It's worth noting that we didn't barge in with the DMCA, so I updated the blog post to reflect that. Besides, nothing wrong with a DMCA. It's a valid, and expected way to take down infringing content. Which Al-Jazeera chose to ignore.
We're not treating them as a sales lead. What they did is not a great start to a fruitful relationship. We just would like them to take down the infringing code and at the very least stop using our bandwidth for their stories. It's kind of ridiculous.
As you say, we're small. So when a large bully steals from us, that makes it okay? I really don't understand. People go to jail for copyright infringement but when Al-Jazeera does it to a small startup nobody bats an eye. We chose to speak up after it was clear that Al-Jazeera would keep ignoring our friendly requests and formal demands.
Ah, your update definitely clarifies the situation, and your course of action makes more sense.
I get the feeling that you've got a mismatch between your market's expectations and what you're providing -- they seem to think of your service as an authoring tool that gives them rights to the generated results, whereas -- as I understand it -- you see yourselves as a service provider that retains full rights. Given how low your price points are, I wonder if this experience might suggest a change in direction; for example, a more expensive tier that allows a client to repackage content for distribution.
Finally, I'm going to risk being a bit stentorian here and say that ethics in business is a one-way street; it puts a lot of demands (quite rightly) on us, but doesn't help when someone acts unethically and even unlawfully towards us. When it happens -- and it will happen, repeatedly -- you have to put aside any moral indignation and just focus on turning the situation to whatever advantage you can wrest from it.
In this case, what's your BATNA -- your "best alternative to negotiated agreement?" If, for example, your clients, their reporters, and AJ all ignore you, what is your best option? What course of action protects your rights without damaging your prospects and incurring needless costs? That becomes your new baseline and, combined with the other players' BATNAs, becomes the context in which you try to build negotiations.
Now that you've knocked on the door of legal with a DCMA request, you need to have an escalation path. My experience is that legal action is generally used to force negotiations, not end them, and a DCMA request is actually a pretty canny way of starting the process since it's short of actually filing a lawsuit. But if this doesn't lead to getting everyone in a room to discuss options, then you'll need to determine whether you have to escalate or break off. Difficult problem, really.
It would seem equally likely that your original client was the entity that performed the white labeling. In which case they white labeled the site, and sold that cleaned product to AJ. In that scenario, AJ never saw a copyright, and your client is not only responsible for the issue, but also for distribution of copyrighted material for profit, which may not be in the best interest of your business. You have not mentioned any communication with the original client, which I doubt is the case, but I would tread lightly as the Dutch seem to be pushing for criminal pirated resale guidance from the EU, unless you are comfortable with that escalation.
We've given serious thought to this issue but it really does not seem to have been the case. All our contacts have behaved ethically, unless they're lying to our faces, which I find very hard to believe. It seems to have been a rogue developer at AJ who chose to ignore established practices, and is now being kept out of harm's way (while unfortunately leaving the situation to exist). As far as escalating--well that can never end well, can it? I'd be okay (not happy, just okay) if they just took it down or moved all remaining assets over from us to them, so that it's no longer costing us out of pocket.
Was that necessary? I mean, at that point, how much resistance had they been giving you? They are in the wrong no matter what you call them on Twitter, but I can see them being even more recalcitrant after that. Having worked for and with media orgs, this feels like a classic case of crossed wires and ineptitude; the vast majority of editors and reporters at Al-Jazeera and elsewhere have no clue about what copying CSS/assets mean. That is, they think of webpages as being some immutable discrete package, as if someone had sold them a video.
Being a big news org makes them move a bit slower than is ideal. Throw in the factor of this being freelance work, and then the tech component, and yeah, I could see incompetency being the reason rather than malice. I agree with the original commenter that this was a possible sales opportunity with one of the few online media orgs with actual money and runway to try out different story-telling forms and vendors. This was a needless way to antagonize them.
More importantly, you've dampened the possibilities for other relationships to news orgs. Web devs/techies at media companies, having had to deal with a decade of Web incompetency by media cos, are likely to side with the possibility that this was an honest mistake. And these web devs are already reluctant to outsource content-production/delivery to a third-party. If they're ever asked about using scrollytelling.io vs. any of the other possible vendors, this incident is not going to weigh in your favor.
Safe harbor only protected hosts from content they were unaware customers were hosting. You can still be brought into the fray once you know you're hosting that content. E.g. Google search results may have a link at the bottom with a list of sites that were excluded due to DMCA requests (ironically I've heard people say it's a great way to find out links to legitimate pirated content)
Actually, the DMCA is evil. It was invented by evil men. It's been used countless times to terrorize people and maintain a corporate oligarchy. Nobody should utilize the DMCA, you should find a way to get the things you need without resorting to that particularly evil method.
There is some philosophical debate to be had regarding whether your code is deserving of copyright protections. Precisely what parts were duplicated? Just the CSS? Is there a better way to write those parts? If your way was the best way, copyright laws cannot prevent someone else from duplicating that method. This is known as reverse engineering, and is completely legal.
I'm a designer and developer myself so I understand your perspective, but you are not necessarily the righteous ones in a battle of good vs evil. It is definitely a blurry grey area.
Quite frankly, "code borrowing" happens everywhere in development. Most lessons on "How to learn to code" encourage people to explore other's code and adapt it for their own projects as a means to learn. The history of computing supports borrowing and adapting other people's code. You probably aren't aware of these things.
The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA is extremely important to preserving the Internet as I think we all want it to be. It protects joesvideoshack.org as much as youtube.com. If you host a site to publish your own blog articles, I don't think you would want to be legally liable for the contents of someone's comment on a blog post.
We're not treating them as a sales lead. What they did is not a great start to a fruitful relationship. We just would like them to take down the infringing code and at the very least stop using our bandwidth for their stories. It's kind of ridiculous.
As you say, we're small. So when a large bully steals from us, that makes it okay? I really don't understand. People go to jail for copyright infringement but when Al-Jazeera does it to a small startup nobody bats an eye. We chose to speak up after it was clear that Al-Jazeera would keep ignoring our friendly requests and formal demands.