by Kay Baxter

Created on: March 20, 2008

Recently a friend of mine emailed me a link to a blog on blogger.com (owned by Google) and said I had to go look. I clicked the link and took a look. I immediately had a bad feeling after reading only a couple of entries. The blog was full of nasty snide remarks, profanity and negativity about other people's horses. Being busy and not having much time I clicked off and replied to my friend's email that the blog gave me a bad taste in my mouth and left it at that.

A week later a dear friend of mine was a target of this bloggers wrath. This blogger scours websites and online photo hosting sites looking for pictures of other people's horses to critique and then posts them on her blog. She claims her blog is "educational". My friend's horse was a rescue horse that she had taken in to rehabilitate and care for. The pictures the blogger used were the initial pictures of the horse when my friend first got her home. The picture the blogger used also had my friend's very young daughter in them. So this blogger posted pictures that she had no rights to (copyright or any other right) and went on to post nasty comments about the condition and conformation of the young horse. My friend posted on the blog and explained that the horse was a rescue and that is why she is so thin in the pictures and asked that the blogger please remove her pictures from her blog.

The blogger promptly refused to remove the pictures and went on to spew more venom about my friend's character, her horse knowledge etc. After being so shocked and appalled by what I was reading I posted on the comments section of the blog. I wrote that the blogger was infringing on my friend's copyrights to pictures by posting pictures she didn't own and did not have permission to use. Her reply was that number one no one would spend the time or money to sue her and number two, she is anonymous so cannot be found to sue. She also said that Google.com would protect her hidden identity should anyone try to find her. She then went to say that her blog was educating people on horse conformation and what "not to breed". She also stated that she feels she has the right to use any picture she finds on the Internet as it is "public domain". I did try to explain the difference between "public domain" and copyright infringement. I also informed her that I had never heard of using nasty remarks and insulting other people's character to be educational tool. I told her that I myself am very interested in horse conformation which

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