
Well, i must confess i am a little bit irritated of the long time response and action times. I already reported these watch faces in the free top 100 as well a week ago.
I think what we need is something like a clone police, maybe some sort of administrators like in other communities.
I guess I don’t see the relevance of that when Facer can just look and see the name of an established watch brand on a random user’s published face and simply say, it is our policy not to allow replicas of branded watches, and remove it as simple as that.
Look at the comments under some of this guy’s faces. In some cases the people who actually drew the graphics he stole have commented “you stole that from me”, others who recognize the work have written “this is stolen from …” he doesn’t care. Again, I realize this aspect would still be a bit muddy waters for Facer to independently verify, and there is the irony that it’s stolen work of copyright infringing work.
But as I’ve repeatedly said, Facer could totally ignore the theft aspect of it and there is no excuse for these faces, no matter who made them, to still be so prominently featured in the promoted lists after so much time and effort has been made to bring this blatant violation of their own policies to their attention.
Ironically, though the Watchmaker community is much more tolerant and accepting of replicas, in the official community forum there is a very strict list of banned brands. And you will never find a single one of them posted on that forum because there is an active team of moderators.
Here in Facer it’s a bit different in that everything is posted direct in the app and not a separate community forum, so I don’t know how much “in-app” power they want to give to volunteer moderators, but still you’d think they would be more proactive in responding to things like this.
Facer could take on the relevance of moderating all published material, but then it might take days or weeks to get a simple quick change to an existing face published. This is one of the reasons I only published a single face on the Samsung store. I tried twice to get it published, with no feedback on the first time to inform me of any mistakes I had made during the submission process.
Yes, and at times, the obvious to you and me might be clear as mud to someone else.
Sure. Curating all the hundreds of faces submitted per day takes up manpower that Facer might not be able to afford. Whether or not they take on user moderators is another story. Deviantart user gallery moderators and they have a vastly larger user base.
I have been a member of art sites that did not allow fanart of specific brands, such as anything Nintendo and Disney, as an example. It is plausible that Facer could put this into the terms of use when a face or other app is published. It may cut down on such products, no is not a guarantee.
@ircrotale are you not able to do that via the community here with Private Messaging? I haven’t looked but it may depend on a member’s settings whether he wants to allow receiving them. I recall using that method in my early days here. Click on your avatar in the upper right. The icon for PM’s looks like an envelope.
@Linlay, I am to believe that only works if that member has enabled their forum account. Still, I cannot even find a way for me personally to comment on a watch face through any of the mediums I previously mentioned. I have complained about this and nobody from Facer responded.
Oh, I didn’t know that you meant someone not registered at the community. That’s strange about your not being able to comment via the phone app. Yes, that would be frustrating.