Elum Blog

We just ran our first Save the Date on bamboo paper and it printed really well.  The bamboo sheet is a little bit harder than the 100% cotton rag paper that we normally use but this sheet ran just fine and printed beautifully.

From what my distributor tells me, the bamboo paper isn’t actually 100% bamboo fiber, it has about 10% cotton rag mixed into it to soften it up a bit.

You learn something new everyday – we should all be so fortunate!  On Thursday, I received an email from my webhost that they received a DMCA complaint involving my domain, elumdesigns.com.  Having never heard of a DMCA notice I immediately clicked the link in the email to read what it was all about.  It seemed that I was being accused of “infringing on copyrighted material” that belonged to Dolce Press.  Quite shocked, I immediately forwarded the email and notice to my copyright attorney for review.  For those of you that have never heard of a DMCA notice, click this link to learn about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

In a nutshell, Elum is being accused of infringing the “copyright protected” designs of Dolce Press, which I believe were copied from us in the first place.  Make sense?  I don’t think so either.

Elum has the right to display images of what we believe are infringing copies of Elum proprietary designs.  The images from Dolce Press were placed on our site to illustrate our belief that Elum’s protected designs were being copied by Dolce Press in violation of Elum’s rights, and to allow consumers and the industry to make up their own minds about it.  That is a fair use under copyright law.

In order to avoid costly attorney fees and all of the BS associated with having to deal with a situation like this, we decided to remove the Dolce Press images that we believe were “inspired” by our designs in the first place and just get on with business, and life.  We made our point – we got Dolce’s attention, and we have made it clear that Elum will protect its proprietary rights, as should everyone who feels that they have been violated.

If you believe a website is displaying your copyrighted materials without permission, you may be able to send a DMCA takedown notice to the site host and have the offending material removed.  Click this link for more information:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi

The original blog post “Is Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery?” can be seen here, without images of course…  http://www.elumdesigns.com/blog/category/flattery/

Disclaimer:  I am not an attorney; this blog contains our opinions, is not legal advice and is for informational purposes only.  I do not endorse the third party links contained herein, and have no connection or interest in or to them.  They are provided as is, and may or may not contain information useful for your particular situation.