Chicago, IL—My Space has proven to be as popular with Chicago’s Gangster Disciples street gang, as the high school and College students.
Julia Hudson, Justin Hudson, Gregory King and William Balfour among many other members of the Gangster Disciples have My Space pages for social networking. Cops have been looking closely at the postings and the “friends” added to these pages.
As in every high profile story the media needs and longs for usable photographs of the newsmakers. Ms Space has proven to be a gold mine where people publish millions of photos without any form of copyright protection. That’s where most of the Hudson family murder story pictures came from.
Police found one young Mississippi college student who claimed she got a phone call from Balfour in the wee hours of October 24. 19 year-old, Rashia Whitlock told police that Balfour told her that he and his "boyz'' were "getting ready for something real big that's going to go down tomorrow" and asked if they could lay low in Mississippi. Whitlock rejected Balfour’s request. Whitlock also told police she met Balfour on My Space and had talked with him on the phone a couple of times.
I rejected the Internet long ago as a place to meet new friends. I think the old fashioned face to face method keeps the intrigue and prevarications to a minimum.
Paul, about MySpace you wrote, "... people publish millions of photos without any form of copyright protection".
ReplyDeleteThat's not correct, at least not in the strictest case.
Specifically, everything thing that is written and all photographs have an implicit copyright that usually belongs to the author or photographer. (Exceptions being when that work is "for hire" -- then the copyright belongs to the hiring individual or organization.) No copyright notice is required.
But it is also true that when a work is published and the copyright owner makes no effort to protect their work, the copyright protection weakens and, in time and with repeated examples, whatever copyright there is quickly becomes unenforceable.
MySpace is a prime example where people are giving up their copyrights by not marking their works, nor pursuing violators.
But the absence of a (C) Copyright statement does *not* make a work freely available for anyone to use as they wish. Although this practice is rampant on the web, it is still wrong.
I notice that crimefilenews.com has a copyright notice. Good for you!
An excellent post. I work with many teenagers, and spend so much time educating them and their families about the online dangers that are around every bend of the internet.
ReplyDeleteI saw Julia Hudsons' myspace page when her little boy was missing. She had photos of that goof on there as well as other nasty garbage. I started clicking around and checking out the friends on the list, etc. Shady...
ReplyDelete