h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi everyone.

We've had a response from the BBC legal team, and here's the essence of what they said.

When looking at sites who may have nicked BBC copyright material, the lawyers take a number of things into consideration; as any kind of legal action would be funded using up licence fee payers' money, the end has to justify the means.

The sort of things that they look at are whether the offending site is run for commercial gain, trades off the BBC's name, or damages the BBC in some way. Action may also be considered where a site is non-commercial but contains a large amount of BBC copyright material or uses the BBC logo in a way which suggests that the BBC have licensed the use of the logo, but often an informal initial approach is more appropriate on these occasions.

Applying these criteria to the Bravenet and Wisecat sites, neither site appears to be operating for commercial gain or is damaging to the BBC. Also the amount of material that is being used is not large, so it's not really worth spending licence fee payers' money on chasing them up.

However we may drop them an informal line, asking them if they'd be so kind as to put in a copyright notice for the smileys they're using... but basically the understandable opinion is that getting all heavy and legal isn't really a good use of the public's money.

Hope this makes sense.

This thread was buried in my space! I only just found it!

But yes! Of course that makes sense.. I had so many pages on my site with smileys in on my site though, that I resorted to deleting the whole site, you'll be pleased to know I hope so anyway - I clicked the button but I sort of got a connection problem at that time..

PS; What was the search engine that searches sites for your online content been "nicked" for theirs again? was it alta vista? OR will any old meta engine do?

aka

So I guess that's why I have never had the BBC lawyers after me for "My Page In Goo" http://www.chawke.vispa.com/ (linked to via my h2g2 page so seen by the moderators each time I update my page)

No real reason for posting here cept to plug my site!

C Hawke