Hot links and metal detected finds in museums

Steve Taylor replies to my previous post asking him to explain what he and his lawyer mean by the use of the term "copyright":

Hello Mr. Barford

You obviously are a very
knowledgeable person and seem to know everything there is to know about nothing.
Here is some information for you to digest about hot linking
and the theft of other peoples videos for your own blog.

You seem to be a collision course for self destruction
on your private war against UK detectorists.I have now instructed the various Museums I have loaned items too over a number of years, to return them, because
of your personal attracts on the hobby.Many of these museums did not have the funding to purchase these items and were loaned by myself for the public to
view.I have told them why I am now asking for the items to be returned, and I now hope to turn the archaeological community against yourself.

Regard Steve Taylor

Hotlinking, aka inline linking, is the practice of displaying a file such as an
image or flash object on a page that is stored on another site. While it has legitimate uses; often people will hotlink images without the permission of the owner of the site being referenced. Because the object is being called from the server of origin, that account is the one that wears the bandwidth expense for delivering the image for display. In the cases of unauthorized hotlinking, it's not only a copyright issue, but
bandwidth theft. It become a particularly nasty problem for sites with many photographs and original images.

Mr Taylor seems to be unaware what the term "hot linking" actually means. In my Portable Antiquities and heritage Issues blog, within a text discussing a video on Google Videos, I provided a hyperlink to the Google Video site which opened a video on that site. this is NOT "hot linking" by any stretch of the imagination. The term seems reasonably clearly explained in the text Mr Taylor cut-and-pasted to me (I am sure he sought the page owner's permission first given the general 'touchiness' of this milieu about such things). So I am puzzled why he does not understand it.

This is simply the normal time-wasting tactics employed by the detecting milieu when they have nothing substantiative to say.

As for taking "his" objects from public display as a reaction to me discussing a video he made of a detecting holiday in Suffolk on a blog, then really that simply demonstrates the depth of the public responsibility detectorists like Mr Taylor display. What were his motives in loaning them to museums in the first place - to offset criticism by archaeologists, or to make a contribution to public knowledge? I wonder if he will be contacting the landowners on whose land these things were found to explain the reasons why he is now not sharing them with the public? We still have no news whether the finds from Suffolk we saw in the video reached the PAS or local museum.

Threats now?

From a metal detecting forum:
"what kind of person would give false details like that and put another family in danger because of the way he is and the things he says ! He is nothing but a weak little man in my eyes".
What kind of milieu is it that threatens a man and his family "because of the way he is and the things he says"? This really is beginning to get out of hand. What "danger" is the family in who lives at the address Mr Richard Lincoln deliberately and with premeditation posted on a metal detectorists forum - without first checking that it was in fact mine?

Oy M8, that's copyrite!

The immediate reason for setting this second blog up was that a number of metal detector using artefact hunters and collectors apparently associated with the "detectorist.co.uk" forum have been harassing me over the past few days with a barrage of email communications concerning what they allege are 'copyright violations' committed by me in my referring to material on their forum and other resources disseminated by the Internet.

It seems to me that these metal detectorists would like to shield their exploitive and erosive hobby from criticism, and are casting about for a means to do it. They typically append footers to the emails in which they make their baseless allegations (copied one from another) denying the recipient the right to share their contents with third parties, and of course have so far denied permission to post their words here so that people can see what they are actually asserting. This is typical, British metal detectorists are typically all mouth and no trousers when it comes to actually backing up their claims with proper and articulate arguments. Members of this milieu are however also making such allegations publicly elsewhere: http://paulbarfordstinx.blogspot.com/

From the messages I have received so far, it appears to me that their senders have not the foggiest idea of what copyright law actually says, neither in their own country (the United Kingdom) nor that in the milieu where the blog arose (Poland) and is hosted (the United States). Their messages suggest to me that they actually have no knowledge of what can be copyrighted and what not and are too lazy to try to find out. They appear to have no knowledge of what constitutes fair use in criticism and review. They seem to think that the laws of copyright have in some way been formulated to prevent free speech and to protect THEIR hobby from any form of scrutiny or criticism, rather than its true purpose to protect the physical products of creativity.

So I invite these individuals to an open and civil discussion of their grievances here on this blog. Only one rule, no pseudonyms, real names only guys. What is the problem in signing your own name beneath your own words?